Sausage-a-Day: Sage Breakfast Sausage
6 Comments Published by Joel January 22nd, 2007 in Food, Meat. Share ThisTo better understand the process of making sausage, Susie and I have set out to make a sausage a day for the week. We started with the basics last night—a sage-heavy, fresh pork breakfast sausage, which we immediately fried up and made into a cream gravy and poured over biscuits. Along with the screwdrivers it made an excellent dinner.
There’s not an easy way to annotate each image in the slideshow, but I don’t think captioning every image is necessary. They sort of explain themselves. (Although they seem to be running from the end to the beginning, despite any reordering I do. Oh well!)
We started with a seven-pound pork butt; cut off the skin; cut it into one-inch cubes; ground it with the wider of the two grinds available on our KitchenAid; spiced it following the “Breakfast Sausage” recipe from Sausage Mania’s excellent recipe PDF (although we doubled the spices and still found it to be relatively mild); greased up our casing tube with Crisco and fed the entire casing onto it; stuffed; twisted; feasted.
It was delicious, but not terribly different than the typical fresh sausage you can buy at the store. All in all a good primer for working the machinery before we get into more interesting sausages.
6 Responses to “Sausage-a-Day: Sage Breakfast Sausage”
- 1 Pingback on Jan 22nd, 2007 at 2:14 pm
For just some pictures of sausage, these shots look really good. Really nice depth of field. Definitely makes the process of making sausage look more appealing.
Seems like the slides are running in reverse order… Turns from sausage into a pork butt…
I did this not too long ago for the first time as well. Turns out, in my book, sausage making is… well… disgusting. Believe it was Bismarck who declared that “people who love obeying the law or eating sausage should see neither one made.” I used natural casings and the recommendation was to rinse them thoroughly, since they are packed in salt. Rinsing out a sausage casing is, well, like rinsing out an intestine. One end is certainly going to try to flow down your drain, and when they are like 8′ long, its going to go a long way down your drain.. Very hard to keep control over.
I also was a bit disappointed by the Kitchenaid attachment–seemed like you had to press really hard to get the meat to flow out the nozzle, even with the screw supposedly forcing things through. Plus, I seemed to lose an entire sausage with left over meat gunk stuck in the attachment. I tried to pinch off and twist the links as they came out, which really didn’t work well–I do like your idea of doing the whole casing and then twisting them. Probably get a much better pack that way.
The chorizo I made was quite tasty, however.
Excellent flickr slideshow. However, needs more boobies.
As the son of a grocery store owner/fresh sausage maker, a big hint to everyone making their own sausage is to soak the casings in warm water for a half hour or so to make the casings all poof out. It’s much easier to get the filling into the casing when it’s stretched out a bit. Also, my dad makes a bitchin’ chorizo. I might see if I can find the recipie…
A friend once handed me what appeared to be a massive hard salami, like a pepperoni, except two inches thick and as long as my arm. The label was written in foreign. Only after a few delicious slices were devoured did he feel it appropriate to inform me I was eating horse.