How To Make Sweet Italian Sausage From Scratch

[Applause] [Music] welcome back to campbell kitchen today we're going to learn how to make sweet italian sausage now sweet italian sausage is it sweet not really it just refers to a sausage that is not hot italian sausage it's pretty savory although it does have a little bit of sugar in it sausage is very simple you have lean meat you have fat you have seasonings and you have a little bit of liquid to blend it all together follow along super easy you're going to love it okay so to start out i weight some spices out so right there i have one ounce of fennel seeds coarsely browned an ounce of black pepper an ounce of paprika an ounce of dextrose and three and a half ounces of salt if you don't have dextrose just substitute with sugar [Music] and as you can see i have large cubes that's the fat and i also have lean meat as you see underneath there so what i'm doing is dumping it into a hotel pan or a large container and i'm going to season all that meat with those spices so it's important to keep your meat really cold and it's important to let your meat marinate with all the spices to really absorb that flavor [Music] now i'm using 10 pounds of meat and what i did was about seven pounds of pork to various parts that i had in my freezer from breaking down a whole pig of pork belly fat back leaf lard just scraps that i had in my freezer so i mixed it up really really really well and then now it's ready to go in the freezer and you can see it looks beautiful it has all those spices mixed in well so go ahead and freeze it until it's almost frozen and then you add it into your meat grinder now your meat grinder i'm just using a cheap kitchenaid one it works actually just fine as you can see it's pretty light and fluffy ground meat once it starts to smear if you do it for a while maybe it'll heat up a little bit so that's time to stop your project cool everything down clean your grinder put it in ice water and then start over again because you always want to make sure that your meat's very very very cold that's crucial so as you can see at ground ground ground and that's what the final product now this is just the meat and all the spices now what i'm going to do is incorporate water and water kind of brings everything together sometimes they use wine various other liquids today we're using water and i'm just adding a little by little and i'm going to mix it by hand now you just want to mix it mix it mix it until it gets a little sticky and tacky right that kind of emulsifies the fat together and that makes it really juicy sausage if you don't add liquid your sausage is going to be kind of mealy and dry and the fat's going to be separate so the heat from your hand is going to warm the sausage enough with that water to kind of make a sticky mushy mixture now that's going to provide you with a wonderful sausage that's super juicy very flavorful and once you're at the point that i met right here you can go ahead and stop mixing and just put it in your freezer or your fridge let it cool down and pull out your meat stuffer now this is your sausage stuffer right here i bought it on amazon it's like 100 bucks and these are hog casings now you can use different casings today i'm using hot casings it's the intestine of a pig so you're going to fill up your sausage stuffer almost to the top slowly but surely you're going to want to press it down with your hand to make sure there's not any large air pockets and you can see i attached the mid-size tube to the bottom of the stuffer that's going to be about the right size and now with the hog casings this is a little bit tricky i tried to do it on a cutting board but you kind of want a slippery surface underneath your sausage stuffer so the sausages can kind of slide around the table really easily and it's easier to stuff them so what i ended up doing was actually taking off my gloves because i can't work with gloves and the hog casings and then i actually remove the cutting board that you'll see here in a second but what you want to do is take the hog casing after you soaked it in water you want to rinse it of all the impurities and salt that has been stored in and then you just add it to your tube and what you can do is just work it little by little and you'll see one intestine is gonna be maybe five feet long or four feet long and you're just gonna work little by little and eventually you'll be ready to go so i use a hand crank so one hand i'm kind of gently pulling it making sure that the sausage is firm and the other hand i'm slowly cranking and pushing that sausage out of the stuffer into the casing and this looks pretty good what you want to do is just slow and steady and uh make sure that the casing is filled up not so tight that it's going to burst but you want it to be completely full it doesn't have to be perfect but just do your best to do a nice even stuff just like that and i was going to tie off the ends but that's not quite necessary you just want to give them a little twist it's time to twist them into links you can do any size that you'd like generally i pick maybe like a five inch four and a half inch size twist them fold it over so i know the right size just like i'm doing there so they all are very uniform or closely uniform and you just continue the process and you're going to find sooner or later when you twist one of them will break not a big deal just keep moving on i am definitely not an expert sausage maker and i always have them burst on me i was pretty lucky here it worked out pretty well and this is why it's crucial not to overstuff your sausages if you stuff them too much and too too much meat in the casing when you twist them they're going to rupture so as you can see there they're relatively uniform and now you're going to want a needle this was part of my espresso machine kit and it has a very very fine point and you're just gonna poke the little air pockets and what that does is allow for the sausage to just form into a tighter final product it releases any air pockets that might store fats and just gives you a better sausage it's going to keep the juices in it's not going to rupture you don't have to worry about any of that so just go around and just poke the little air pockets with a any needle that you have and this is a very very very small hole you don't want a large hole at all you're just letting the air out so it's going to cook even dry even and from this point you let it dry for a couple days and so to cook it i use a cast iron pan this is the smallest i have but it works just fine and you put it in the pan over medium to medium low heat keep it covered and you're going to find that it's going to brown up on one side then you're going to want to flip it over and just keep that heat low low to medium low and because i let that sausage dry for a couple days it's gonna cook up really nice if i cook if i cooked it right when it was finished stuffing it's really wet and it's gonna not cook up so nice so that's what we're looking for nice color on both sides it's going to be fully cooked through the meat has stayed in the sausage tube and hasn't come squirting out or anything like that sweet italian sausage is so versatile today i'm serving it with a couple mustards and sauerkraut you can just easily break it open and serve it with pasta well i hope you guys liked the recipe i hope you enjoyed the video hit that like button hit that subscribe button and stay tuned for more videos thank you guys

Channel: Cambeau Kitchen

Views: 18,525

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Id: sh7_SiKZsQc

Length: 8min 39sec (519 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 14 2020