Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Adventures in homemade sausage

I bought Matt the grinder attachment for our Kitchen Aid two Christmases ago & we are really just starting to use it. We use bulk Italian Sausage quite often for our Orecchiette with Sausage & Broccoli as well as in lasagna so we decided to try making our own. Most recipes we've seen call for pork butt or shoulder. Lund's had a two for one special on center cut pork loins so we decided to try that. We went with the Alton Brown seasoning mixture, fennel seeds, kosher salt, black pepper & parsley. He called for 1 1/2 teaspoons of toasted fennel seeds per 2 lbs of pork but we really like the flavor of fennel so we upped it to 1 Tablespoon.
making homemade sausage
The fennel gets ground & then we added 2 t kosher salt, 1 1/2 T black pepper* & 1 T parsley. (I'm betting this was supposed to be fresh parsley but we used dried as we had it on hand). We mixed this with the chopped up pork.
making homemade sausage
Then the whole thing went through the small blade on the grinder. We used 1/2 lb in last nights dinner.
making homemade sausage
This cut of pork maybe a little leaner than the shoulder or butt so a little olive oil helps while browning it. The rest went into 1/2 lb portions in the freezer for later use.
making homemade sausage
And how was it? *Well it was good but Matt made a little mistake when writing down the seasoning & it should have been 1 1/2 teaspoons of pepper not tablespoons, so we had some peppery sausage. Matt actually really liked the way the pepper worked with the fennel but next time we'll definitely cut back & we'll always double check that big & little "t."

3 comments:

Jen said...

Hi Kat-

I love sausage and I've never even thought about making it at home before-- it's a really good idea. Using the lower fat cut of meat would be a lot healthier too....

kat said...

Jen - its really quite easy with the Kitchen Aid. We've made ground chicken for burgers & beef for chili too. Are next experiment will be actually making cased sausages

Nina Timm said...

What a lovely post - it inspired me to want to give it a go.

Thanks you.

Ps: You've been tagged

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T = Tablespoon
t = teaspoon
c = cup
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