Homemade Sweet Italian Sausage

Today , we’re trying to put our meat grinder to a good use . My husband bought me a meat grinder for my kitchen aid attachment about 3-4 years ago . And since then i’ve never used it , not even once , i’ve used the pasta plates though , but it was very frustrating .Anyway , back to the meat grinder , it works really good for grinding meat , and so we decided we’re going to try to make home made sausage . Because we don’t have sausage stuffer attachment for the machine , we ended up just making sausage patties .

I think sausage making is pretty easy and fun , although it takes a little bit of your time , but at least you know what kind of meat you’re getting , and you can control what kind of spices goes into the sausage . We bought our meat from the local butcher , and it was a very good meat to start with . The rest of the ingredients pretty much all the things we have on hand , or from our herb garden .

The recipe for the sausage was from Michael Symon ‘Carnivore’ book . I have to say that the sausage turned out really good wtih one exception , next time i will cut the salt into 2 1/2 tbsp. instead of 3 tbsp.

Direction :

3 lbs of pork shoulder

1 lb of fat back ( i couldn’t get this from local butcher since they said nobody bought it , i would have to order them in a large bulk , i ended up skipping it )

3 large garlic cloves , minced

1 large shallot , minced

1/2 cup of fresh parsley , chopped

2 tbsp. of fresh oregano , chopped

2 tbsp. of fennel seed , toasted

1 tbsp. of sugar

2 1/2 tbsp. of kosher salt

1/2 cup ice cold water

1 juice from 1 lemon

1. Cut the pork shoulder into small dice . And add the sugar , salt , pepper , shallot , garlic , fennel seed and parsley and oregano . Mix well with your hand .

2. Place the mixing bowl in the fridge along with the paddle attachment . Now let’s get the grinder ready for the meat . Feed the tube a little at a time with the diced meat , until all the meat has been used .

 

Place a baking sheet or a dish under the grinder to catch the meat

 

Once it’s all done , cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for about 30 minutes .

 

After 30 minutes , take the bowl , attachment and the sausage out . Place the sausage meat into the chilled bowl , and add juice from 1 lemon and 1/2 cup of ice cold water . Turn to speed 2 , mix for a minute .

 

Once you’re done , if you have sausage stuffer , you can start working on the sausage links ( hopefully i will get one soon , so i can try making a sausage link ) . Or just make some sausage patties , and grill or brown them on the skillet . Another choice is also to brown the sausage just like that , you can use it with your fave pasta sauce , or crumble it up for pizza topping . Whatever you don’t use , just store it in the freezer , make sure you wrap it up good .

This is what we did with the sausage that we made today , we made sausage patties , and my husband grilled it , and it was delicious . I served it with home made pasta .