It’s been snowing all day, and is actually sticking, albeit lightly. I’m taking advantage of the indoor time to make sausage out of the ground pork from the last two pigs. By the way, we were very happy with the results from Westminster Meats.
I’ve got 15 pounds of hot breakfast sausage mellowing in the downstairs fridge. Last December we used the The Sausage Source seasoning with the ground pork from Ginny and the hooligans in the fall. We found the results dry and bland. Too little fat in the sausage is not the usual problem that people have. The ground pork was even leaner this time, and there was no fatback at all. Fortunately, there’s still quite a bit of the last batch of fatback in the freezer.
My first cut this time was 8 pounds of meat, 4.5 pounds of fat and a double dose of seasoning. I ran the fat through the coarse die on the grinder. This was a mistake: A noticeable fraction of the fat came out looking diced rather than ground. I ground the fat spices and meat together and cooked and sampled the results. I liked the texture, though Lisa still found it dry. It also gave off more grease than I approve of. We found the flavor too salty. The spice level would probably have worked out about right in a day or two.
Anyway, I added another 2.5 pounds of ground meat and redid the batch. We sampled it after a couple hours, and it seems like it will be fine, albeit as spicy as even we like it. If we were selling it, I’d likely go with 12 or 13 lbs of meat, 6 of fat.
Next up was hot italian sausage, also using Sausage Source spices. Italian sausage is allowed to be greasier, so I went with 11 lbs of meat, 4 of fat. Nuking a test patty produced a lot of grease, but the texture is right. It’s a flavor bomb already: In a few days I may decide to go with 17 pounds of meat next time.
So that’s 30 pounds of sausage in the downstairs fridge. We’ll case the Italian, and vacuum pack and freeze it all in couple of days after the spices mix a bit more. Getting the fat content right is going to take some learning. The next batch will not likely be this lean. One more time I think to get the spicing right, but of course that just means we’ll start on our own recipe.