Never again (slightly gross pictures)

Once we had located the intestines we needed to process them in to sausage skins. When one looks closely there is a lot of people mentioning that this is done... but not much detail about HOW it is done.
We now know why this is. It is such a foul disgusting gross foul (oh I have run out of words to describe it) process that noone can bear to describe or picture it. I am not too squeamish for this kind of thing, delving around in a bucket of bits was fine. But this was a bit much.
The photos don't quite show the scale of what had to be done. The stuff starts off about 2cm diameter and ends up a whitish tube with paper thin walls and nothing inside. That is a lot of stuff that had to be squeezed and scrapped out. We are suspicious that our end product is a little pinker than it should be. But we can't get it any better.

Before

After

Initially you have to squeeze out any remaining contents (which vary in colour from green to brown and are really slimey and ooze out in a disgusting fashion, the smell is interesting too). You then need to remove the fleshy lining and also bits of connective tissue on the outside. You do this by getting the back of a knife and pressing down on the skin against something solid like the edge of the sink, and then pulling the skin under the knife. The pink stuff all squidges up and you keep having to stop to empty it out - if you don't think skin splits. I can't think of words to describe it. You have to press pretty hard with the knife and the skin is suprisingly strong. Occasionally you do manage to rip a hole though. We just cut the skin intestine there and started a new section. Once you have managed to scrape off all the pink stuff you rince through well with water and then lay out on curing salt (not the same as eating salt which usually has iodine in it). The whole lot is topped off with more salt when you finish.

Next year we are pretty sure we will just buy some ready prepared skins as they are 5 EUR or there abouts in the supermarket and doing the above took the WHOLE day and has traumatised us both for life. Words can't get across how gross it was. Photos or a video would be too much for the world to handle. It wasn't helped by the fact that the first section we tried seemed much harder to do than the others. We nearly give up after 3 hours when we had only processed about one meter. We did the remaining 20 meters in something like 3 hours.