Charcuterie Fundamentals: Homemade Sausage

For most of my adult life, I considered charcuterie beyond the realm of the home kitchen. As an American, charcuterie surrounds us in life as hotdogs, bologna, bacon and more, but we don’t really talk about making our own. We buy bacon or sausages and we cook them. I assumed these meat products required advanced techniques and equipment just not available in the home kitchen.

How wrong I was.

Several years ago, with the help of Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s phenomenal book Charcuterie, I began a quest of sorts. I started with Pâté de Campagne, moved on to fresh sausages, then even tackled homemade Pancetta and Dry Cured Sausages.

The truth of the matter is, homemade sausage is surprisingly easy to make at home. It does require some attention, some basic techniques, and a couple of key ingredients and pieces of equipment, but it is not the gargantuan task that I was expecting. And the sausage you make at home, like most homemade things, tastes so much better than a lot of what is available at the grocery store.

Don’t be scared. I’m going to walk you through all the basics of making fresh homemade sausage in this post, and in my next, I’ll provide a recipe for homemade bratwurst that will knock your socks off!

Special Tools

If you want to make fresh loose sausage, like breakfast sausage, you actually don’t need any special tools. You can buy your meat pre-ground, season it, mix it by hand, then cook it. Sausage doesn’t have to be stuffed into casings. Nevertheless, I do prefer most of my fresh sausages be in link form. I prefer buying the meat and fat necessary for the recipe and grinding myself. Also, being able to accurately and easily measure ingredients and keep them cold helps tremendously in the process. In my home, when it is sausage making time, I rely on these basic tools to make the job easier.

♦ Scale

♦ KitchenAid Mixer – I use the Kitchenaid with its bowl and paddle for every sausage. It’s way easier to mix than by hand.

♦ Meat Ginder – I use the meat grinder attachment for my KitchenAid

♦ Sausage Stuffer – Again, I use the sausage stuffer attachment for my KitchenAid

As you can see, I use my mixer with attachments pretty exclusively. You can buy a separate meat grinder or sausage stuffer. I’m sure they work well, probably even better than my attachments. I find the grinder attachment works really well as long as the meat is nice and cold. To be honest, the stuffer attachment is a bit of a pain to use. If I made sausage more frequently than once every few months, I might seriously consider buying a separate stuffer.

Special Ingredients

The basic meat needed for sausages is usually pretty easy to find. Most recipes call for pork shoulder or pork butt. Where you might need a butcher or nicer meat counter is for finding Back Fat (or fatback.) It sounds awful, but sausage is only as delicious as it is because there is a good amount of fat in it. More than what is in regular cuts of meat. Most recipes will call for fat and you will need a way to get that fat. Most butchers or markets that make their own sausage will have it available, you will just have to ask for it since it is rarely if ever advertised. And while you are asking for that, you’ll need to ask about casings as well. My butcher carries  fresh casings that I just rinse and use. Some carry salt packed that you’ll need to soak/rinse before use. If not, there are lots of places online you can order casings. And if you get further down the rabbit hole and need other special ingredients like pink salt, Instacure, or cultures (definitely not needed for basic fresh sausages) those are all easiest to find online.

The Process

Step 1 – Seasoning

Once you’ve got your equipment and ingredients, you are ready to begin.

The first step in fresh sausage making is preparing/seasoning your ingredients for the grind. Cube all the pork and fat, add in all the seasonings, mix, then popped in the fridge overnight to let the flavors mingle and meld.

As a rule, you want to cube your meat small enough to easily fit in your grinder. You don’t want to squash and mash to get the meat to fit through. I always do this the day before and let it sit overnight, but even a few hours works. Just keep it nice and cold.

Step 2 – The Grind

The colder the meat is, the easier it is to grind. About 45 minutes before I grind, I place the seasoned, cubed meat, along with the grinder attachment for my KA mixer, into the freezer for 45 minutes.

When I am ready to grind, I set up my mixer with the grinder attachment, and set my mixer bowl into another vessel of ice water to keep the mix super cold. Meat should come out looking like ground beef, not mushy or squished. If that happens, or the grind isn’t coming out uniformly, you may need to unclog your grinder (sinew can get tangled in the die and make a stringy/gloppy mess) or things could be getting too warm.

Step 3 – The Primary Bind (Mixing)

This mixing step is important. It gives you that beautiful uniform texture and even seasoning flavor. Many recipes will have you start mixing then add a liquid (like cream or wine, but often water.)

Step 4 – Test For Seasoning

At this point, you’ve technically made sausage. Whether you plan on stuffing it into casings or storing it loose, now is the time to test your sausage for seasoning. Make a tiny test patty, drop it in a pan, then quickly cook and taste it to make sure it is seasoned to your liking. If it needs more salt, more heat, whatever, you can add it to the sausage now. Here is what I love about sausage making: the seasoning is up to you! For example, I’m not a fan of hot or sweet Italian sausage by itself. I usually buy one of each and mix them together when I’m cooking. No more. While I generally followed the recipes from Charcuterie, I adjust the seasonings to include some heat, keeping the herbs and spices to make my own mix, milder than traditional hot Italian, spicier than traditional sweet.

If you aren’t stuffing into casings, once you’ve checked for seasoning, I  divide the sausage into smaller ziplocks, and put them all in a larger ziploc bag and in my freezer.

Step 5 – Stuffing

If you are doing everything in the same day, you are going to want to take that grinder apart, clean it, dry it, and get your stuffing attachments set up. I like to put the stuffing equipment in the freezer and the sausage in the fridge while I clean so everything is cold as possible. Then it is time to get to your casings.

Fortunately for me, my butcher sells presoaked casings. Otherwise, you get a package of salted casings that need to be rinsed and soaked and rinsed some more. I almost always get hog casings and my butcher places them in a tub. This is what they looked like.

It can take a few minutes to actually find the end, but don’t worry, you will. Get yourself to a clean sink and run water straight from the tap inside the casing, making a water sausage that runs through the entire casing.

From there you just need to load that casing onto the tube of the stuffer. This can be tricky if your casings are dry, or if they aren’t rinsed well enough.

This is the point where things got really difficult. Stuffing sausage into a casing is really a two person job. You need one person dealing with the sausage, getting it into the feeder and using the plunger to move the meat through the sausage stuffer. The other person should be focused on feeding the casings slowly and making sure not to under or over stuff the sausages. I have done the stuffing alone, but it’s a pretty tough time and I wouldn’t recommend it.

A couple of tips here – keep your work surface or baking sheet (or whatever you are using to place your sausage while stuffing) slicked with water so the sausage slides easily. Have a clean needle at the ready if you get any bubbles that you need to pop. You’ll make one long sausage first. To separate it into links, tie them off with butchers string, or twist each link in opposite directions. From here you can refrigerate or freeze until you are ready to smoke or cook these babies!