Smoked Italian Sausage | Homemade Sausages

You say, I know this guy, don't you? And then I can say Big Mike from BG Cooks. Nah, we finna flow through it. All right. What's good, everybody? And welcome back to my channel, Smokin' and Grillin' with me, A.B. And you see my boy right here, I got Mad Dog. You guys might know him as Big Mike from BG Cooks. BG Cooks. BG Cooks, that's right. Hey, listen, so it's an interesting topic. I know when you read the title, you saw the thumbnail, you was like, what? They makin' they old sauces? But that's right, we gonna do it in Italian sauces. Now, I'm gonna say this right off the bat. Here's my little disclaimer to this. This will be the third time I've ever done it. You know what I mean? And Mad Dog, he got the equipment, he brought it over. So you guys can check it out. It's very interesting. You know, check this out. Look at this. Let me know down in the comment section below. And so that I don't over talk it, we finna go right over these ingredients and we finna prep this meat and we finna make it happen. All right, so when you make an Italian sausage, it's usually made with pork. So here we have a whole pork roast. As you can see, this is what we gonna be using. Now the fat on here is gonna serve a purpose because you need that to get the juiciness out of this Italian sausage. All right, so as you can see, this is a bone-in pork shoulder. You can do boneless, but we just happen to have a bone-in one. A.B.'s gonna start slicing this. Now you wanna cut this up into cubes. Okay, well look, I'm gonna spin this around this way because the bone is on this side. So the bone is here. I can feel it in the front. So I know it's in this area right here. So what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna go ahead and just start here. Yeah, and you can just cut around the bone. Get as much meat as you can off of it. So it doesn't make a difference how I really cut this? No, it doesn't make a difference. Okay. Key thing to making sausage is you wanna make sure that all of your utensils are cold. So we've got our grinder in the freezer. Once we cube this meat up, it's gonna go into the freezer because you want it to be extremely cold, almost to the point of being frozen because you want it to go through that grinder. You don't want the fat to be soft. It starts to coagulate. It's really hard for it to process through that meat grinder. Now look, look at these pieces right here. I'm gonna go ahead and cut these into big one-inch cubes. Can you guys see that? All right, so this is where we're going with it. All right. Oh, and you wanna get yourself a bowl. You know what I mean? Just put them inside. Nice metal bowl. It gets real cold when you put it in that freezer. Now, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna keep on cutting this and then we'll just come back once I got everything cubed. Yeah, we ain't gonna keep you out here, boy, watching us cut meat. Okay, so now you guys can see, I'll just use this as my pointer. You know what I mean? Because I just washed my hands, but you can see here's the bone. We just go ahead and get in. Just the bone right here, right? So you, listen, it's a little tricky to get all of that meat off of there, but it's no problem. We just trim it as best we can. And then right here, what you're seeing here, look, this is some of that loose fat that didn't quite, you know what I mean, wasn't worth cutting, even though we're gonna need a lot of fat, right? So what I'm gonna do now, I'll just show you. Here it is right here. You can just see everything is cut into cubes, just like what you see right here. All right, now that you guys see what the meat looks like, let's talk about what we are going to stuff them in, yeah? So once you make your sausage, we have natural hog casings here, all right? Now you can find these at your local butcher, or that's where you basically wanna go to find out about them. Oh, and you can get them online too. You can just order them also. Yeah, you can, you can. Some people use lamb casings, some people use collagen casings, if you don't like pork or whatnot. But here today, we're gonna be using natural hog casings, okay? All right, once you get those casings, you wanna make sure you put them in some lukewarm water before you stuff them, because you're gonna need them to be really pliable when you're stretching them out and you make... So, you know how we gonna put them in the refrigerator? I'm gonna let you explain it, right? Because you the mad scientist on there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we talked about everything needing to be cold. So we're gonna put these in the freezer, because it's gonna get cold fast, all right? We want this to get really cold till it's about almost frozen, like you're picking up little meat rocks. When we put those into our meat grinder, it's gonna make it a lot easier to make the sausage. And once we do that, guys, we'll show you how we do it. We're gonna go over the ingredients for this Italian sausage, and then we're gonna show them how we stuff them. Hey, so just to give a recap of what he just said, look, we took the shoulder, we de-boned it, cut everything into the cubes, which you guys just saw. We're gonna put it in the deep freezer. We just wanna get it cold. Whatever you use, if you got a fire extinguisher, you wanna... Right, right, right. Hey, whatever your method is, but you wanna get it cold and starting to, you know, like freeze, it'll help it grind. So once we put this in the deep freezer, then we'll be able to check it. And once it feels like it's hard enough, but not frozen, then we'll bring it out and then we'll move over to the next step. Okay, folks, look, that, I don't know, what made me think that, you know, my deep freezer was gonna be something more than what it was. I was thinking it was gonna be ready like an hour, maybe two at the most. What happened was we got to playing games, blah, blah, blah. Or, you know, we came back to a frozen, you know. A whole roast. Oh, wait, a block of roast. Right, right, right, right. It all turned into one solid meat again. Now, check it out. Okay, so look, this is my, you know, my mixer, right? And we got the attachment because we're gonna grind. Now, what I wanted to tell you was, this has been in the freezer because you're gonna want this to be cool also. Everything needs to be cool. Everything needs to be cold. I say cool, but you, listen, we want it to be cold. So this is that. This goes inside. And... This actually helps to push. Right, right, right. So we got a bowl right here. Look, we're gonna get this inside of this from here. So with that being said, hey, let's get down. Yeah, let's start grinding. Hey, so tell me that part about the speed again. I just gotta make sure that... Well, you don't want it to go too slow. You wanna push this through as fast as you can, but you don't want it too high because what happens is the friction from that will heat up the meat as well. So if it's going too fast, it's gonna soften up your meat. It's gonna get hot, you know, as the motor spins. If you do it too slow, it's not gonna grind it as good. So the happy medium here is the setting is on four. So if you have a KitchenAid mixer, it goes from two, then to four, but there's an in-between between there. So just put it on the four. That's the speed we're gonna use it at. That being said, we finna get it. Cause listen, we don't want this to start getting, you know, starting to like lose its rigidness. Rigidness. Yeah. All right, so. All right. This is ready? It's ready. Now. Okay, so look. Now that we're done, now you guys get the chance to see, let me tilt it this way. So you can see, listen, it made a lot of ground, you know, pork shoulder, right? So the next step is let us get, take this off. Let's get this clean. And then you see these seasonings right here. I'm getting ready to tell you what they are, give you guys the measurements. And if you look down at the description box below, you'll be able to see exactly what goes into this. And this was about five pounds if I didn't say it earlier. Now, hear me out. We ground this meat up. We're gonna season it right now. After we season it, we're gonna put it back into the fridge to get it cold because we're gonna run it back through this so that the meat that we grind is already seasoned before we stuff the sausage. Hey, so, hey, give it to you in a nutshell. What he just said is, listen, you know how like when we season ground beef, like we making a hot dog, right? I mean, like we making a hamburger. If we do that, you only got, and then when you mix it, you do your best. But just imagine if he was to regrind it with the seasoning and then that just puts the seasoning deep, you know, deep penetration through every piece of this meat. Hey, they should make burgers and sell them like that. Well, they do. We just leave. Hey, we gonna leave that one alone. Hey, we just, hey. Okay, now. Big Mike and AP's ground, seasoned ground beef. Right, right, right, right. Okay, so now we getting ready to go over these ingredients so we can hurry up and put these back into the deep, you know, freezer to get this cold. So look down into the description box below and then you'll get the exact measurements and everything like that for this Italian sauce. Yeah, because right now, we're just gonna tell you what it is. Right, right, right. Yeah, we'll put the amount of ingredients in, but the amount of ingredients that we're gonna put in the description is for two pounds of meat. Right. Okay. So this was five pounds. Yeah, you adjust it to how many pounds of meat that you ground. Correct. This is red chili flakes. All right. This is fennel seed. Oh, okay. This is dry parsley. Now look, can you use fresh parsley or do you like using dried? I know that every time we do it- Well, fresh parsley is wet. Right, right, right. Okay. So we want dry seasonings, not wet seasonings. Okay. Okay, we got some black pepper. This is some Italian seasoning. If you don't have Italian seasoning, you can make your own Italian seasoning. I'm gonna leave that up to you. You look up that recipe, but you can just buy Italian seasoning at the grocery store. This is paprika. Hey, I ain't gonna lie y'all. Hey, I wanted to put some Creole kick in here. But he was like, Hey, you can though. Hey, you're gonna want to see these next sausages though. You ever go to barbecue places and you always see they have their own sausage. Their jalapeno cheese sausage. Well, they seasoned the meat to their likings, just like you would season ground beef. So if you want it to make your own barbecue sausage, you can use your own seasoning, grind your own meat, season it, and just pack it. Put whatever you want. Sausage is very versatile. Let's get this last one. What was this? Oh, wait, we got salt. Kosher salt. That might've been that cayenne, right? Oh, yeah. So we're gonna make our Italian sausage a little spicy. Gotta have a little kick. Yeah, so we got some cayenne pepper we're gonna put in there. All right. All right, we got all the seasoning dumped in the bowl. Now you just want to go old school. All right, got seasonings all up in here. Now you get this incorporated as best you can. There's really no way that you're gonna be able to just really get it all seasoned like you would before you stuffed it. So imagine if we just did this and we stuffed the sausage. You're gonna have some pockets that don't have flavor. Like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's gonna be super, you know, tasty. Super concentrated. You can get your part of the sausage where it's bland. This is why we running through. I'm gonna do it this way so they can just see. Yeah, this is why we running through the second time because we want all of our seasonings to be on every piece of meat. Now, what we getting ready to do is I'm getting ready to take this, put this ---- back into my deep freezer along with the grinder, the meat attachment, the grinding attachment, right? So we can get this cold. By the time this gets cold, that'll be, you know, where we want it to be. Actually, it's kind of cool right now. No, probably we can run it back. Yeah, I got frostbitten hands. Look, we gonna need this to be, you know, to be chilled also. So we'll see you guys back maybe about like one hour. Okay, so look, it's been one hour. This is what we got. It's already like chilled. I'm gonna try to, I don't know how I can show you this, but listen, it's got some real good resistance. You don't want to go no further than that. You know, you don't want it to be froze. Now, what we getting ready to do is we getting ready to run this back through the meat grinder. And then what we gonna do is we gonna make it, hey, tell me about the test patty. Oh yeah. That right there, it's fire. Whenever you're making your sausage, you definitely want to make sure before you stuff your casings, that you make a test patty, okay? That's basically gonna determine how your sausage is going to taste once it's cooked. All right, so look. Whenever you make sausage, make sure you do that. Hey, you know what? I want to say this. I want you guys to let me know down in the comment section below. You know what I mean? Like, listen, if you had this, would you, I don't know, what type of sausage would you make? Or are you interested in seeing more videos like this? I said, come on. Hey, look, I'm saying come on, because look, I'm ready to get this going. Hey, you guys don't have, you have no idea how this smells right now. It smells so good. You know, with those seasonings. You just saw, we ran everything through for a second time, right? For a second time. So got that done. Now what are you doing is, he just mixing this up, you know, with his hands. So go ahead. We got this mixed in. And then look, this right here is going to be key. You're going to want to test it, right? And you're going to want to taste it. So we're just going to make a couple of small patties. I'm going to go ahead and just fry them up. And then what we'll do is, we'll decide if we need to add anything else to it. Yeah, see, this is my patty right here. This is my sausage patty. Hey, an Italian burger, or burger patty. Okay, look, so check it out. Here you go. Look, just made two test patties, right? Hey, he wasn't lying. He said he wanted one for himself. I thought we both was going to, you know, just like cut one in half. Oh man, I'm hungry. So I'm going to go ahead and just put it there. Put it there. All right, look, and just so you know, we, this is not the second patty. These are first impressions. Like we didn't eat something to prep what we were going to say. Hope you guys can see that. Look, it's smoking a little bit. Hey, I can just tell you, it smells incredible. You know what? I probably want to make some of these up. Yeah. For science. Everything is for science. Oh man, that's good. Well, you don't need nothing from me. Hey, these might even be better than the last ones, bro. That is good. Okay, so look, let us rinse this down, get set up, and we're finna show you the next part. And this right here is where it's really finna get interesting. This is good. All right, so I guess now we're finna load, right? So look, since it's over there on your side, you load, what I'll do is I'll hold this up. I'll hold this up and you can start stuffing it. All right. Now, now that you can see, we got it, you know, completely stuffed all the way to the top. Now we put it in position and then we'll move to the next step. All right, so we're gonna start cranking this meat through here. We're gonna push it so we get all the air out. We want a little bit to come out the tip here to make sure that all the air is out. It's not gonna get all of it, but most of it. So start turning this here. All right, so there it go. There we go. So these are our casings. Remember, natural casings. You just wanna pull one off of here. That's a long one. For this much meat, you do want a long one. Find the opening here. Okay, so once you got it on there and you slid it all the way, right, you tie a knot, as you can see right there by that arrow. Then you wanna start cranking. As you cranking, look, there's two things that makes a difference when you packing a sausage, right? When you stuffing one. One is how fast you cranking it, and two is the resistance. If you look at where the arrow is now, you can see where I'm putting my hand at right there. I give it a little resistance. And then that helps pack it in, but you don't wanna pack it in too tight. Now, at the end, you wanna make sure you leave yourself some so that you can tie yourself a knot. So what I do is I squeeze it down, and then I just go ahead and just put a simple knot at the end of the casing. Okay, so look, we done with that part right there. Now look, right here, you'll notice it got like a little air pocket, right? So just go ahead and get yourself a toothpick and just put a hole in it. Anywhere there's an air pocket, just put a hole in it. There we go. And then it'll just, you know, bust. Here's another one right here. And then that's it. Oh, one more right here. And outside of that, there you have it. Now, the next thing we get ready to do, I'm gonna show you how we twist them. All right, so we're gonna start twisting our sausages, making our links. You choose how long you want them. We decided we wanted them about this long. So twist, you pinch here, then you're gonna twist clockwise or counterclockwise. Now, to make sure that your links are about the same length, you turn it here and you pinch there. All right, so this one was going clockwise this way. We're gonna go counterclockwise this way. All right. Now, just repeat until all your links are done. Links! We got links, son! Now you can see my, you know, my setup for my firebox. Just three logs. What I did was I just recently flipped it over. So what you're gonna see right now is it's gonna have a little bit of white smoke, and then you can see the difference. 250 at the top, and I had 200 at the bottom. And what we were looking for was about 225, and we're gonna do that for about three hours. All right, so now we're gonna go ahead and load it. All right, I'm gonna start with this one right here. And what I'm gonna do is, look, I'm gonna just take it, and I'll probably just hang it like this. We'll just let it hang like that. Ah, mad dog. You go ahead and hit this one. I'm gonna go ahead and bring the rest of them out. Okay, so what you guys are seeing right now is, listen, this Lone Star vertical, you know, smoker, check it out. It's got these sausage hangers on the top. Real simple. All you do is hang them, you know, in between each link. And you know what? Even if you guys are doing them on your own smoker and you don't have a, you know, sausage hangers or anything like that, you can always put them on top of the grate, as you just saw. Now, what we want to do is we want to do this for, you know, at that temperature, 225 degrees, we want to do it for three hours. And then when they're done, they look like this. Now I looked at it once in, you know, in between the time that it was smoking, just to see how it was coming. Don't forget, heat rises towards the top. So the upper left-hand side will be the hottest. And then, you know, down here at the bottom will be the coolest. You know what I mean? So look, that right there, those are those breakfast sausages. Now I'm gonna show you a closeup of them. When you look at them, check this out right here. If this don't say breakfast sausages, I don't know what does. And then when he gets the rest of these out, you're gonna go ahead and just take a look at it. That right there is some good breakfast sausages. And then for the Italian Lynx sausages, there you go right there. Hey, super easy, you guys. Let me know what you think. All right, y'all. So look, you just saw us take them off, right? So here they go. Already washed my hands, all of that. Hey, look, you know what? I don't even want to fake the funk. Hey, check this out. We done already ate one. Hey, listen. No, that's right. Hey, two. So listen, we trying to fight it back because in a minute, we're gonna be done ate up all of the sausages. Hey, so this is what it looks like. Here, you guys can see that right there. I'll zoom in and get you some good pictures of it or whatever, but right now I am starving. You know what I mean? This has been a long time coming, so let's go ahead and just cut it here. You might've saw some other ones. You see these wrinkles right here? Don't they look like breakfast sausages? But that's what these are. These are some that we made. We made these off camera. Now, hey, and then for those of you guys that really don't do no pork, we gotta make that beef sausage too. We'll make a beef sausage. We might make a chicken sausage. Ooh. Yeah. There you go. Hey, so enough talking. For science. Yeah, baby. Mm. So much juice. Oh, man. Hey, so you guys seen it. I just looked down, saw the juices. You know what I mean? When I bit into it, it was running all over my apron. No, I didn't check. Hey, you better check yourself. Hey, so I want you guys to let me know down in the comment section below. Just let me know, like, you like seeing this type of stuff? Would you like to see different types of, I would like to see your suggestions and see what you guys would like to see as far as making this. Let us know what kind of sausages you want to see us make. Yes, sir. So with that being said, listen, if you're new to my channel, let me just take this time to say, hey, thank you for watching this video. Thank you for watching this video. Don't forget to like this video and subscribe and tell everybody out there. There's a channel out here that's simplifying these recipes and taking the mystery out of cooking. That's right, man. So you know what I'm about to say now, folks. Y'all been watching me for a minute. You know what I'm about to do. I'm out of here. Peace.