Homemade Italian Sausage!

There have been many times that I have wanted to post the different types of food that I love to make.  Not only the great recipes but with the great pictures.
I have wanted to make homemade Italian sausage for a very long time and finally decided to get on the internet and look up different recipes.  The one I most like is from a guy named Tom Papoutsis and he is on monkey see.com.  He has a few clips with GREAT instructions.
So when the storm was in the throws of being ugly and we had electricity, Andy and I decided to try it, what the heck. But way before this day I had to……
First, I had to order the meat grinder for my Kitchenaid Mixer and the sausage maker.  Now I could have gone down the mountain to get these at like Kohl’s or any department store that carries Kitchenaid.    The order took almost 2 months to get to me!  But I finally got it, now what?  I then went to the grocery store and ordered natural casings from the butcher.

It would be easier to go to an Italian Market and get them.  Ordering them took time and was quite expensive.  So, now I have almost three months into this project and I haven’t even started yet!
Well, here is the recipe we followed:

8 pounds Pork Butt or also called Pork Shoulder – both are the same.


Try to get the pork on sale, see I got it for 89 cents a pound!  Now that is a lot of sausage for a little bit of money!

9 cloves of garlic –minced
Dry Spices:

• 1 Tsp Kosher Salt
• 1 Tsp Dried Basil
• 2 Tsp Dried Oregano
• 2 Tsp Paprika
• 2 Tsp Red Pepper (Pizza Pepper)
• 2 Tsp Cayenne
• 1 Tsp Rosemary Leaves
• 2 Tsp Cracked black pepper
• 2 Tsp Fennel Seed ( I grounded mine)

Secret Ingredient:  1 Cup White Wine
Directions:
9:30AM  Take the casings out of the bag.  They are incased with salt.  You will have to rinse and rinse and rinse them.  Follow the directions  on the back. They have to soak for two hours. There are over 50 feet of casings!  This was the really strange part and it will even get stranger as this story goes!

11:20AM  Take the pork butt and cut into chunks.  I didn’t take out the fat due to what I found out, see Italian sausage that you buy in the store is about 50% fat.  The pork butt that you buy in the store is between 25 and 30% fat.  I just didn’t use the big slab of fat on the back part, but used the marbling throughout without getting crazy to cut it out. 



Put it into the meat grinder on the larger of the two blades, put the motor on 4 and let it go!  Make sure you have a bowl underneath it to catch the meat.  Even the simplest things get by me sometimes.

  

It gets messy with the grinding of the fat with the meat, you may need to stop it a couple of times and clean it out.  ( I had to). 
Once it is all grinded that is when you start to add your ingredients.  Make sure you take off your rings or you just may lose it in the mix.  It mixes really easy, just be thorough in the mixture

To make sure you have enough ingredients, you can take a little and make a patty to fry up and taste before you doing the second grinding.

 

I needed to add more heat, good thing I checked.


So now you are ready for the second grinding:
This is where it becomes a work of art!  WOW!  I would suggest as with the first grinding and second, work at a table that is lower than a counter.  my shoulders were killing me when I was done!  Because you are literally working over your shoulders, Whew!I am going to show you how to make sausage links.
I did this because I wanted to try to make authentic sausages.  Been there, done that, and DON’T WANT TO DO THAT AGAIN!  Note to self:  Self, next time make patties out of it, it is A LOT easier!!!!

When the casing were finally finished, we put it on the sausage maker, let’s just say we tried and tried and tried, but it finally worked.  What a pain!  
We worked on length of casing on it and stuffed the mixer and away we went, well not exactly away we went it was sort of ----what the hell?!!!!!
I didn’t take any pictures of the actual filling of the casings due to the fact I was using my hands and Andy’s too.  We only had four hands and the camera would have been gross!

We used only four strands and I didn’t know if we could of saved the unused ones so I threw them out,  when in doubt, throw them out.  I just found out yesterday that I could have froze them and it would have been fine.  (I thought to myself, “Yeah like that would have happened then I could have used them again, yeah like that would of happened!) SEE NOTE TO SELF!!!!
We only split a couple and I didn’t take into consideration about the uniform links, some large, some small and a lot were ugly.  I want to take a picture of them in a circle and that is what I did. That will be the last time I make links, I had to save that picture.
I took cookie sheets and laid them out and partially froze them.  Then I took them and but them into bags and stuck them into the freezer. 

I grabbed some and took them over to our friends home for Super Bowl.  They were a hit especially when people found out that you made them yourselves. 
It took me about 2.5 hours from the time I started with cutting the pork until they were stuffed.  You probably could cut out about 45 minutes if you didn’t stuff the casings.
I look forward to making them again, but this time patties please. 

Update Notes: 
I have made patties since then and cut out all the fat, oh boy you need fat for these babies.  Way too dry, however, they were excellent in spaghetti sauce, but too dry to eat by themselves.