It recently dawned on me that I don’t have any sausage recipes on this site. Which is crazy. So I’m going to post a bunch. For details on procedure and technique, I have two posts linked below. Also… I happen to be teaching a sausage-making class for Metro Continuing Education on October 19, 2016.
I wanted to create an artisan version of the little sausages you get at dive-y breakfast institutions like the Commodore. The kind of diners that that pour you bad coffee all morning.
North American breakfast sausage is usually made entirely of pork. It is ground quite fine and mixed to emulsify so that it has a very delicate texture. It is often flavoured with sage and other versatile herbs. And, most characteristically, the links are narrow and short compared to, say a smoky or even a hot dog.
For my fancy breakfast sausage I use pork butt with all of the 1.5″ fat cap. It is flavoured with both fresh and dried sage. I find you have to add a prohibitively expensive amount of fresh herbs to get the flavour to come through in a sausage. And to amp the fancy-factor up a notch I use orange zest and ginger.
I double-grind the meat for delicate texture. That’s two passes through a 3/16″ plate.
And finally to get the narrow diameter characteristic of breakfast sausage I use lamb casings. Being lamb, these are a bit expensive, but they’re essential here. I twist the links into 4″ lengths.
A detailed recipe follows.
Breakfast Sausage
with sage, ginger, and orange
Ingredients
- 2 kgs pork butt, boneless and skinless, but with entire fat cap (about 1.5″ thick)
- 40 g kosher salt
- 44 g fresh ginger, peeled and grated
- 1.6 g dried sage
- 18 g fresh sage, chopped
- 47 g fresh garlic, minced fine
- 5.4 g black pepper, coarsely ground
- 22 g orange zest (I use a packaged orange zest made by The Perfect Purée)
- 222 mL ice-cold water
- about 2 m lamb casing
Procedure
- Chill the pork butt thoroughly by spreading it out on a sheet tray lined with parchment and storing in the freezer. The meat should be slightly crunchy on the exterior, but not frozen solid, and still with some give.
- Grind the meat through a 3/16″ plate.
- Re-chill the ground meat as described in step 1.
- Grind the meat through a 3/16″ plate a second time.
- Add the remaining ingredients (except the casings…) to the bowl of a stand mixer. Mix with the paddle attachment for 90 seconds on a medium speed, then 30 seconds on a medium-high speed.
- Fry a small piece of the mixture in a pan. Taste and adjust seasoning as necessary.
- Stuff into lamb casings.
- Twist into 4″ links.
- Poach until the meat is just cooked, reaching an internal temperature of 150°F. Transfer the links to an ice bath to arrest cooking.
- Let links dry thoroughly.
Yield: about 35 x 4″ links
