All You Need to Know About Buying Sausage Casing

Although you can make bulk sausage and fry the sausage in patties, it's much more satisfying to stuff the sausage mix into casings to make sausage links. So you will have to find a good casing supplier. That's not always easy: every retailer will tell you his casings are "the best," but until you try them out, it's really a roll of the dice: there is nothing so frustrating as trying to stuff poor-quality casings, which burst on you every minute or so.

SausageMania's top recommendation is Syracuse Casing Company, a family-owned operationn that sells premum casings, both hog and sheep. Both come in various diameters (we recommend avoiding the narrowest sheep casings, as they are extremely time-consuming to stuff).

Some people have an aversion to using animal intestines as casings, and prefer artificial casings, such as collagen casings. Natural casings are made under strict regulaltions for cleanliness and sterilization. We've been to at least one casing factory and found it to be as clean as a surgical operating room. Natural casings are odorless and are easily disgestible. Finally, they are far easier to stuff with hand machinery than are the rather stiff collagen, plastic or and fibrous casings.

We recommend dry-salted, tubed casings. They are easy to run up on the stuffing horn, and do not get entangled and knotted-up with one another like hanked casings. Remember to soak them first in 120° water to soften them up, and never freeze casings before use — you'll ruin them by making them highly burst-prone.

Sausage Casings Links

• One STOP Jerky Shop — Sausage casing, meat cure and sausage seasonings for all your home sausage making needs.

• Butcher & Packer — Detroit-based, family owned business. Offers fibrous, natural and collagen casings... plus advice!

• Syracuse Casing Company — Natural casings only: hanked or tubed, salted or pre-flushed. Premium stuff! A SausageMania three-star recommendation!***

• Heinsohn's Country Store — limited range of hog and collagen casings

• Allied Kenco, Inc. — collagen, fibrous, natural and plastic. Lots of practical information

• The Sausage Maker — a wide selection of natural, collagen and synthetic casings

• DeWied International, Inc. — "The Casings Superstore." A broad selection of natural (hog, sheep and beef), collagen, fibrous, HUKKI and plastic casings. Sizes from snack stick up to 2.5" (65mm) and larger. Dewied also sells vacuum pouches and offers an interesting "sausage troubleshooting" page.

A Brief History of Natural Casings

Sausage is known to be one of the oldest and most enduring form of processed meat. In some respects, it may even be considered the world's very first "convenience food."

The history of sausage production parallels the recorded history of man and civilization. In fact, for as long as man has been carnivorous, the intestinal tract of meat animals has been used for sausage casings - not to mention a variety of other uses as well.

It's only during the last thousand years, however, that Sausage Making has come into its own as a venerable and highly developed craft. The practitioners of this trade have fostered a rich tradition - at once sophisticated and yet personal. In many cases, families handed down their particular sausage making art over several generations and across dozens of nations, with each "wurstmacher" contributing his taste and heritage to the art. Of course, the art was also influenced by the demand of the marketplace and by the availability of the various ingredients which went into the sausage.

The twentieth century brought on the Technological Revolution - exploding onto the scene with new technology - and adding billions to the world's population. This "one-two punch" generated a need for mass production in virtually all industry segments... especially food! At first, the goals of mass production were primarily "quality" and "speed." But gradually, "quality" struggled toward the forefront of this new technology. The meat processing industry faced its own inherent challenges in slaughter, processing, and food safety. "Efficiency" and "quality" became the norm for those processors who rose to the challenge and managed to withstand the test of time.

Sausage making has now evolved into a highly specialized business, with processors ranging in size from independent "mom & pop" shops producing one-of-a-kind gourmet sausages, to multi-million dollar "mega-processors" producing millions of pounds of product each and every week.

Today there are numerous types of sausage casings including: Natural and artificial such as Collagen, Cellulose and Plastic. Collagen, Cellulose and Plastic casings are relative newcomers to the artificial field, mainly born out of market demand during the technological maelstrom of the early twentieth century. Much information and instruction about these man-made products is available through the major manufacturers of these casings and it is not our place to delve into them here. As for Natural Sausage Casings, however, surprisingly little qualitative or quantitative information is readily available to processors about these products

Hog Casings Soaking in Water

Tubed Hog Casings from Syracuse Casing Company, Soaking in Warm Water in Preparation for Stuffing.

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