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.

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.

Then the whole thing went through the small blade on the grinder. We used 1/2 lb in last nights dinner.

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.

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."