How to Make Homemade Sausage

I recently took a great sausage making class over at my local butcher shop, Butcher & Public. The class was great for so many reasons. First, because it gave me up close and personal face time with a really good sausage maker, so I could ask a million questions and really learn the “ins and outs” of making fresh sausage. Second, because my butcher Travis fed us The. Most. Incredible. charcuterie board lunch ever. (Ever, ever! They need to have a Butcher’s Dinner in that kitchen, just like we had it.) Three, because it was BYOB, people brought great local beers for everyone to share and enjoy. (Seriously, what’s not to love when you can mix handcrafted cured meats and great beer?).

Here’s that amazing charcuterie board lunch.

So, if you have a chance to take a cooking class at a local restaurant or butcher, I highly recommend it. If you’re in the central Arkansas area, I highly recommend taking a class from Travis over at Butcher & Public.

Here’s how we made this really great Italian sausage, a savory sausage that is great with a cheese plate or in buns with mustard. (The ingredients list is at the bottom.)

Equipment

Travis started out by explaining the various types of equipment we would need to make sausage. The first thing you’ll want is a good electronic scale. As you make larger quantities of meats, accuracy becomes very important to the recipes. To achieve that accuracy, most books measure in grams—and you need a scale for that. However, for convenience here, this recipe is in standard measurements.

You will also need a boning knife, and something to pierce the sausage casing to release any air holes that creep in when you are filling the casing. For boning knives, Travis recommends the Victorinox Forschner brand, and to get a firm blade (not a soft flexible blade which is used for fish). You want a boning knife with a 6” blade. Travis prefers a rosewood handle because it retains its grip when greasy, whereas plastic does not.

Here is a picture of the tool that Travis uses to pierce the casings to release air after the sausages are made.

You will also need a meat grinder, and one with a nice wide augur bit, so that the meat and fat aren’t smeared, but rather, are nicely ground through the die.

You will also need a sausage stuffer, like the one he has here. For home cooks, they make smaller grinders and stuffers.

You’ll need a six foot section of casing. Travis walked us through the different types of casings you can use for sausage. You can make sausages using many different casings, from many different animals. (Each of these casings holds about 15 pounds of meat.) Travis likes buying casings from the Natural Casing Company.

You can even make sausage by stuffing the sausage ingredients in another organ, like a bladder or a stomach. This is a sheep’s bladder. This makes a good balloon shaped size for various lunch meats. Travis likes to make beerwurst in it.

Here is a neat video of the famous sausage Culatello di Zibello which is tied up in a pig’s bladder.

This is a cow casing, which is really wide, about 5 inches. That is good for bologna or mortadella.

This is sheep intestine, which makes a nice 1 inch sausage for hot dogs or breakfast sausage, but note that sheep’s casings can be delicate and hard to work with.

You can even use synthetic casings, like this collagen sheet. They are really uniform and easy to use. You soak these in water and form tubes with them. Travis uses these for making coppa di testa, which is also known as head cheese.

Here is Travis’ delicious head cheese.

You can even go without any real casing at all. Here’s Travis showing off caul fat, which is a white fatty net that lines a pigs abdomen, and can be used to hold together sausage ingredients, which you then cook in a terrine. When it heats up, it melts away.

Here’s what the terrine pan looks like. With a terrine, you line the pan with fat (caul fat or otherwise), then poach the pan in a water bath until cooked through to 165 degrees.

Cutting the Meat

You will start out with a nice sized piece of pork shoulder, like this. It is perfect for sausage because it already comes in about a 75% meat, 25% fat ratio (you can go fatter than that, but not leaner. You can buy pork fat from your butcher to increase the fat ratio if needed). You will want to remove the bones from the pork shoulder. You can do that by just cutting around them. If you don’t feel comfortable with that task, just ask your butcher to do that for you.

Slice through the meat and fat to make long strips about 1” wide…. Or whatever width works for your grinder.

Make sure to cut away any arteries or veins that you can see. They look like little tubes, like in the middle piece of pork in the below picture.

One the meat is cut, place it on a pan and get it into your freezer until it crisps up. That takes about 30 minutes, maybe more.

Grind the Meat

Once the meat has frozen for 30 minutes or so, grind it in your grinder.

Once all the meat has been ground, drop a few pieces of ice through the grinder to push the last few bits of meat out of the grinder.

Once you are done grinding the meat, you need to let it rest again. Put it in the freezer to chill for 30 minutes.

Toast Your Spices

You want to buy your spices whole, in small quantities from a reputable spice vendor that changes out its stock regularly, and to toast them in a pan before you use them. I buy spices in ¼ to ½ cup quantities from Penzey’s and The Spice House. The spices are extremely fresh, and it is easy, convenient, and inexpensive to buy them over the internet and in small quantities. Both have low or free shipping.

To toast your whole spices, place them in a pan. (Leave the already ground ones like paprika and salt to the side for now.) Place that pan over high heat and watch it closely. As soon as you see a wisp of smoke, take the pan off the heat and swirl it or stir it. That only takes 20-30 seconds or so. It’s ok for the spices to darken, but you don’t want them to burn. As soon as they are done, pour them out to a cup or plate. (If you keep them on the hot pan, they will continue to cook and potentially burn. It’s cheap insurance to pull them off to a separate cup or plate!)

Time to Emulsify the Fat and Meat

The next step is to emulsify together the cut pieces of cold fat and meat so that they are unified in the sausage, instead of dispersed in separate pieces. We also need to mix the ground meat with the toasted and untoasted spices, salt and our flavoring liquid. To do this, you will need to mix the ground meat and spices in your mixer. Turn the mixer on low just long enough to mix the spices into the meat. (You can certainly do this by hand, but don’t actually use your hands. Use a big spoon, and use two bowls one inside the other. Place ice in the bottom bowl. In the end, we want everything mixed together but not heated up.)

Time to add in some liquid. The liquid will help the emulsification. It makes sense to use a flavored liquid, and alcohol is great at flavoring the sausage. Here, we used 1 cup of red wine, but you could use gin, bourbon, brandy, cognac, beer or any flavored liquor. If you’re making beerwurst, add frozen beer at this stage. (Yep, frozen beer. That sounds so awesome.)

With the emulsification, you will whip it for about 10-15 turns (not minutes!) until the mixture sticks to the sides of the metal bowl. The real test is to take a breakfast patty sized amount and press it into your palm, and turn your palm over. If it doesn’t fall, the meat is ready. If you want to see how it will taste, take a little nub of meat and fry it in a pan. That will give you a good idea of the balance of meat and fat and spice.

Once the meat is emulsified, it needs to rest so that all of the spices and flavors intermingle. Chill it overnight in your refrigerator.

Soak the Casing

Soak your chosen casing in water for at least 30 minutes.

Time to Stuff the Sausage

Once the meat has chilled overnight, you can stuff the sausage. Start by filling your stuffing machine.

Your goal is to stuff the sausage pretty tight without breaking the casing. If you break the casing, just back the sausage stuffer a couple of cranks, cut out the burst part, and end the first length of sausage just above the break. Tie off the casing again below the break, and continue filling the next length.

Guide the sausage away from the stuffer in loose rolls. Keep the casing moist so that it doesn’t stick to your pan or to the table and tear.

Once all the sausage has been stuffed, it’s time to roll it into sausage links. Take a section of sausage close to one end, a little longer than you want a link to be.

Pinch it gently to divide that portion from the whole sausage, and then roll that sausage portion in the air to twist the pinched area tight, forming a sausage. Keep the sausages attached to each other.

When you get to the next sausage, spin the sausage the other direction.

Once all the links are made, go along each link and remove the air bubbles with the poking tool.

Once it is rolled into links and the air bubbles are removed, you want to let it rest for at least an hour before you cook and eat it. It really needs to firm up. Since you are making 15 pounds of sausage, cryovacking the sausage is a good idea. Make sure to get out all the air, then pop the packages in the freezer.

Travis walked us through his favorite charcuterie cookbooks, and recommended we start with In The Charcuterie by Taylor Boetticher, and Sausage Making – The Definitive Guide with Recipes by Lynn Farr.