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I love restaurants. Love them. I love the varied decor, the look of a long, shiny bar stocked with glassware and pretty bottles. I like kitchens and chef coats and people who bring food to me and then take away my plate and don’t expect me to do dishes.

I’m partial to restaurants in Lawrence and rarely visit Kansas City for my dining needs. Why would I? We so rarely splurge on eating out, and there are so many good ones right here in our fair city. Also, I’m partial to the locally owned restaurants in our midst, and thankfully they are plentiful. Really, we are ridiculously lucky to have such a variety and quality of restaurants in our little berg.

Recently, I’ve been having a tawdry affair with 715 Restaurant on Massachusetts. I can’t get enough. I’m too poor to frequent them as often as I want, so I find excuses to go in there on the cheap. Like, they have a $7.15 lunch – every stinking day. I like it – a lot. Also, they serve an amazing champagne cocktail with candied ginger that I may or may not stop in to indulge in with my girlfriends after our fancy weekend garage sale excursions.

I got so addled and lovesick over their amazing wares – their local meats and produce, perfectly cooked and simply yet elegantly prepared – I finally had to know how it was done. I wanted some of that sausage, but they don’t have a variance to sell raw meat I could cook at home. Without that sausage with which to make my own (lackluster, in comparison) pizzas or pastas, I felt lost. I can’t eat there every day, or even every week. I had to know.

So I contacted the folks at 715 (the internet is a wonderful thing) and begged and cried and threw myself at their mercy, until Chef Michael Beard, the owner and the man behind the sausage, agreed to school me on sausage.

Best. Hour. Ever.

Chef Beard invited me down into his immaculate prep kitchen where he quietly went about the business of making sausage. The business that is, in part, his business.

So here it is, folks. The wisdom of Michael Beard’s sausage making. Trina Baker of Gallery 32 agreed to join us and photograph the process, and my friend Adam came with me for moral support, in case I fainted in the presence of all that sausage.

Of course, the most important facet of good sausage is good, local, fresh pork. Chef Beard loves to make sausage for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that he can use parts of the pig that otherwise would go to waste. He uses a pork shoulder because it’s nice and fatty – which is very important for good sausage. A lean sausage, according to Chef Beard, is not worth the trouble. He cleans the neck of all the bits of meat and fat still left. This is important for a lot of reasons, but really, it’s a bit of respect for the animal. As Adam said, he uses every part of the pig – “Everything but the oink.”

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Chef Beard explained that one of the most important parts of making sausage is COLD. To begin, he put the grinder parts in a bowl of ice water. Then he cleaned the shoulder of all the pork and fat he could get. and put the meat in the freezer for about fifteen minutes to “get some cold on it.”

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Meanwhile, he set up the grinder. The grinder was basically an attachment to the giant industrial kitchen mixer. I joked that it was the restaurant equivalent of my KitchenAid. Really, it is, but it’s such a gross understatement it’s hard to make the comparison. But, like I would with my home stand mixer, Chef Beard attached the grinder attachment to the mixer, and flipped the switch.

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I have to admit, watching meat come through a grinder is far more fun to me than it should be.

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Chef Beard explained how to properly grind meat – not too much too fast, and making sure that there’s a good fat to meat ratio. If the fat goes in on its own it will get gummy and glue-y and not incorporate well into the rest of the sausage.

Once the meat is ground he was ready to add the spices. But first, he added water. Cold water first, about sixteen ounces to the approximately five pounds of meat he was working with. Then he added salt – about three percent by weight – and then a couple of cloves of garlic. Finally, the spices. Chef Beard says that one of the most important tools in his kitchen is his calculator. You won’t find him measuring in cups or tablespoons. It’s all done by weight, and percentage.

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He noted that traditional Italian sausage uses what you’d expect – basil, rosemary, fennel, etc. But the sausage at 715 has a unique taste because his spice mixture is a blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove – although the ratios of that he’s not quite ready to share. A little black pepper, and he’s ready to mix. You and I will have to come up with our own spice choices and ratios, I suppose, because according to Chef Beard, sausage makers hold their recipes quite close to the chef’s coat. Like BBQ masters or beer makers, he knows that the devil is in the details, and some things he can’t just give away.

Mixing is important. Like making a hamburger patty, the meat begins to adhere to itself and get that sticky property that makes it possible to get it into the casing. After giving the meat a good turn or three with his hands, he then pressed down on the mixture to get all the air out – another important step.

Then we were ready to stuff. Sausage casings come in several forms, but we were using a brined intestine. After untangling a portion that seemed sufficiently long – several feet (I guess this is just an eyeball trick you learn by doing) – he gave it a rinse. The casing looks delicate, and I was concerned that running water through it would tear it, but it is surprisingly resiliant and took to the washing without any casualties.

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Next, he set up the sausage stuffer. This is quite a production. The home cook can do this with a KitchenAid mixer, but this guy does volume. Like, 150 pounds of sausage a week. He needs heavy artillery. He set up the stuffer, and clamped it to the counter. Then he pressed the meat into the vat (vat? I don’t know – maybe it was more of a pot?), careful to keep the air out, and cranked a few times to get the sausage all the way down into the tube

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Then he attached the casing to the end of the tube, and started cranking. The cranking, friends, made me tired. This guy – fit, young, strong – was given a run for his money by that thing. I’d have never gotten the meat out of there. I’d have started crying. And this is why wimps like me have KitchenAid mixers.

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Once the meat is in the casing, you’re ready to tie it off. Chef Beard explained that some people twist the sausage periodically as they stuff in order to create the links, but he prefers the tying method, which, for him, is faster.

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After tying, he gave the sausage a few pricks in order to prevent splitting in the cooking process (don’t go overboard; you don’t want to let all the delicious juices out of the sausage while you cook), and it’s ready to hang and/or cook.

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Chef Beard suggests that sausage should be cooked at the lowest temp your oven will allow. This way, it cooks through to the center evenly but doesn’t dry out. His commercial oven will go as low as 150 degrees. The oven in my house will only go as low as 225 degrees, so I might turn the oven off in the final stages of cooking in order to slow it down. You want an internal temp of 165 degrees. In the warmer oven this will take approximately 20 minutes. Longer, of course, in a cooler oven. Always use a thermometer to make sure it’s 165 degrees throughout.

When we were finished with the demonstration, myself and my two counterparts retired to the bar, where we shared a carafe of wine. Jay, one of Chef Beard’s assistants, arrived with a couple of plates of appetizers. Sausage, of course, on crostini with some caramelized onions. Like everything I’ve ever had in that restaurant, it was exactly right. Not fraught with too many ingredients or pretentious techniques, it was simple, wholesome food that highlighted the flavors of each ingredient. It is precisely the kind of food I want to eat and the kind of food I want to make.

This week I am going to pause from the usual mayhem that is my life and go find some local pork. I’ll spend an evening with friends making sausage that we will then eat that same night, and feel abundantly proud of ourselves and what we can do. Our deepest thanks to Chef Michael Beard and all the staff at 715 Restaurant, for their time, hospitality, and their sausage.