Homemade Italian Sausage - Food Wishes

Hello, this is Chef John from foodwishes.com with homemade Italian sausage. That's right, there's an old saying that if people knew how sausage was made, they would not eat it. Which, as far as commercially produced sausage goes, is probably true, since nothing, and I mean this literally, gets thrown away in a butcher shop. But when it comes to making your own fresh sausage at home, I think the opposite is true. We want people to know what's in it, and we want people to watch how it's done. If for no other reason than to help us with all this prep and clean up. And speaking of prep, let's go ahead and get started by cubing up some pork shoulder, which is also known as pork butt. It's a long story. But anyway, we're going to take this boneless piece of pork shoulder, and go ahead and cube it up by cutting a thick slice, and then the slice gets cut into strips, and then we can slice across those strips to make cubes. And even though it looks like this cut has a lot of fat in it, which I guess it does, when it comes to sausage making, this has basically the minimum amount of fat you want for a decent sausage. Alright, believe it or not, a lot of commercial sausages are like half fat and half lean meat. And we could achieve that by adding some pork belly to this, but we're not going to. So we're only going to end up around 25 or 30% fat, which is enough, but basically the bare minimum for a juicy, nicely textured sausage. So basically this is the diet version. But anyway, we'll go ahead and cube up our meat as shown, at which point we'll transfer it into the fridge, while we move on to make our MSSP, which of course stands for Magical Sausage Seasoning Paste. And we'll start that by tossing some garlic cloves into this mortar, along with a small portion of our salt, which is going to help us grind this garlic into a paste very quickly. And like I said, this is just part of the salt, so we want to make sure we don't forget to add the rest later. But anyway, we'll go ahead and crush that into a paste, at which point we'll stop and add our fennel seeds, our anise seeds, and a whole bunch of freshly ground black pepper. And we'll go ahead and take our pestle and give this a very brief bruising. Okay, we're not really crushing this or grinding it down to a paste. We just want to bruise it for about 10 or 15 seconds, which is going to bring out a little more of the flavor. Oh, speaking of which, you get extra credit if you toast your fennel seeds first. And I will briefly discuss that in the blog post. And then what we'll do once that's set is add some hot pepper flakes, and some cayenne, if we're doing a spicy version. Or if you're doing a sweet version, as they call it, don't put it in. And besides the hot pepper, we will also add some dry oregano, and some dry marjoram, as well as a little touch of coriander, and some ground mustard, and a little touch of allspice. And we'll finish off with an optional spoon of sugar, as well as a splash of water. And that's going to be it for our MSSP. All we'll need to do is give that a mix, and it will be ready to add to our meat. And just in case it's not obvious, the whole advantage of making your own sausage is that you get to season this any way you want. So please feel free to adjust this to your own taste. But regardless of what you use, once that's done, we'll go ahead and add it to our pork cubes. And thoroughly mix that in, using your bare hands. And even though I'm going to severely edit this down to just a few seconds, you really do want to make sure you take your time and mix that thoroughly. And then theoretically, as soon as this is mixed, we could grind it, but we're not going to. For best results, we want to let this sit in the fridge overnight, not only so it's really cold when we grind it, but also to give it enough time so that all those flavors really permeate the meat. And then you remember a few minutes ago when I said we shouldn't forget to put in the rest of the salt? Well, we forgot. So we will go ahead and dump the rest of that in, and we'll give it a mix. And then like I was saying, we will pop this in the fridge overnight, or longer if you want. Some people do it for a couple days. And if everything goes according to plan, when you pull it out the next day it should look a little something like this. And at this point we are now ready to grind this in the sausage, which I'll be doing with the relatively inexpensive, and almost effective, grinding attachment for the stand mixer. And we'll go ahead and feed that still very cold meat in. And by the way, this comes with a white plastic plunger that you're supposed to use to push it down, not your fingers. So please be safe. Luckily I have short stubby fingers, so I can't really get in trouble here. But yours might be longer, so be careful. But anyway, we're going to go ahead and grind that on the slowest speed. Which is why this is going to take you a few minutes. And also the cheap blade I'm using is not really that sharp. But having said that, it does work. And a few minutes later I had a nice bowl of coarsely ground sausage meat. And basically that's it. We just made Italian sausage. And you could certainly form this into patties and fry it up, and eat it as is. But I will be pressing on it, and showing you how I stuffed mine in the casing, only because it was so comical, as you will see. And speaking of casings, we need to soak those in water, according to directions, until they're nice and soft and ready to use. And then once that's soaked, we can go ahead and place that on our sausage stuffing tube attachment. Which I'm assuming has a shorter, more accurate name. But anyway, we'll go ahead and push that casing on that tube, until we get to the end. And we'll start feeding our sausage mixture in. And again, do not use your fingers like I am. Use the plunger that comes with the attachment. And as you start this, please brace yourself, because that sausage is going to come shooting out the other end. Check it out. So by shooting out, I meant about an eighth of an inch every two minutes. And no, I do not think it's supposed to take this long. But three things here. One is that I'm on the slowest setting. And two, I'm not pushing that meat through very aggressively. But third, and most importantly, I think I had my casing pushed way too far up that tube. So I think it was basically stuck, and preventing the meat from flowing in. So basically this operation had become an I Love Lucy episode. And you can ask your grandparents about that reference. They got it. And by the way, since I am going through this part of the process fairly quickly, using all the worst practices, I will try to add a few links in the blog post, to a couple videos that actually show you how to do this for real. But I guess it is good to know that even using this total amateur setup, and my questionable techniques, the final product actually came out amazingly well. As I spoiled the ending. But anyway, eventually that loosened up, and I sort of figured things out. And a few minutes later, all my meat was gone, and my casing was filled. And we'll go ahead and tie a knot in that end to finish it off. And that's it. We're the proud owner of one of those beautiful Italian sausage coils, just like you saw on Sopranos that time. I believe it was the episode where that guy got shot. Anyway, once our casing has been fully filled, we will move on to creating links. And we'll do that using the old pinch and twist. So simply squeeze your fingers together to push the meat out of the way, and then give it like 3 or 4 twists, and we'll simply continue on until all our links are formed. Oh, and I should mention, you don't have to do the links. You could just keep it coiled up and grilled like that. Which I have to admit, really does look cool on the grill. But anyway, you decide. I mean, you guys are, after all, the Colonel Clinks of twisting links. And by the way, if possible, I like to finish at whatever end I think has the most excess casing. And that is pretty much it for the linkification stage. And then what we'll do next is transfer these onto some kind of rack set over a sheet pan. Since we are not even close to being able to eat these yet. Because for the best results, I think we should pop these in the fridge for a full day. So that they have time to sort of dry out a little bit. And ideally we would hang these, but there's no room in your fridge to hang sausage. And if there is, you really need to buy more food. So I popped those in the fridge uncovered for about 24 hours. At which point they look like this. And finally, these are ready to separate and eat. Although we really should cook them first. So I went ahead and separated those. And transferred them onto this platter to take a few pictures. But then shortly thereafter, I headed outside to grill a few up. And while these are excellent pan fried, or cooked in a sauce, or both, I would say that grilling over charcoal is my favorite cooking method. And as long as you can avoid a giant raging grease fire, I think that's going to produce the best flavor. So I went ahead and grilled up two, which for me is one portion, and then promptly stuck that in some nice crusty bread, where along with some peppers and onions it creates one of the greatest sandwiches known to man. And despite what I thought was a disastrous stuffing stage, this sausage really did turn out amazingly well, both taste wise and texturally, which was kind of surprising because I think that meat did get overworked in the machine, but the final product really had no ill effects. And the flavor, while subjective, to me was the epitome of a classic spicy Italian sausage. And these actually came out so good, I forgot how much time and effort went into them, until I edited this video. Then I remembered. So if you have like three or four days to kill, and a stand mixer with all the attachments, and you've always wanted for the first time in your life to eat sausage knowing exactly what's in it, I really do hope you give this a try soon. So head over to foodwishes.com for all the ingredient amounts and more info as usual. And as always, enjoy!