Anyone make your own sausage?

[ktgrok]

I just ordered a meat grinder, after wanting one for at least a year. I will use it for grinding up food for the dogs, but also want to make sausage with it to help my husband see the value in the machine, lol. Anyone do this? Favorite recipes, types of casings if you use them, etc?

I'm also going to grind beef for burgers, and am seeing that a mix of mostly chuck with a bit of sirloin seems to be favored. 

Any other suggestions welcome! 

[Spy Car]

I always use natural casings, mostly pork but sometimes the thinner lamb ones. They'd be a pain to source here if one didn't have a friendly connection with a friendy butcher or shop that produces sausages. Weird.

I wish I had recipes to share, but I always wing it.

Season well. Fry up a small bit prior to final seasoning to check the taste. Use plenty of fat. For Italian sausage, I like a good bit of fennel seed along with other herbs and spices.

The good thing about sausage is there are no rules (other than enough fat so that the results don't taste dry).

Bill

 

 

[MarieCurie]

My family made homemade sausage in casings every year for Christmas. When my kids get older I hope to start the tradition with them. We always did a traditional kielbasa. Make sure there's enough fat in the meat. When you boil the sausage put some of the same seasonings in the water so you don't lose flavor.

[vmsurbat1]

I don't have the option of buying, so I make 2 kinds of sausage, Italian and Breakfast, and I never bother with casings.  

Basic recipe:

3 pounds meat (pork butt for us usually), chilled and ground to desired "fineness" + seasonings (see below).

Mix seasonings together before adding to meat.  I spread the meat out and then sprinkle the seasonings all over and working them in.  If freezing, shape and freeze immediately.  If planning to cook, let flavors marry an hour or two in the frig if possible.

Italian:

• 2-3tsp salt (I prefer the lesser amount, the full 1 tsp/pound is more traditional)
• 1 T paprika
• 1/2t-1T crushed re pepper--depends on if you want hot or mild sausage
• 1/2 T crushed fennel seed (can sub ground anise--half the amount)
• 1 tsp. thyme or Italian seasonings
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed, or garlic powder 
• fresh ground pepper.  About 15 grinds.

Breakfast Sage:

• 1 egg white, beaten
• 1 T ground sage or crumbled sage leaf. Chopped fresh if you have it (we do-- we like lots.)
• 2 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. pepper
• 1 tsp. paprika (mild or hot) or crushed red to your liking.
• 1/2 t. thyme.

Assuming you are not planning to smoke/dry the sausages, you can freely adjust the spices.  Use these ideas (or others) as a starting point and you'll quickly come up with your own preferred blend!

 

[Spy Car]

ETA: prick the casings prior to cooking so they don't explode/splatter.

Bill (who just came in from visiting the two burgeoning sage plants in his herb garden that he started from rooting cuttings from the supermarket) 

[Kareni]

Does anyone have a kielbasa recipe to recommend?  We're eating a low sodium diet and most commercially available sausages are too high for us.  My husband has managed to make a great low sodium Italian sausage but kielbasa is proving far more challenging.  (We're not intending to encase or age the kielbasa; we're looking for something we can prepare and then use in a recipe.)

Regards,
Kareni

[LMD]

Dh's family make kielbasa regularly. His grandparents did, when they emigrated here they kept it up. My FIL feels it's important to keep the tradition, I have some great photos of my children helping. They use cases, and dry them. Lots of salt, garlic, paprika and chilli seems to be the recipe. To be fair, that is the base for most of their recipes ?

[Spy Car]

 

For kielbasa, I really like including fresh;y crushed juniper berries in the seasoning, especially if they are going to be used for making bigos (hunter's stew).

Juniper berries can be a polarizing taste but for me they bring a sense of gameness to the sausages that suggest a taste of the wild. 

Bill

 

[Kareni]

44 minutes ago, LMD said:

Dh's family make kielbasa regularly. His grandparents did, when they emigrated here they kept it up. My FIL feels it's important to keep the tradition, I have some great photos of my children helping.

What a great tradition, LMD.

45 minutes ago, LMD said:

Lots of salt, garlic, paprika and chilli seems to be the recipe. To be fair, that is the base for most of their recipes ?

Sadly, it's the abundance of salt that is the problem for us.

Regards,
Kareni

[Kareni]

36 minutes ago, Spy Car said:

For kielbasa, I really like including fresh;y crushed juniper berries in the seasoning, especially if they are going to be used for making bigos (hunter's stew).

Juniper berries can be a polarizing taste but for me they bring a sense of gameness to the sausages that suggest a taste of the wild. 

We tend to use kielbasa to accompany cooked kale and mashed potato; it's likely a variant of a Dutch recipe.  I'll admit to being unfamiliar with bigos but it sounds intriguing.  I can't recall if I've ever had juniper berries; admittedly, I've only ever thought of them in conjunction with gin making.

Do you have a kielbasa recipe that you could share, Bill?

Regards,
Kareni

[WendyLady]

We have a grinder and have used it for making sausage and ground meat.  It is awesome!  We have used it for game meats, but making sausage is similar with any kind of meat.  Meat can get bound up in the grinder, so we freeze meat into "ice cube" size chunks and freeze them on baking sheets, then when they are frozen solid, we bag them up.  That makes it easy to pull out a few bags to grind at a time to make burger or sausage.  We bought a "collar" for our grinder that you freeze, then strap around the grinder to keep the working parts nice and cold...

You can find bags for bagging up ground meat at sporting goods or farm stores.  It's handy to bag breakfast sausage or burger in one pound bags.  It's probably not any better than using ziplock bags, but I like pulling out a white one pound bag of ground elk from the freezer - it just feels more professional or something ?  We also use a vacuum bag thing for freezing/storing sausage links.  The first year we did this, we bought sausage making kits from Cabelas to try different flavors, etc.  We tried several different varieties for summer sausage, italian sausage, kielbasa, etc.  That made it really easy, as they came with the casings, flavor mix, etc.  We have since ordered casings from a local butcher (and online) and have made our own recipes for flavoring sausages, to avoid some odd ingredients in those store bought mixes. 

There is a local grocery store that sells pork fat for adding in to sausages.  I'm sure it's not necessary, but it does make it yummy!

Smoking the sausages in our smoker adds a whole 'nother layer of awesomeness!

 

[Spy Car]

1 hour ago, Kareni said:

We tend to use kielbasa to accompany cooked kale and mashed potato; it's likely a variant of a Dutch recipe.  I'll admit to being unfamiliar with bigos but it sounds intriguing.  I can't recall if I've ever had juniper berries; admittedly, I've only ever thought of them in conjunction with gin making.

Do you have a kielbasa recipe that you could share, Bill?

Regards,
Kareni

Yes, juniper berries are a predominate flavoring in gin. If they are used too liberally it could be off-putting (as it is a strong flavoring) but in moderation juniper berries (at least to my taste) makes conventional foods taste more like they came from the wild. I believe that at least in the mountainous (Southern?) regions of Poland that juniper berries are a common flavoring.

No expert here, but in the early 80s a great Polish restaurant opened here in Santa Monica and their bigos was well-spiced with juniper berries. From then on, bigos and kielbasa were incomplete for me without that taste.

Sorry about lack of recipes. I'm an improviser. To any standard kielbasa recipe, I'd add some juniper berries, a little fresh ground nutmeg, a little clove, and (probably already included) paprika, plus some herbs (thyme, sage, etc) to enhance a "wild" taste. Particularly if used to make bigos, which I find delicious.

Bill

 

 

[Sharpie]

I grew up doing this.  Your post brought back a flood of my favorite childhood memories...butchering two pigs in the dead of winter and cutting up the meat after school.  I could hardly wait for school to be done so I could go in our farm house basement and cut up the sides of pork.  Grew up on homemade sausage with real casings that my mom scraped clean.  ?  We have our own (very simple) sausage recipe consisting of salt & pepper but our local butcher shop puts our meat into casings.  My mom used to can sausage links & beef when I was a child.