Home made Italian sausage

[Clipper]

I bought a 5 pound pork butt yesterday with the intent to make a batch of Italian sausage, only to find that I had lost the recipe that I used to use.

I am going to try this recipe. I haven't made sausage in quite some time, but simply have a hankering for some loose ground sausage and the only thing we can buy here is the cased sausage and it is not of the quality we are used to having lived in CNY.

Kathy is planning a lasagna dinner in the near future when my oldest son visits from Kentucky and we love our lasagna as well as meatballs with half ground beef and half Italian sausage. I will let you know how it turns out.

www.italianfoodforever.com/2010/02/homemade-italian-sausages/

The only drawback is that the process is messy and the cleanup afterward takes almost as much time as it takes to make the sausage. I think that is why I haven't done it in a while. I used to make breakfast sausage as well. There comes a point where the value of your labor exceeds any financial savings of just buying the store bought sausage.

I have to drop Kathy off at the hairdressers at 1. That will give me two hours to make the sausage and clean up before I pick her up. I won't have to stress her out with the greasy mess in her kitchen, LOL.

[clarencebunsen]

Let us know the result.

[Clipper]

Will do CB. Just got the stuff all out to start the process. I will make the five or so pounds and freeze most of it for now, but I WILL be eating a sausage patty sandwich before I go bowling tonight.

[Clipper]

Sausage came out fairly good. The fennel seed I used was a year old and although it was in an airtight container it had lost some of it's oils and flavor even thought I put it in a mortar and pestle and gently cracked it to release the oils. All and all it is still quite flavorful and better than the store bought Johnsonville. I just finished sandwich made with it, topped with a slice of roasted red sweet pepper from a jar.

The recipe itself is quite good. I just need to buy some fresh fennel seed.

[kit]

Living in south Utica, delicious local sausage is available in many of the local supermarkets, so I don't bother going to the trouble and mess of making my own any more. The best Italian sausage I've ever had was made by a musician friend of mine, Dan Falatico, who lived just down the street from me in south Utica. Dan was considered "The Sausage Man" of Utica, as well as an excellent trumpet player who was in 2 of the concert bands I'm with. Sadly, Dan passed away a couple of years ago.

I'm a nostalgic and sentimental old fart and used to make sausage with the same hand-grinder that my mom used before I was born. She got it from her grandmother who, along with her husband, used to have a meat market on Saratoga St. in west Utica in the late 1800s. Making sausage was a long, slow process, and I eventually moved up to a motorized grinder. But still, it's a messy process and I don't have a lot of room in my freezer for 5 lbs of sausage, so I just buy what I need. I sure wish I could buy a pound of my great grandmother's sausage. She was said to have been an "expert sausage-maker".

[Clipper]

We often bought Falatico's sausage in years gone by. There are a lot of good sources for great sausage up there. We have bought it a Chanatry's for years, and now get it at Meelan's Market on the main corners in Clarks Mills. ANY sausage that we have gotten up there is better than what we can get here in the South. Bought Honest John's for a couple of years when we came home. I still have my grandmother's old hand crank grinder. I use the electric grinder for sausage, but love the hand grinder for making ham salad from leftover ham. I used to grind horseradish with it when we lived up there. There was a place on the back side of Griffiss where we used to pick it and put the tops back in so it would come back again. Then the security police discovered it and they picked it and didn't replant the tops and before long it was all gone. I don't know if you ever ground you own horseradish. It was a chore for outdoors with the grinder clamped to the picnic table, preferably on a breezy day. The guys at the firehouse at the base used to do it in the firehouse kitchen an would put on an airpack to do it. lol

You are correct. It IS a messy process and I don't do it often anymore. Not worth doing unless you are going to make 5 or 10 pounds. Pork has gotten a bit expensive also. I used to do 20 pounds at a time. Now I would have to take out a mortgage to buy that much meat, lol.

[chris]

I have a recipe for you from my friend Joe from Utica. I have eaten his and also made it myself and it is delicious...IMHO

1/2 oz Fennel Seed (this is weighed) food scale
3 oz salt
2 shoulder pork butts (10lbs)
3 oz paprika
1 oz hot red pepper flakes
Hog casings

Have butcher debone and grind coarse shoulder pork butt one time. Mix all ingredients and let stand overnight in refrigerator. Hog casings come packed in salt. Rinse thoroughly and then stuff. Makes 10 lbs. sausage.

Note: all weight is measured on a diet scale (food scale) and not by a measuring cup. This will make a difference in the amount of ingredients you use.

When I made it it was over my friends house. She had a Kitchen-aid with meat grinder and sausage and sausage stuffing attachment and it worked great and made it simpler to do.

[Clipper]

Thanks Chris. I am going to try this recipe the next time I make sausage. I have an electric meat grinder so I don't have a butcher grind the meat. My grinder has two plates, one for coarse and one for fine. Sausage is done with the coarse grind and when I grind chuck roasts or round I grind it twice. First coarse and then fine.

I quit casing my sausages quite a while ago. I just didn't like messing with the casings, and I was not very good at the casing process. We like the patties for sandwiches and Kathy forms it into meatballs for spaghetti rather than having the links.

I wonder if you gave me this recipe before. The measurements of the ingredients looks very much like a recipe I have used in the past.

[Clipper]

If anyone needs a recipe for breakfast sausage I have several. The one I use most is based on a sage and black pepper flavors, while I also use one that included a little bit of crushed red pepper for extra zip. That is good for sausage gravy to be poured over biscuits.


I used to enjoy making sausage. When I hunted I always made some breakfast sausage with venison, as well as venison Italian sausage.

If I had a smoker I would love to try making kielbasa, but Kathy is not crazy about the smokey flavor of doing BBQ in a smoker so I haven't had one since I lived on Kayuta Lake and had company for cook-outs just about every weekend in summer.

[dicklaurey]

Years ago,there use to be a small Polish butcher shop towards the north end of Sunset Ave. They made a ring sausage called "shakova" (spell?). Is anyone familiar with the shop, or, that particular sausage? It was delicious.

[Clipper]

I remember the shop, but I am not familiar with that particular sausage. Is it similar to kielbasa?

[dicklaurey]

Looks exactly like kielbasa, maybe a little larger diameter. Very rich and meaty flavor. Never found it any place else.