Basics: Italian Sausage

"...if you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn."
 
Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie,  Mrs. Dymond (1885)

Time to get your sausage fingers on.

One of the single most useful things you can learn to do, if you cook a fair bit, is to make your own Italian sausage. Pasta sauce, lasagna, risotto, sausage, kale and bean stew, etc., etc. are built on the central pillar of sausage. So much so that their flavor and quality more or less depend on how good the sausage used in it is. Unfortunately, if you've spent much time in the average grocery store meat aisle, you've discovered that most of the commercial sausage out there is complete shit.

This is totally fine.

You can easily leave the world of crap sausage behind and never look back. Of all of the "artisan" food trends out there, making really good sausage is, by far, the easiest to do yourself, without any special equipment, in a few minutes.

What lies below is a all-purpose Eye-talian recipe suitable for most applications. You can easily customize it to your taste by adding or subtracting ingredients. Just remember that not all the stuff in the "Optional" section play well with each other. Fennel pollen is a stand alone. Parmesan, parsley and lemon zest go well together. Rosemary can be added to the existing recipe to make it *nice*, just don't use too much!

THE key to successful sausage it to use GOOD ground pork. Go to a real life butcher shop and get freshly ground pork shoulder or buy a frozen pack of pork at the farmers market, just don't buy the donkey-dookie ground pork they sell at the Stater Brothers, OK?

Italian Sausage:

1 lb. ground pork (80% fat 20% lean)
3-4 cloves garlic, crushed and minced fine
2 Tbsp. decent red wine
2 1/2 tsp. whole fennel seeds, lightly toasted in a dry pan until fragrant
1 rounded tsp. Kosher salt
1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
1 tsp. sugar

Optional

Crushed red pepper flakes
Fresh rosemary pulled off the stem and finely minced
Fennel Pollen
Grated Parmesan
Chopped parsley
Lemon zest

First, you're gonna need a big mixing bowl. Plop your ground pork at the bottom of it and simply add all of the ingredients on top, saving the red wine for the last. Now mix the pork and friends together using a dough kneading motion, giving the bowl a quarter turn after each single kneading action. When the sausage firms up and starts sticking to your hand, you're done.

Yeah, that's it. Seriously.

Are you now as angry as I am about how shitty pretty much all the sausage commonly available in these United States is? You should be. It's the direct result of fucking Cultural degeneracy, people! Take the power back. Make some sausage.

p.s.

If you'd like to make linked sausage, get you some 32mm hog casings from the internets or butcher shop and cut off a 3 foot section. Soak this in a warm water for 15 minutes while you cut the top (the mouth to the bottom of the shoulder, like an inverted funnel, which it is going to be.)  off a stout 1 or 1.5 liter water bottle (Fiji bottle work good and the water has free silica in it, or so I've been told) and round off the edges with a bit of sandpaper. Wash your new homemade funnel and slide the hog casing over the bottle neck like you were trying to get a Trojan on a wiener. If wiener jokes bother you, stuffing sausages in NOT for you.  Tie off the end, fill the funnel 1/2 full of meat and start jamming the meat through the neck with your thumb while holding the casings taut with your other hand. Keep doing this, trying to avoid air bubbles as much as possible, until you're out of meat. Tie off the other end flush with the end of the meat and then twist the tube of sausage into 4 equal links.

Finally fold the sausage links over one another till you get this kinda thing:

Refrigerate, uncovered for a few hours to allow the casings to dry out and then snip into links for grilling. Not too hot! Medium heat or they'll blow the fuck up.

Enjoy.