Making Sausage from Fresh Ground Pork

Pork Sausage – Sage & Italian

Making homemade Sage Breakfast Sausage and Italian Sausage is easy to make and we prefer it to store bought brands. With store bought sausage, the herb mixes vary, so unless you buy the same brand time after time, the different brands vary in flavor. Additionally there is a variance in fat content of the packaged product. When making your own, you can adjust the flavors just the way you want them and have control over the fat content. We find that a lot of brands of italian sausage leave out the whole fennel seeds which we like to have in ours. We grow our own sage, but store bought sage will work just as well. You can make the sausage ahead and freeze it either fresh frozen or cooked frozen.

In our local grocery store you can buy 80-20 (80% lean – 20% fat) ground pork. You can also buy lean pork cuts and grind them yourself, if you want something leaner, however you will want some fat content if you want a true sausage flavor.

Here is the list of ingredients for both a Sage Breakfast Sausage and an Italian Sausage based on one lb. of sausage. Since this is a freestyle recipe, you can adjust the quantities to your taste.

Sage Breakfast Sausage
Ground Pork – 1 Lb
Sage – ground or crumbled – 1 TBS
Crushed red pepper flakes – 1/2 tsp
Salt – 1/3 tsp
Pepper – 1/8 tsp

Italian Sausage
Ground Pork – 1 Lb
Fennel Seed – Whole or Ground – 1 tsp
Crushed red pepper flakes – 1/2 tsp
Oregano – 1/2 tsp
Sugar – 1/3 tsp
Salt – 1/3 tsp
Pepper – 1/8 tsp

Making the Sausage into Balls to Let the Herb Flavors Infuse

With either recipe the ingredients are uniformly mixed and allowed to sit anywhere from a few minutes to a couple hours to let the flavors infuse into the sausage uniformly (it depends on how big a hurry you are in). When you are ready to cook the sausage, it can be made into various shapes depending on if you want crumbles, patties, sausage links, etc. You can run the sausage through a sausage link stuffer if you are equipped to do that. We normally cook the Italian Sausage into crumbles for pizza and the Sage Breakfast Sausage into patties.

Cooking our Italian Sausage for a Pizza