How To Make Sausage – Breakfast Sausage Recipe

What’s the secret to making sausage yummy? Check out this breakfast sausage recipe where mixing pork and spices, it’s really not crummy!

How strange is a food that meant only to be a method to salvage the otherwise useless meat becomes one of the most delicious ones. After all traditionally, sausages are cleaned animal intestines filled up with the same animal, chopped up or nowadays minced bits. It’s rather an ugly death to have but it’s a novel solution to waste as little meat as possible.

The most common meat that is used to make sausage in the Western world is the pork around these days but any other available meat can be used. Beef is fairly popular too but sometimes chicken or even horse meat is used which actually is a delicacy in the non-English speaking part of Europe.

Sure enough not only meat can be filled into the casings. Apart of spices and herbs, there are countless ingredients apt to lighten the texture of the sausages. In Britain some homemade sausages are filled with apples or other fruit.

In Eastern Europe casings are filled with the inner bits of the pork like liver mixed with cooked rice. Even the blood of the animal is used in some sausages like the well praised and widely popular Spanish Morcilla.

Nowadays, there are various casing available for filling from natural one through artificially made cellulose or collagen to synthetic ones. The natural ones are fairly harder to get by, as not every butcher keeps a bag of cleaned intestine under the counter but they may be able to order it, nonetheless.

The natural casings require a bit of extra care, like soaking them in lukewarm water before usage and salting or keeping the unused ones in brine afterwards. In this way, it can be kept in the refrigerator for one to two years. It is not recommended to freeze it as that will weaken its structure, though.

Without a sausage stuffer it’s really hard to make sausages and it isn’t recommended to anyone to walk on that path. A manual sausage filler can be easily and cheaply purchased online that does the job. Surely, there are advanced machines and attachments for kitchen tools that can do a better job at it. These are well worth the investment if we plan to make our own sausages often but a once in a month sausage filling party may not be worth it.

When sausages are stuffed, there are various preservation methods to keep them long. One is simply to use the achievements of modern age and pop them into the freezer. Some recommend to keep them in a low temperature dark but airy room hanged on a wooden stick for a day. This would allow the flavors to settle before freezing it down but this is not available to everyone nor recommended with not recently cut meat.

Some time ago when refrigerators were not abundant at all, households meat preservation relied on storing roasted meat under airtight fat layers in pots and curing. Smoke and air curing sausages is still a popular method for storing meat but more for its taste now than out of necessity anymore. Spain is really fond of its smoked and cured Chorizos and have an uncountable amount of them in different shape, size and flavors apart, of course the traditional one.

Filling our homemade sausage at first is a guesswork really so writing everything down will help us improve our recipe and learn from our mistakes. It’s amazingly hard to find the just right amount of salt we like in our sausages but it can be achieved through determination, love and care.

We can fill the sausage up with all sort of spices and herbs but it doesn’t require much besides salt, garlic, paprika and maybe pepper. Some even skip on these four and only use salt and pepper.

Ingredients

Type 1

• 3½ lb / 1.6kg Ground meat
• 1.7 lb / 0.8kg Ground pork belly fat
• 2 oz / 55g Salt
• 2 oz / 50g Garlic
• 1 oz / 30g Paprika
• Spices and herbs of choice E.g:
  • 0.2 oz / 5g Hot paprika or chili (optional)
  • 3 oz / 80g Black pepper (optional)
  • 3 oz / 80g Cumin (ground)(optional)

Type 2

• 3½ lb / 1.6kg Ground meat
• 14 oz / 0.4kg Ground pork belly fat
• 1⅝ oz / 46g Salt
• ¼ oz / 6g Garlic
• 1 oz / 30g Paprika
• Spices and herbs of choice E.g:
  • ⅜ oz / 10g Hot paprika or chili (optional)
  • 1/16 oz / 2g Black pepper (optional)
  • 1 oz / 30g Cumin (ground)(optional)

How to make sausage

1. In a big enough bowl mix together all the ingredients. However, some may venture to taste this mixture, it isn’t recommended to eat raw meat.
2. Pull as much casing onto the tube of the filler as possible.
3. Tie a knot at the end of the casing and pull tightly to the end.
4. Make a small hole on top of the casing with a sharp knife that will allow the air getting out when the meat is getting filled.
5. Fill the filler with meat then put it together and start filling the casing. Make sure the air leaves the inside of the sausage by making more holes if necessary.
6. Hold down the casing with one hand while continuously pressing the meat out. Holding the casings tighter will result more dense sausages while letting it loose the sausages will be lighter. Too dense filling won’t allow enough room to make the sausages and it may burst. Too light filling will make a sloppy sausage so we have to make just the right density.
7. Depending of the size of the filler we have to refill the machine until we have meat or casings available. It isn’t recommended to make longer sausages than 3 feet / 90 cm as that would make them pretty uncomfortable to handle. When the desired length is reached close the end with a knot.
8. Measure out the desired link length then start making the sausage links by holding the bigger part still and rotating the smaller one. This will seal the space between two pieces well enough.
9. Mind to rotate the second link into the opposite direction and then alternating the directions until the end otherwise the sections will open up again.
10. The sausages are ready to be frozen, fried or roasted.

Notes

Pork needs to be cooked until the meat inner temperature reaches 145°F / 63°C then it needs to be rested for 3 minutes to be consumed safely. In case food temperature gauge is not readily available cook each side for 8 minutes on medium low heat until golden brown color achieved.

Enjoy!

 

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