Oversea Casing Natural Sheep Casings

I read all of the reviews and was really hesitant about buying this, since I am a newbie to making sausage. My husband and I started off with the hog casing by same manufacturer and had pretty good luck. We decided to be adventuresome and try breakfast sausage. We had success!! One thing I read was when you flush the casing, since it is so small, use your smallest funnel and slide it into the open end of the casing. It made it so much easier to flush out the inside of the casing. The next thing I found is while you are flushing it, to keep it from trying to slide down the drain because it is so small, put the drain plug in. If you have a stopper it works better so it won't nick the casing. Once rinsed I left the casing to soak in a cup of water overnight in the fridge. The next day, when ready to use the casing, I rinsed it one more time with warm water and let it sit for a half hour. It was nice and slippery, held up nicely to thread onto the stuffing horn. As long as I didn't over stuff the casing I had no problems with blow-outs. I have used several of these casings at different times and have only come across one pinhole. All in all, I would recommend this casing for use in sausage making, it really wasn't that bad to work with. As for the smell, once it is refrigerated for a while, the smell really dissipates (it is really bad when you first open the package!). The casing cooks up well, nice snap and doesn't split, even when over cooked. So far, it has worked well for both breakfast sausage and frankfurters, the lengths on the casings do vary quite a bit but we just measured it before we soaked it so we knew how much to soak. It was kind of nice to have different lengths to work with so we didn't have to cut them, we could pick out the lengths we need.

Good product

I've used this company's pork casings with no issues over the years, so wanted to try the lamb for smaller sausage. Like others have said, there is a distinct smell of rot (smell of day old turds + decomp). I soaked for a couple days in the fridge which helped but didn't completely eliminate. Stuffing was a PITA. Small, dang near impossible to get on the horn and generally a tangled mess. If I do this again, definitely going with a different brand. I'm making droerwors, so we'll see if the drying helps to mummify the rotting corpse encasing my meat.

These are the casings you use for narrow breakfast sausage, not hot dogs. They stuff out at a little better than 1/2 inch. They were clean and in good shape when they came out of the bag as a near-solid block of intestines and salt, and had no residual smell once soaked and rinsed. Length varies from 2-3 foot and they are narrow. I wish they had been more uniform in length so that I could plan a little better. I found myself picking through the soaking bunch looking for the length I wanted. They stuff well and were stronger than I expected. There were some small pinholes I saw when putting them on the tube, but only two of them caused a blowout - and these were probably caused by me not helping them feed out. I used my smallest plastic tube from LEM and it took work to get these on. HINTS FOR USE: My suggestion is to soak these longer than you normally would, get them a little warmer than you normally would, and blow them out with a water rinse until they stretch. Snip the end and use a blunt chopstick to open the end, then gently stretch by hand until you can get them started. After that (assuming you rinsed a little more to stretch them out), they go on fast and easy. Just watch when you stuff: make sure you help feed the casing with one hand while handling the sausage with the other. If not, the casing might get caught on the tube and you will blow out. Obviously, a foot peddle switch was the magic here. A good quality product that I would get again if I were up for the trouble of threading small casings onto small stuffing tubes. They have a nice snap once cooked, and take on a nice color when finished hot. They held up when poached and then high-heat searing/frying.

I have sourced sheep casings from Amazon but from different suppliers on a number of occasions. Outcomes varied from ok to terrible. One of my previous orders were not cleaned properly during processing and was tough as old leather. Value and price are not coupled with this kind of product, unfortunately. The product from Oversea Casings was excellent for making droewors. They rinsed out easily and well and were easy to get onto the stuffing horn. Stuffing the casing was without any trouble and no blowouts occurred. The sausage dried out uniformly and the casing shrunk down appropriately. I recommend this supplier to anyone wanting to make the king of snap sticks.

I purchased these casings even though there are a lot of bad reviews - what can I lose? 15 bucks? First time I used them I took out about 6 of them from the bag (they are packed in salt) and left them to rehydrate for about 30 min or so in warm water. Then I took out my Smokehouse Chef KitchenAid meat grinder , ground some lamb, mixed it with spices and then installed my 1/2" sausage funnel. I thought that even if the casings are bad, I will still east some mean Adana Kebabs. So imagine my surprise when I saw that all the casings I soaked worked perfect! Did I get a better bag? Or maybe some reviewers did not use them correctly? Please remember, these are very, very delicate. Do not think that they will be similar in characteristics to the pork casings. You need to soak them well, blow some air through them before sliding on the funnel, grease or wet the funnel, and when you load them, be gentle! Very gentle. They should slide very easily, but if you feel resistance pull it back about an inch or so and slide it again. I have used them twice with zero issues. They worked perfectly for me. Good luck.

I don't know what it's like to work with other sheep casings, but these were not as easy to use as hog casings. Maybe I need a smaller feeder horn on my stuffer? It was hard to get the casings on the horn. I figured out if I had just a bit of sausage meat extended out of the horn, it provided enough lubricant to keep the casing sliding all the way on the horn. I then found it hard to get the casing to advance as I stuffed it...tore several times. Perhaps a smaller horn would make these work perfectly. The one I have is just under 3/4 inch. If your's is bigger than a half inch, I think you'd do yourself a favor buying a 3/8 inch horn to use these casings. I'm giving this a 3 star rating because the price was a lot better than any other options I could find for sheep casings. It didn't work very well, but that might be the result of needing a small feeder tube/horn. At this price, I made it work and will likely buy again since around $50 was the best price I could find elsewhere. I can buy a 3/8 inch horn and another package of these for less than it cost to buy another brand.

I have a fair amount of experience in making sausage and know the difficulty between hog and sheep casings. My poor review is due to the packaging which made separating and stuffing the casings extremely difficult. The smell referenced by other reviewers is real, I am not sure if this is common for all sheep casings or just this product. I did not think it affected taste. The casings were in a bundled knot when I opened it. I fought for many minutes each to remove about 4 casings. After cleaning, I tried to slide the casings over the smallest tube in my professional quality sausage stuffer. The casings were very small making it difficult to find end openings and difficult to slide onto the tube without damage. My opinion is the poor packaging made the problem worse due to stretching and pulling on the casings trying to untangle the knotted bundle. I threw away the unused casings since they were almost impossible to use and since I had inadvertently washed the preserving salt off. Not sure if I will try again.