How to Make Homemade Sausage

bringing the people behind our food to life what I like to do with making sausage is usually using the shoulder part of the animal this is pork shoulder 20 percent fat the shoulder is a pretty heavily used muscle so it's full of flavor and what we're going to do is we're going to measure out two pounds of pork shoulder and that is 2 pounds and this is lamb shoulder which has a little bit more fat on it you can use leg on that if you don't want such a fatty lamb sausage but I highly recommend it fattest flavor and it makes it balanced all the way through the sausage with spices and garlic and salt and everything else and then the other one that we're going to be doing today is Italian chicken that's gonna be extremely lean sausage and we're gonna add some olive oil in there for fat as well that way it doesn't dry up so much with the breasts we use all pieces of it boneless skinless chicken breasts are the number one seller of any meat market so these are the things you need to make sausage with you need a basic home appliance that has a grinder attachment to it this is called your horn this is your worm this is what spits out all of the meat when you grind this is your blade the most important part and this is your die this is what will end up cutting so the die and the blade kiss each other and when that happens you have a grind and you go ahead and seal it up so we have our pork we have our lamb and we have our chicken we can actually grind all three of these if you go through that step so it would be beef pork lamb chicken they grind through your grinder without having to clean it chicken of course we're gonna do last just because of the chance of salmonella or other foodborne illnesses might happen we're using a really fresh product so it's probably not going to be an issue so what we'll do is we'll grab our pork we'll turn on our grinder slow and go is kind of the way to go basically it's kind of a two-step process we go ahead and grind the me first then we'll mix all of our seasonings and we'll send it through again but one thing you don't want to do is you don't want to overwork the meat if you grind it a third time you're going to have a pretty tough sausage we'll just set that to the side onto our ground lamb ground lamb I'm going to go a little slower on because this shoulders a little tougher meat then actually the pork shoulder is lamb uses this muscle way more than what a pig is going to do and lamb is one of those animals that not a lot of people are eating anymore which is pretty unfortunate so everything we're doing today we're doing in two pound increments you can go less if you want but I think that two pounds is a pretty good number to shoot for building yield us about eight sausages all together out of quarter pound apiece two pounds will feed a party of four pretty comfortably all of the fact I'm using in here I didn't trim anything away from it because I want that fat it's gonna add flavor texture and it will cook up nicely as well you won't dry up on you the next we'll move on to the chicken like I said we're using chicken breasts for this so it'll grind out pretty easy because the chicken is so tender we go to a little bit higher speed because it won't be got up in the blade at all pros and cons of the chicken sausage the pro is that it's very good for you very healthy the con is that sometimes it can dry up on you and the dried sausage is pretty miserable so what we're gonna do with this guys we're actually gonna add a little bit of FATA to it with olive oil and we're gonna flavor it pretty nicely because the chicken breast is kind of clean Jane by itself and we're done so the next part we're gonna do is mix up everything but in the meantime I'm gonna break this apart and clean it that way we don't have any residual chicken left over on the grinder so the three sausages that we're gonna do today the first one that we're gonna do is going to be the pork chorizo we have salt black pepper a really high-quality smoked paprika brown sugar to kind of sweeten it up a little bit a little chili flake for some heat a little cumin for some earthiness garlic and a little bit of vinegar to kind of acetate it up a little bit so when we're gonna mix all of this basically I want to use as less as I possibly can as far as movement goes so I'm just gonna sprinkle in the salt and my rule of thumb on salt is pretty easy for every two pounds of meat that you use I like to use two tablespoons of salt I'm gonna go ahead and put 1 teaspoon of black pepper 1/2 a tablespoon of cumin 1/2 a tablespoon of chili flake 1 tablespoon of garlic a little bit of vinegar about a tablespoon of brown sugar and we'll finish it off with smoked paprika and when we're mixing it just kind of let it fall through your hands don't work it too much as long as we just get a nice coating on it the second time that we actually grind it through everything will kind of come to one and kind of be a little bit more cohesive so we just kind of want to delicately do that for the lamb Merguez salt pepper cinnamon makes it a little fun kind of brightens it up a little bit garlic a little kiss of cumin a little kiss of coriander to make it sweet as well coriander's is one of those beautiful little sweet spices that we use tablespoon of cayenne you can adjust this however you want I kind of like my Mar guests to be a little bit fiery but it's really up to you regular sweet paprika and cilantro and parsley we're gonna do the same thing as we did with the chorizo and we'll Della CLE mix this up as well and the third one that we'll be doing is chicken Italian so play off of a New York style Italian sausage and we're adding time to it to kind of give it a little bit more flavor boost in it because it is such a bland meat start off with salt pepper a little bit of Chile crushed fennel seed to bring a little sweetness to it a little bit of dry thyme that'll add a little earthiness some garlic a squeeze of a half a lemon just so we can brighten this up a little bit and then we'll go ahead and add our olive oil now we have it so now we'll start the second part of the grind in this guy you can actually go pretty fast on this because all that tissue has already been broken down no that's grind then we're going to go ahead and do the chicken but I'm going to go ahead and clean off this part so we don't get paprika everywhere the next we'll do the chicken Italian now for my favorite part of entire sausage making that's stuffing the sausage so basically what we have we still have our horn our attachment there's a little part on there that hooks onto the worm this is our horn and we just tighten it up so when we're doing sausage you can use a couple of different options as far as casings go today I'm using a hog casing with the lamb Merguez you can use a lamb casing if you can find them that's traditional but for today we're just doing all hog casings the best place you can get hog casings is from your local butcher if you don't have a local butcher I suggest you find one or get one or become one or you can get your casings online I'm using a 36:38 hog casing which is pretty much the standard in the industry as far as making everyday sausages when they come in they come in salted we go ahead and rinse off all the salt in water they come in long strands like this and this is all pork intestine so what we'll do is we'll feed the horn and you don't want your casing to be dry you want it pretty wet that way it will slide off pretty easily when you're stuffing as far as how much casing you need it's pretty much just a judgement call I go ahead and just use it all cool thing about casings if you do buy them online you'll have to buy them in a Hank which they run around right around 20 bucks or so but you don't have to use it all at once after you're done fleshing them out all you would have to do is just soak it in salt and you can keep it in your fridge for an eternity if you want make sure it's on and we're gonna start with our chorizo basically what we're gonna do is we're just kind of going to feed it through I'm gonna put a little bit in there first make sure it gets to the tip then we'll go ahead and tie off our casing and then we go I put my finger right at the opening I'm gonna feel a touch then we're ready to rock here we are so at that point what would do so go ahead and tie off the end and the whole thing about making and stuffing sausage is you kind of want to get it as tight as you possibly can you don't want any air pockets all in there when there are we'll go ahead and release those after we get done and we'll prick them try to keep everything steady as she goes load up the hopper and you just got to be gentle with it take your time it's fine and I'm kind of putting a little bit of pressure on the horn itself and try to pack it in as much as I possibly can and we're kind of letting gravity do the rest if you get it too loose it's fine because when we twist them we can make it as tight or as loose as we want the other step that I would suggest doing is make sure all your ingredients are cold all the way through when you cut make sure refrigerate before you stuff it make sure it's refrigerated nice and cold that makes for a better sausage as well if it gets warmed up too much from working your hands that fat will break down during the cooking process and it doesn't make the to enjoyable to eat the thing with the natural casing is the fact that it's actually got a lot of room in it so they'll break on you but they're pretty sturdy the other thing the sausage-making you get very messy - it's fine and we are stopped so what I'll do go ahead and cut off a little bit of excess because as you'll see when we stuff it you'll need that excess part right now we're just going to leave it coiled right there and we'll move on to the Marga's basically doing the same process and with the Merguez I'm actually gonna do something a little different what we're gonna do is we're gonna do coils how it's done traditionally we're gonna go ahead and roll it like this and we're gonna put a skewer right through that and then if you were to grill it you'd grill it as is it kind of gives that wow factor when you present next we'll do the chicken Italian so I went ahead and cleaned the horn and the bass all those sausages had paprika on it and I didn't want to have the chicken Italian turn out red so do the same thing be the chicken so gets to the tip go ahead and tie it off starter back up if you wanted to make this sausage or maybe kosher you could use a lamb casing instead of a hog casing for it chickens don't have any casing so you take that out of the equation plus a very nice pork free sausage very healthy flavorful go ahead leave a little bit extra we're done with stuffing first things first before we start tying these sausages if there's any residual air in there we need to take it out and the reason is for when you cook it the casing will expand and it could break on you being a natural casing so I have a sausage pricker but at home if you have a paper clip or a needle of any kind go ahead and sanitize that a little bleach rinse it off and then what you want to do is go ahead and start poking the sausage this is the key right here of actually really good sausage most store-bought sausage doesn't have this done so if you do buy store-bought stuff I would suggest you breaking it before you do eat it after we get done pricking our sausage then we're going to go in and start making them links so the first thing we're going to do is grab it push the meat up as much as we possibly can to the tied section and then we're going to twist it two or three times usually works then we will go up to the second link and we'll kind of squeeze it we're kind of bringing all the meat back in that way it's solid all the way through and what we're going to do is go the opposite way so as we're going we go one and then we go back one and go back and when we do that what we'll have is a perfect little tie and and back until we end up with links that all look the same we'll go ahead and tie these off if I'm going to be doing this in the afternoon and then cooking later on at night I'll leave these whole as it is it'll kind of let the meat come together become one and then before I cook it then I'll go ahead and cut this off and that is perfect sausage right there chicken Italian will do the same way as we did the chorizo we'll start off with poking now with the chicken Italian these are going to be a little bit looser than the pork is because there's no fat there's no bind in it whatsoever so what I always suggest doing on them is actually making sure you have a little bit more excess of the casing on it because when you cook it you don't want the chicken to kind of fall out of the sausage so I keep everything kind of tight we go one way then we go the other sucking all that in as you can see I got a longer casing going on there and we got this little guy for a little Scooby Snack later with this I would definitely suggest keeping it linked up for a little while maybe a good hour so before you grill it if not this is what will happen when you grill it it'll spurt out on you and you really don't want that to happen but if you keep it as is and you have your little pieces right there everything will stay even chicken Italian sausage so making sausage is not that daunting of a task it's pretty easy to do you're gonna have fun with it you can experiment you can take these sausages you can then smoke them if you have a smoker at home you can cook them in the grill you can cook them in a pan you can cook them in an oven all of these products need to be cooked all the way through do not cook them to a medium-rare cook them all the way through because they have been ground it's the safest way to go the best way that I think to cook these is either on the grill seven minutes per side medium heat lid down or you can cook it in a pan medium heat a little bit of oil on the bottom Brown it for about six or seven minutes per side flip it over maybe put a lid on there if you want do that an additional seven minutes you can't go wrong it's a challenge because it's the same thing every day but it's always different because every carcass is different and that's what makes it hard is that the repetition but you have to concentrate at the same time so it's a challenge and I'm a challenge based person

Channel: Food Farmer Earth

Views: 3,689,355

Rating: 4.7932467 out of 5

Keywords: food farmer earth, artisans, organic, promotion, ecology, cooking up a story, sustainable food, DIY food, talks, craft, cooking videos, food stories, environment, farming, urban ag, small farmers, organic agriculture, interviews

Id: RPQP4TC3E1w

Length: 19min 40sec (1180 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 04 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/FermentedCreation]

These are fresh sausages, the only real reason you need to poke them is when you cook them they will balloon and could pop or split. Thanks for the link.