Making Italian Sausage, from Scratch - Complete Step-by-Step Guide and Recipe

hello everyone my name is evo and welcome to cooking with the koyas now today we're not cooking we're actually making and if you've never made sausage before homemade italian sausage after this video you will be able to make fantastic sausage and if you already make sausage stay tuned because i'm going to share with you all the tips and techniques ingredients and all the things i've learned over the years to help you make a fantastic homemade sausage so let's get started quickly with equipment i was fortunate enough to have this given to me as a gift from my my siblings which is a phenomenal gift so it's a meat grinder electric one which is fantastic but you know what i grew up over the years with my father and all we used was the hand grinder this one is a size 10 meat grinder which i would recommend the size 8 is what my father had was a little bit too small but a size 10 as this one is perfect or a size 12 and these are the components that come with it which is basically the same here as the electric one so we're going to put our that our screw goes in now the blade the blade goes in next there's a flat side where the cutting side is and then there's the rounded side so the rounded sides goes on the inside you want the flat part facing outwards so this will just sit on there very nicely now as far as the mincer plate are concerned is concerned there are different sizes so there is this is a half inch mincer plate with half inch holes which is roughly 13 millimeter which is the size that we're going to use today 13 millimeter or half inch there is also a 3 8 inch size which is 10 millimeter a little smaller and i'll tell you when to use that one and then there's a smaller one even this particular one is 3 16 or 16 sorry six millimeters this one so this small one is mainly used for if you want to grind your own make your own hamburger that's what these smaller ones are good for the next one up the 3 8 inch this one i like to use if i'm going to dry or cure my sausage because it has a smaller grind and it's going to cure better and dry better so that's when i use the 3 8 inch but the one i'm using today is the half inch you want that bigger grind and yes it does make a difference when you're filling your sausage casing the bigger grind has a better texture to it it cooks up properly and comes out great every time and it does make a difference there's a little groove on the bottom here and and this just sits in that groove and locks it into place that's it right there okay now if you had the manual meat grinder [Music] it would assemble in the very same way okay the other thing i really like about this particular one is my buddy joe gave me a nice gift foot pedal so as opposed to having to turn the machine on and off all the time i just use the foot pedal and it makes it a whole lot easier okay let's get into the cuts of meat and the proper cuts of meat for sausage making so when you head to your grocery store or your local butcher you're going to see some various cuts of meats being offered for sausage making typically there's the pork leg there's the whole pork shoulder which is also called a new york shoulder or there's a picnic shoulder roast or a butt shoulder roast so and the butt is not this butt it's the shoulder butt so just to be clear all right so for all intents and purposes those are your four different cuts the pork leg let's just eliminate that right from the equation because the pork leg yes you can use it for sausage making and if you do use it by all means be sure to blend it with some pork shoulder because the leg is very lean not a lot of fat and doesn't make as good of a sausage as the shoulder does so let's discard the pork leg at this point in time that leaves us with the whole shoulder the picnic or the pork butt my preferred cut of meat for making sausage is the pork shoulder butt now the picnic but the picnic shoulder roast is about this size as well uh there there are both about this size and in fact if you look at the whole pork shoulder the whole pork shoulder would probably be about this big and the whole pork shoulder consists of a picnic roast and a butt what i like to do is just use the pork shoulder butts and the reason is the picnic roast is a little more i'm going to say blubbery fatter fat it's it's more fatty and it's got more of that blubbery kind of fat whereas this one the the the shoulder butt has more of a firm fat what i'm going to call a better a better fat you could see this fat here is very very firm you can see here there's not a lot of this is maybe a little bit more you can see they're a little bit more loosely blubbery stuff but most of the fat on this uh pork shoulder butt is is firm and the other thing i like to do is if you have the option this one this particular is boneless it just makes it so much easier for me to cut and it's quicker to use so when it comes to sausage making now i'm going to cut this up and depending on your machine i like to cut very you know smaller pieces especially if you're using the hand crank the bigger the pieces the harder the crank now in my case i have the electric it'll chew through this meat like nothing so that's about the size of you know the pieces that i want to cut if you cut them smaller that's fine even better but that's that's about the size that you want to cut and in fact before we grind these we're going to actually weigh our meat because everything is calculated when it comes to the sausage making and we have to know how much meat we're starting with so now that we know the best cut of the meat for the sausage is the pork shoulder butt and you'll see here i'm not gonna i'm not gonna throw away any of this fat sausage needs fat now if i see a little bit of this blubbery fat i might you know i might trim and remove it like this little piece here for example sure trim it get rid of it no problem you see any fat you don't like get rid of it but as a general rule your sausage needs to be somewhat fatty and in fact the sausage you make at home is nowhere near as fat as the sausage that you buy at the store so in fact i remember first time i grew up making sausage with my father i've been making it since this big and i always remember my father keeping the fat in the sausage and when i started making sausage on my own first thing i said was oh i'm gonna make healthy sausage so i i got my sausage brought it home and i trimmed all the fat a lot of the fat i trimmed a lot of the fat off and i thought here we go a nice healthy lean sausage guess what it was like eating sawdust please don't do that sausage needs fat if you're gonna hang your sausage up to dry and and cure it that way then by all means start to remove the fat it can be leaner that's perfect for drying but not for uh your typical sausage for uh for cooking so i'm gonna cut this up i'm gonna finish cutting this up and what we'll do is we'll weigh this up and get get going to the next step so okay and this particular cut there was very little waste in fact basically no waste uh it was already rather lean and but what i did cut out is there's a it's like a little gland and it's usually embedded in the fat and i just like to remove that if i see it i don't want that in my sausage but you can see here there's some fattier cuts and then some leaner cuts once it all gets ground together it's going to be absolutely perfect now speaking of ground if you don't have a meat grinder you could go to your local butcher or grocer and ask them to grind it for you you could get it already pre-ground to the size that you want and you could start already just by spicing and and all you have to do then is just stuff and you can buy a stuffer to stuff your casings so you don't necessarily need to grind your own i like to grind my own i like to know exactly how much i'm putting in there how much fat etc and if i see those little glands i like to remove them okay so the next thing very important that we have to do is weigh our meat the reason we're going to weigh it is i have a recipe for you where i've calculated all the spices to be absolutely perfect comes out superb every time there's no guessing involved because everything is calculated and that to me makes a huge difference i remember when i used to spice with my father we would spice then fry a little mix it fry a little taste spice fry a little taste and we would constantly do that until we figured out okay you taste it yeah needs a little more salt leaves a little more there's a little more that and eventually you'd get it right but sometimes you might have too much salt and you can't remove it so this way there's no guessing so right now six pounds 15 ounces that's close enough to seven to call it seven pounds okay let's start grinding so clean hands always a given all right so um i don't like to run the machine dry you don't want it to grind without any meat in there so i like to get the meat started into the hopper and then once once you start grinding you want to continuously feed it through but you're going to see it come through here on the grind and how nice and thick the grind is and i'm going to use my handy dandy foot pedal thanks joe makes it so much easier so this just grinds through like nothing so again you can buy it already ground like this from your local butcher okay as you can see now we're just about done and when you get to the end here what i like to do because there's still some meat inside this chamber i grab some of this ground meat and i put it through so that ensures that all the meat that has come through is drowned so now we're going to unplug the machine i don't necessarily like to put my hands close to a blade when while that's plugged in and i'll just remove this plate very easily there we go and scrape out you can get all that made out and i will take my time and get that meat out of there take the blade out same thing just remove the meat okay take the screw out and remove the meat so now i've got all my spices together and this is why my sausage comes out great all the time it's the pick of the cut of meat that i use it's the size of the grind and it's the ingredients very very key so i of course have my recipes here written down which i will put this all in the description for you no problem you'll have it all there so that you can repeat this without any problem at all so uh for salt i have here four four and a half grams of salt per pound which comes to 31.5 grams total now if you get the 0.5 or 0.7 or 0.8 just round up it's okay to round up better to round up than to round down so i've got my salt and i like to use fine salt don't use coarse salt you need fine salt whether it's table salt or sea salt it has to be fine salt okay next i'm going to use next the recipe that i normally use calls for 1.5 grams of black pepper per pound but honestly for the last few years the black pepper hasn't been agreeing with me so i've been eliminating it and guess what sausage still comes out great so i'm gonna bypass the black pepper but by all means feel free to use it next ingredient is are my chilis i want this to be medium hot medium not overkill hot not just mildly hot i want it to be medium hot so for this it's .85 grams per pound which comes to 5.95 so again six grams of chili peppers so that'll go in and the next ingredient is paprika two and a half grams per pound i like to use hungarian paprika nice dark rich full color and i think that also helps make a difference so there is my 17 and a half which i rounded up to 18 grams and then another spice i like to use is fennel seed and fennel seed uh just adds some real nice flavor uh to your sausage and for the fennel seed it's only a half a gram per pound so in this case 3.5 grams i rounded it up to four grams if you're a real fennel lover you can do one gram per pound okay now with all my ingredients or my spices in there all i do is just with a fork mix them all together so i'm creating my own blend if you will so with the spices what i like to do now is spread it evenly over over my meat so you get at least a good head start on spreading out your spices and getting an even flavor throughout your meat next ingredient this one is totally totally 100 optional is a little bit of red wine and i like to use uh one cup of wine red wine per pound again you don't need to do this step by all means uh your sausage will come out amazing with or without this but if you like to have that little bit of added flavor of red wine now's the time to add it but again that's 100 optional that was my own homemade wine just a little bit for flavor but this one i also say is optional because i could mix my meat and have a great sausage right now i say this is optional but to me it's essential this is one of the key ingredients to making a fantastic homemade italian sausage and it's pepper paste otherwise known as pepper sauce but it's not a sauce as you would imagine like a cook sauce it is more of a paste but it might be referred to as a sauce in this one it actually says sweet pepper sauce but if you look at the ingredients it's peppers it's peppers salt and some citric acid that's it there's no vinegars in there or nothing of that nature it's just basically peppers so that's what you want and if you take a look there it's a nice thick paste so what i've calculated this is a one liter just or slightly over a liter jar one liter jar will do up to 40 pounds of meat so a half a jar 20 pounds of meat in my case i have seven so just about a quarter if i want to round up again to round up i could do a quarter about a quarter of a jar of pepper paste for seven pounds this i have to repeat is a key key ingredient now i am using that's about it's about a quarter of a jar right there right there by using sweet pepper sauce you can control the amount of heat by using chili peppers you of course have the option to use hot pepper sauce if you want as well if you use the hot pepper sauce i recommend don't using not using the chilies if you take a look you'll see exactly what i have in there so all the ingredients are in there and now what you want to do is basically you want to get into these ingredients and squeeze them all together so flip from the bottom and whoops and squeeze them all together the key now the key is in the mixing you've got all the right spices you've got the right combination you've got the right mix so now if i were to just say okay that's it i'm good looks good that's not good it needs to be very very evenly mixed together and i have an expression and those of you who are tuning in who happen to be friends of mine you already know what it is and that is when you think you've mixed enough mix some more because you cannot i repeat you cannot over mix but you can definitely under mix okay you can see how i've graphed the bottom and i'm squeezing all the spices and i've done this for a couple minutes now and i came to the point where i thought i did enough so then i did some more okay look at this blend of meat perfectly perfectly blended together all the spices are there and look at my hands you gotta look at this you could tell with that pepper sauce and the paprika that nice color on my hand and that's gonna come through on this sausage as well okay so now that we've got all our spices mixed in and everything's blended nicely we're going to prepare our sausage casings and today i'm going to use like i always use real sausage casings and for that i'm going to ask my wife laura to come give me a hand because normally that's her job what she does so let's get laura in here and let's get these sausage casings prepped meanwhile this can go in the refrigerator or it's cold enough today outside i could just put it outside while we prepare the casings laura has finally joined us so time for you to get to work all right going to explain how we're going to do this yeah okay so this is 20 yards or 20 meters of casings and 20 meters or 20 yards will do about 25 to 30 pounds of meat depending on the size of the casings but as a general rule 20 yards will do 25 to 30 pounds i only have seven so i'm only going to need about a quarter of these so if you don't mind laura you could show the folks how you wash and prep our sausage casing the casings come in different kinds of containers plastic containers bags even if the butcher is going to give you some he just might put them on his butcher paper but when you get them in a container like this it sort of looks like a big mess there is a little way to this madness and let me give you a close-up and i'll show you how so the casings are very very heavily salted and that's what preserves them but if we take them out of the container somewhere in here we're going to find a little plastic circle sort of like a ring and that is keeping all of the pieces together so we can find that middle of the ring and we can separate these as i'm separating i'm going to take one half and put it in one bowl just as i'm pulling those apart and they'll just come they'll just untangle really easily so you can see i have the full piece but i have one end and one bowl one in the other this is going to help keep them from getting tangled so if i'm going to need a quarter of this i can divide it and still leave this ring on so i can divide it in half and then take that half and divide it a little bit more i leave this ring on because i want to use this ring after so i'm going to just separate that and start to pull out what i need you can see how easy it is it doesn't tangle at all now i can put this in a second bowl and i'm going to be able to continue holding that ring and put them right back in their storage container keep that ring up on the top and put that salt back in because that salt really does help keep it preserved [Music] now i can take this amount and bring it into the kitchen sink because i'm going to need to soak it in some water to sort of bring it back to life because it is dried i need to put the moisture back in it we just need good old cold water i've left the salt in there [Music] and i'm just going to let it sit for a couple of minutes so i've soaked them for a couple of minutes now i'm going to turn them or at least run water through them so you're going to be able to pull them apart and we're going to want to have some water running down that center we have the cold water and we're just going to run it through you can see where it is already filling up and then just run this until it empties all the water out and you can see the big difference that makes by soaking it and getting rid of that extra salt now you can use it this way or you can turn it inside out so to turn it inside out i'm going to put my fingers along the outside so i have a little outside edge and then turn that so the water can go into the back side and i can take my two fingers hold those together and then the water is going to just push it so that it turns it inside out a little bounce and that's just going to come all the way and it turns it inside out now i'm going to take this and i'm going to put it in a container and i'm going to put one of the ends over the edge and i'm going to continually drop them around putting the one edge over so it won't matter how many you fill the bowl we just want to put them in order so the last one we lay down and in this case it's this one will be the first one you pick up and that way they're not going to tangle if i take this one which was my first one it's trying to take it from the bottom so it will get tangled so you can just take it right from that first edge and it won't tangle so now we're ready to fill these casings and i'm going to give them a helping hand okay now that laura's got our sausage casings ready to go and the rest are just in the refrigerator they're salted they'll keep till next time we're going to put our machine together there's a little spacer that we use first and foremost oh let's get this back in okay that's engaged our little spacer goes in we have our our funnel and this is highly precision here you got to get it right on there we go and we'll just snug that up okay so now laura's going to start filling and i've got some strings here that i've pre-cut it's always great to have a bunch of pre-cut strings ready to go because we're gonna we're gonna stuff these casings and tie as we as we go along okay let's start uh by filling the the hopper so what i like to do is we're gonna feed some through until it stops i'm gonna stop it right here and i'll explain why i'm doing this okay let's feed some through and stop yeah you push the pedal it stops you push it again it starts thanks okay all right so laura has these all organized for me so i like to take the casing with a little bit of that sausage meat coming out and start sliding it onto the to the stuffer but before i continue what happens is and i've tried oiling these and greasing them the casings like to stick to the stuffer so if you turn on off a little more just real quick on off maybe a little bit more okay so now what i do is as i'm pulling the casing on you can see it's grabbing the meat here and it creates it basically creates air and it doesn't allow it to stick another quick on off laura okay and again i'm just going to push that on and over there we go a little more and then at the very end it's not a problem now when you come to the end you got to leave a little bit out because we're going to have to tie that and i'm using now you could use any thin twine that you have thin but strong you want it to be strong enough so that when you pull on it it doesn't break and it's not going to open up on you so there you go cut off the end there you have it okay time to fill this is the fun part okay now as you're filling you want to maximize the fill if you make the casing too over full and over tight it's going to split if you don't fill it enough it's going to be really loose and mushy so you basically want and that's the job of the person here feed it along and fill it as you go along so that it's firm to the touch but not bursting firm okay let's start let's try it so on we go get it started and you can feel you could feel as you go along how firm or how full it is so i don't want to break the casing and if the casing gets stuck on the on the stuffer that's where another chance you run a risk of breaking okay i'm going to stop right there so that to me is a nice size you know for an average uh dinner you can make a huge coil if you want but what i like to do is i like to make about this size because if i have a big dinner party then it's no problem because you just take out two packages if they're in the freezer it's not a problem at all so i'd rather have smaller size coils that i have more options with as opposed to large so i've cut the one in i've tied the one in sorry i've tied the other end and now this part i'm just going to cut it there we have one beautiful sausage coil right there let's get our next one going and you also have to kind of untwist it as well as you're going along okay one of the disadvantages of the machine is it comes out relatively quick and stop okay so now for this one what i'm gonna do is place it down and we're gonna tie this end right here just give it a quick tie okay cut off the string take this little excess put it back in there we have a beautiful sausage coil right there and again that is just a really really nice size of coil and you can see how it's it's not mushy it's firm now if you wanted to if you made it and it's only half filled let's say you can tie you can take a string i don't want to do this but you could take a string and tie it i can probably get away with a bit here okay you can make what i'm going to call smaller firmer links by just working your way around the sausage and i would only do that if it's really loose this one i can almost tighten it all the way down not quite because i don't want to burst so there's one and i'll do one more just for aesthetics here i'll get this one this looks like it's a little bit firmer there i only do a little bit i don't want it to burst there we go that gives a little a little bit of a different look to your sausage but it's got these smaller links and again a little bit on the end there we can put that in but isn't that a nice coil there's a two two nice coils so far and that'll make a fantastic meal let's get the rest of these filled okay so we just started this last casing and i noticed there's not much meat left so i'm just gonna fin we're just gonna finish this off whatever size it is it is okay okay let's do it okay in fact it might actually be about the same size oh no we're getting more coming through now okay you're done okay let's let that come through a little bit more much as we can and stop okay so the last k casing is uh is filled and as you can see we had enough casings so that math on how many yards of casing per meet works out perfectly all the time so seven pounds of meat okay got us one two three four five beautiful coils of sausage right there seven pounds five coils it depends on the size of the coils it depends on the thickness of the casing as to how many links you end up with but here you go general rule seven pounds five nice size sausage casings now what you do there is this chamber is still full of meat so laura if you can unplug the machine okay so now what you have this funnel is full of sausage meat this here is also full of sausage meat so this what you can do and i probably should have mentioned that earlier you can make a sausage patty so i'm gonna my favorite yeah they actually are her favorite now i'm gonna clean that off nicely but just to show you and i'm also gonna take all the meat out of this funnel but just to show you with this recipe you can make sausage or sausages or sausage patties in fact a lot of times what i'll do is i'll make two batches and half of the meat i'll turn into patties and some of the meat i'll even just leave loose just to use for cooking other recipes yeah for pasta sauces and stuff like that so there's a nice sausage patty right there and the other thing i can do is i can leave it as a patty or i can walk right over to the stove and do some sampling although i already know this is going to be very flavorful and delicious the other thing to keep in mind this is fresh sausage freshly made fantastic if you let it sit in the fridge overnight till tomorrow it will taste that much better because all of those flavors that we've added all those spices are going to now infuse into the meat and have time to settle in and make for a much better it'll taste great right now oh yeah but give it a day it'll taste even better you can keep these in the fridge for a few days of course or you can freeze them put them in freezer bags and freeze them if you freeze them i i use freezer bags but if you have a vacuum pack or a vacuum sealer that works even better because they last longer but in our case they don't last very long they don't last very long in the fri in the freezer so i just use ziploc bags but if not i would use a food saver and and vacuum pack those bags because they keep so much better you've now learned if you follow this recipe right to a tea and all those tips along the way i guarantee you right now you will be making one of the best absolute best sausages you've ever had way better than what you buy at a store and just full of flavor and i can't actually wait to get into this and maybe we'll do another episode showing how we cook because we like to cook these with peppers and potatoes and there's a lot of ways yeah so maybe we'll do that someday but you really need to give sausage making a try when you make it yourself from scratch it's always that much more pleasurable so thanks for your help laura yeah well that's always my job yeah it's always good to help and that's the other thing when you make sausage do it with family do it with friends make it a social have a drink or two if you'd like or a cup of coffee along the way and make it a fun event we had fun today i hope you've enjoyed today's episode and if you haven't yet by all means feel free to subscribe we have a lot more of our tips and techniques to share with you so i'm hope i'm looking forward to doing that thanks for tuning in until next time good luck and bon appetit

Channel: Cooking with the Coias

Views: 421,627

Keywords: easy sausage recipes, how to make sausage, sausage, sausage recipe, homemade sausage, recipe, italian sausage recipes, italian sausage, authentic italian sausage recipe, pork sausage, hot italian sausage recipes, medium italian sausage recipes, mild italian sausage recipes, from scratch

Id: 4iINoN4UKxs

Length: 34min 18sec (2058 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021