I’m calling this Italian sausage as it’s loosely based on recipes of the same sort of ingredients.
Unlike most sausage recipes which start with 100% of sausage weight before specifying percentages (eg 80% meat, 9% water, 9% rusk, 2% seasoning), my recipes specify percentages based on the weight of meat you’re starting with. I think this is much easier to calculate for the home sausage maker!
Italian Sausage
You might like to make a mix of water and red wine for the liquid.
Equipment
- 1 Meat grinder
- 1 Sausage skin
- 1 Sausage stuffer
Ingredients
- 1 batch Coarse minced pork shoulder/belly
- 1 % Salt
- 0.4 % Coarse black pepper
- 0.8 % Coarse ground fennel seed
- 0.2 % Garlic powder
- 0.02 % Chilli flakes
- 5 % Rusk
- 10 % Water/wine mix
Instructions
- Get your grinder into the freezer while you prepare
- Follow instructions as per As outlined in the
Basic Sausage Skills post
Notes
- Didn’t taste enough fennel. Not sure if this is because me seeds weren’t very fresh, or if it was because I didn’t use enough.
- I started with 3.8kg of meat and used about 1g of chilli. I definitely should have used more! Definitely could have added more chilli. I was after a subtle heat that you don’t get immediately, which is almost the case here, but another gram or so would have been better.
- Texture was ok, really on the border of being a bit crumbly, but just about got away with it. Juiciness also ok, lost a reasonable amount of fat in the oven. Still room for improvement on both fronts. (this was made pre-supaphos discovery, so that would help)
- For some reason, the test patty I did before stuffing bore no resemblance to the final sausage. It was flavoursome, juicy and held together perfectly.
- I heard alcohol in sausage can affect the bind, so not sure how to resolve that.