How to Store Sausage Casings

Making your own sausages at home allows you to unleash your creativity and invent the perfect sausage to suit your palate. Instead of a relatively typical combination like pork and apple, for example, try making a chicken and mango sausage or a turkey and cranberry sausage for Thanksgiving. You can incorporate ingredients that you happen to have lying around. For example, you can use pine nuts or walnuts in your sausage to make the texture more interesting, or leftover spicy peppers to give your sausage extra heat. If you do not use up all of your sausage casings, store the rest properly and you will be able to use them at a future date.

• 1

  Place a thin layer of salt on the bottom of a container large enough to hold all of your natural sausage casings.

• 2

  Lay the casings on the salt. Spread them in a single layer rather than overlapping them. Do not worry if you have some that do not fit in this layer.

• 3

  Sprinkle a generous layer of salt over the sausage casings. If you have more casings that did not fit in the first layer, spread them over this layer of salt, then sprinkle more salt on top of them. Repeat the layering process until all of your casings are layered with salt.

• 4

  Put the lid on the container and store it at 40 degrees Fahrenheit. When you are ready to use the casings, remove them from the salt, rinse them and put them into a container of water that starts at 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Put this container in the refrigerator and let the sausage casings soak overnight.