As a public service, I'm reposting my sausage recipe along with some tips and techniques to help you make better sausage. I used to not share it, but I've had enough bad homemade sausage that I want to give the masses a basic, straight-forward sausage recipe that is balanced, and none of the flavors take over. Of course, you can amend this to your liking. Everything except the garlic and jalapenos are by weight, because volumetric measuring sucks ass, and weight will give you more consistent results. There's a lot of information here, so read through it all with a cold beverage of your choice.
35 pounds venison
55 pounds boneless picnic pork shoulders
10 pounds pork fat
28 ounces kosher salt
4 ounces Insta-cure #1
9 ounces black pepper (16# mesh if you can get it)
3 large garlic cloves
3/4 ounce red pepper
10 pounds hi-temp cheese (we use cheddar, but use what you like) (optional)
100 jalapenos or varying sizes, 1/3 of them seeded OR 585 grams dried jalapenos (optional)
1. Slice all the meat to fit through your grinder.
2. Roughly chop the garlic, and add that to your food processor along with roughly a cup of the salt. Grind/chop the salt and garlic until the garlic is fully incorporated. Combine with the rest of the seasonings and mix well.
3. Season the meat and toss to combine. Let the seasoned meat rest in a cooler overnight if possible.
4. Grind the meat through a course die and mix by hand or a meat mixer afterwards. All you're really after is getting the fat and lean more evenly distributed.
5. Regrind the meat to a fine die, then add any cheese or jalapenos at this time. Mix to combine and check the bind by making a small patty in your hand and turning your hand over. If the patty sticks and doesn't fall, you've got the correct bind.
6. Stuff into your desired casings. We use natural hog casings, 32-35mm.
7. Hang in your smokehouse, and cold smoke for 3-4 hours.
8. Evacuate the smoke and let hang in a cold smokehouse overnight.
9. In the morning, package and vacuum seal.
For dried sausage, omit the cheese and jalapenos. You can still use a 32-35 mm casing, but a 29-32 mm casing will dry a bit faster. Weigh a couple of the wet sausages, tag them, and record their weight. Leave the sausage hanging in a cool smokehouse for 10-14 days (I've had it go as long as 18 when the weather had a long stretch of high humidity). A small fan to circulate air is very handy to have. The smokehouse we use is well insulated, so we turn on the fan at night to fill the smokehouse with cold air, and then turn it off during the day. If during the drying process you notice mold, wipe it off with either vinegar or vodka. Powdery mold is fine (and is desirable if you're making a dry-cured salami), but grey, green, or black mold is not. If you catch it early enough, you can wipe it off and keep drying (you might want to pull it down and put the sausage in a refrigerator until conditions are more conducive). After the sausage has lost 30% of the wet weight, it is ready, though it might not be "ready." If you cut open a sausage and it's still bright red in the middle and a bit mushy, but still smells ok, you have case hardening, and it happens to almost everyone that makes homemade dried sausage. Vacuum seal the links and leave it in a freezer for a month. It will even out.
Meat Ratios. There's a lot of recipes floating around there that call for 50/50 pork/venison. Most of those recipes are old, because that's how grandpa and great grandpa made their sausage. But they also had hogs that had 2" to 3"+ of backfat on them, so making a 50/50 sausage with fat hogs made a great sausage. Since the 90s when pork became "the other white meat," and the meat got a lot leaner, pork butts now are about 20%-25% fat. If you want to make a straight pork sausage using pork butts, you will end up with a good sausage. But 50/50 sausage is only going to have 10% to 12% fat in it, and that's not enough. The fix is to augment the recipe with pork back fat. You can use beef fat, but we did that once and didn't like the flavor, so we just use pork fat now. The recipe above is around 18% to 20% fat, depending on how much fat the picnic shoulders have on them.
Salt. Use either kosher salt or pickling salt. Since you're doing everything by weight like you're supposed to, it doesn't matter which one you use. Don't use iodized salt. Your total salt (salt and curing salt) should be around 2% to 2.25% of the weight of the meat.
Curing Salt. If you're going to cold smoke your sausage or make a dried sausage, it is imperative you use a curing salt, because getting botulism poisoning does not sound fun at all. Curing salt will also give a sausage that pinkish-red color as opposed to grey when cooked (it's the same chemical process as a smoke ring on a brisket). Most everyone uses Insta-Cure #1, but it also goes by Prague Powder #1, and it's standardized to 4 ounces of cure to 100 pounds of meat, or 0.25% of the weight of the meat. If you have a recipe that does not have a curing salt in it, and you'd like to add it, just swap it out 1:1 with your salt. Technically, it's not a 1:1 salt because table salt and curing salt have different molecular weights, but on small batches for homemade sausage, it doesn't matter. It only matters for commercial producers that are making literal tons of sausage. DO NOT USE CURE #2. It's made for long curing products (more than 30 days) like hams, salamis, etc. It takes roughly 30 days for all the nitrates and nitrites to fully convert, and unconverted nitrates are not good for your health.
If you're making a sausage that uses a cure, and you're wanting to taste it before you stuff it, you should taste it before you add the cure. Cooking meat with curing salt in it before it's had a chance to cure the meat can make you very sick. The way around it is to add the cure after you've adjusted the seasonings. The curing process takes about 18-24 hours to fully run the conversion, so if you're wanting to hot smoke sausage, you should use a cure accelerator, sodium erythorbate. If you're cold smoking and leaving it in a smokehouse overnight, it will be cured by the time you take it down in the morning.
Seasoning. There are tons of seasoning mixes available online. If you're buying from reputable producers, they're going to be pretty good, and are a good way for a beginner sausage maker to start and take out a lot of the fuss of sausage making. In fact, I use the breakfast sausage seasoning pack from Walton's and the summer sausage seasoning mix from The Sausage Maker. I'll put links to these later.
We have started mixing our meat and seasonings and leaving it in a walk-in cooler overnight because we now have access to one, and it seems like it's made a better product by allowing the dried spices to hydrate and more evenly distribute, and also allowing time for the cure to do its thing. We season before mixing because the grinding does a better job mixing in the seasoning than I could do by hand, and the double grinding gets the bind right.
Cheese and jalapenos. If you're wanting to make a jalapeno cheese sausage, one pound of hi-temp cheese to ten pounds of meat gives you a cheesy sausage without being too much. Use hi-temp. It's been specially made to not melt at higher temperatures, and will keep the cheese from melting out when you cook it, leaving voids in the sausage. For jalapenos, one per pound of meat works well, and if you want it milder, take out the veins and seeds. I've made some test batches using dried jalapenos, and I'm going to convince my dad to do that this year, because I hate seeding and chopping peppers. I believe FIDO *98* posted a recipe using roughly 80 grams of dried jalapenos to 10# of meat. I like that, but my mom thinks it's too hot, so I dial it back.
Bind and Binders. One of the most important things in making sausage is getting the proper bind. It means that the fat and water in your sausage is emulsified, and you won't end up with a puddle of grease when you cut into a cooked sausage. How you check for it as noted above, is to take a small patty and press it into your hand. If you can turn over your hand, and it stays there for 10 seconds, you have the proper bind. Keeping your meat cold will help in getting everything emulsified properly. You will know you're getting close when the meat starts getting hard to mix, and a film starts to form on the surface of whatever you mixing it in/on. If you only grind the meat once, you will have to do some hand mixing to get the bind right.
We don't use a binder, but for a beginner, I would strongly recommend you use one. Potato starch or hi temp non fat dry milk powder are two of the most common. The dry milk powder you can get at the grocery store is not the same thing and should not be used in sausage making. You'll need to order it online.
Casings. We've always used natural hog casings in the 32-35 mm size. If you're not making a lot of sausage and don't want to mess with natural casings, you can use collagen casings. The one problem I've had with collagen casings is they tend to disintegrate when cooking in a wet environment (like making bratwurst and poaching them in beer). You should always rinse natural casings in warm water to remove the salt. I also go to the trouble to flush the insides out with water as well, because you'd be surprised at the gunk that comes out from flushing. We used to go to the trouble to flip them inside out, but I've quit doing that as I found it unnecessary. You will see sources online about adding baking soda to the water to make the casings more slippery. I've not done this, but I'm going to try it this year. It's half a teaspoon to two cups of water.
Stuffing and linking. Probably the hardest thing to do right, but it gets easier with practice. The first step is to stuff the meat into the canister of your sausage stuffer and get out as much air as possible. That will reduce the air pockets in your sausage and reduce blowouts. If you're going to cut individual inks and tie them off to hang, stuff the sausage until it feels like the casing is going to bust. If you're going to make individual 6" links by twisting, you don't want to stuff it too tight, or you won't be able to twist the links without bursting the casing. This will take some practice to figure it out. If you can pinch the sausage coil between two fingers without busting the casing, that's the right amount of pressure. You can always tighten it up by twisting the links more times. I'm not going to go into detail here about linking, but there's a ton of resources online for this.
Smoking. If you're not going to smoke your sausage and you're making individual links, it's best to lest the sausage set in the refrigerator or walk-in cooler overnight. That will set the casing and allow the twists to dry, so that when you cut them apart, the twist will stay together when you cook them.
There are two ways to go when smoking your sausage: hot or cold smoking. They both have their place. Hot smoking means you're cooking the sausage with heat and smoke until the desired final temperature is reached. It takes a little practice to get it right, because you generally want the smoker temperature to be about 25 to 30 degrees hotter than the internal temperature of the sausage, and that will change over time. If you have a smokehouse that has a temperature controller, that takes a lot of the guesswork out. But at the end, you will have a ready to eat product that only has to be heated through when you want to eat. The only thing I technically hot smoke is summer sausage, because I do that in an old gas oven that I can increase the heat on over time.
Cold smoking is much easier but takes a bit longer (that's what cooler of cold beer is for). You don't want much heat, you only want enough to make smoke. Generally one or two shovels of coals in our smokehouse is enough. For wood, we use green pecan wood because we have access to it, but use whatever hardwood you like. There's no need to smoke it past four hours, as there's only so much smoke the casing can absorb.
Resources. There are some excellent resources online, but if you're into reading books, Stanley and Adam Marianski's Home Production of Quality Meats and Sausages is one of the bibles to have about making any kind of sausage or cured meat. It's over 650 pages of technique and recipes.
2 Guys & A Cooler Youtube Channel. Eric has an incredible selection of over 150 sausage recipes, and during the month of October, they post a new recipe every week. A wealth of knowledge.
Chud's BBQ Youtube Channel. Primarily a barbeque channel, but Brad has some excellent sausage recipes too. The Meat Church Youtube Channel has great recipes as well and other things to make with sausage.
ButcherPacker.com. Has more equipment for commercial users, but they also carry bacteria starter cultures if you're wanting to get into making fermented sausages. They're a good resource if sausagemaker.com doesn't have what you need.
Sausagemaker.com. My go-to for supplies. Reasonable prices, a good selection, and their customer service phone number is excellent if you need help with something.
Waltons.com. This is where I go for seasonings and sausage seasoning mixes. They have 39 different seasoning blends for bratwurst alone. Their Blue Ribbon Bratwurst is the one I get for brats, and the #114-C is a very good breakfast sausage.
That's probably enough for today. If you have questions, please ask away.
35 pounds venison
55 pounds boneless picnic pork shoulders
10 pounds pork fat
28 ounces kosher salt
4 ounces Insta-cure #1
9 ounces black pepper (16# mesh if you can get it)
3 large garlic cloves
3/4 ounce red pepper
10 pounds hi-temp cheese (we use cheddar, but use what you like) (optional)
100 jalapenos or varying sizes, 1/3 of them seeded OR 585 grams dried jalapenos (optional)
1. Slice all the meat to fit through your grinder.
2. Roughly chop the garlic, and add that to your food processor along with roughly a cup of the salt. Grind/chop the salt and garlic until the garlic is fully incorporated. Combine with the rest of the seasonings and mix well.
3. Season the meat and toss to combine. Let the seasoned meat rest in a cooler overnight if possible.
4. Grind the meat through a course die and mix by hand or a meat mixer afterwards. All you're really after is getting the fat and lean more evenly distributed.
5. Regrind the meat to a fine die, then add any cheese or jalapenos at this time. Mix to combine and check the bind by making a small patty in your hand and turning your hand over. If the patty sticks and doesn't fall, you've got the correct bind.
6. Stuff into your desired casings. We use natural hog casings, 32-35mm.
7. Hang in your smokehouse, and cold smoke for 3-4 hours.
8. Evacuate the smoke and let hang in a cold smokehouse overnight.
9. In the morning, package and vacuum seal.
For dried sausage, omit the cheese and jalapenos. You can still use a 32-35 mm casing, but a 29-32 mm casing will dry a bit faster. Weigh a couple of the wet sausages, tag them, and record their weight. Leave the sausage hanging in a cool smokehouse for 10-14 days (I've had it go as long as 18 when the weather had a long stretch of high humidity). A small fan to circulate air is very handy to have. The smokehouse we use is well insulated, so we turn on the fan at night to fill the smokehouse with cold air, and then turn it off during the day. If during the drying process you notice mold, wipe it off with either vinegar or vodka. Powdery mold is fine (and is desirable if you're making a dry-cured salami), but grey, green, or black mold is not. If you catch it early enough, you can wipe it off and keep drying (you might want to pull it down and put the sausage in a refrigerator until conditions are more conducive). After the sausage has lost 30% of the wet weight, it is ready, though it might not be "ready." If you cut open a sausage and it's still bright red in the middle and a bit mushy, but still smells ok, you have case hardening, and it happens to almost everyone that makes homemade dried sausage. Vacuum seal the links and leave it in a freezer for a month. It will even out.
Meat Ratios. There's a lot of recipes floating around there that call for 50/50 pork/venison. Most of those recipes are old, because that's how grandpa and great grandpa made their sausage. But they also had hogs that had 2" to 3"+ of backfat on them, so making a 50/50 sausage with fat hogs made a great sausage. Since the 90s when pork became "the other white meat," and the meat got a lot leaner, pork butts now are about 20%-25% fat. If you want to make a straight pork sausage using pork butts, you will end up with a good sausage. But 50/50 sausage is only going to have 10% to 12% fat in it, and that's not enough. The fix is to augment the recipe with pork back fat. You can use beef fat, but we did that once and didn't like the flavor, so we just use pork fat now. The recipe above is around 18% to 20% fat, depending on how much fat the picnic shoulders have on them.
Salt. Use either kosher salt or pickling salt. Since you're doing everything by weight like you're supposed to, it doesn't matter which one you use. Don't use iodized salt. Your total salt (salt and curing salt) should be around 2% to 2.25% of the weight of the meat.
Curing Salt. If you're going to cold smoke your sausage or make a dried sausage, it is imperative you use a curing salt, because getting botulism poisoning does not sound fun at all. Curing salt will also give a sausage that pinkish-red color as opposed to grey when cooked (it's the same chemical process as a smoke ring on a brisket). Most everyone uses Insta-Cure #1, but it also goes by Prague Powder #1, and it's standardized to 4 ounces of cure to 100 pounds of meat, or 0.25% of the weight of the meat. If you have a recipe that does not have a curing salt in it, and you'd like to add it, just swap it out 1:1 with your salt. Technically, it's not a 1:1 salt because table salt and curing salt have different molecular weights, but on small batches for homemade sausage, it doesn't matter. It only matters for commercial producers that are making literal tons of sausage. DO NOT USE CURE #2. It's made for long curing products (more than 30 days) like hams, salamis, etc. It takes roughly 30 days for all the nitrates and nitrites to fully convert, and unconverted nitrates are not good for your health.
If you're making a sausage that uses a cure, and you're wanting to taste it before you stuff it, you should taste it before you add the cure. Cooking meat with curing salt in it before it's had a chance to cure the meat can make you very sick. The way around it is to add the cure after you've adjusted the seasonings. The curing process takes about 18-24 hours to fully run the conversion, so if you're wanting to hot smoke sausage, you should use a cure accelerator, sodium erythorbate. If you're cold smoking and leaving it in a smokehouse overnight, it will be cured by the time you take it down in the morning.
Seasoning. There are tons of seasoning mixes available online. If you're buying from reputable producers, they're going to be pretty good, and are a good way for a beginner sausage maker to start and take out a lot of the fuss of sausage making. In fact, I use the breakfast sausage seasoning pack from Walton's and the summer sausage seasoning mix from The Sausage Maker. I'll put links to these later.
We have started mixing our meat and seasonings and leaving it in a walk-in cooler overnight because we now have access to one, and it seems like it's made a better product by allowing the dried spices to hydrate and more evenly distribute, and also allowing time for the cure to do its thing. We season before mixing because the grinding does a better job mixing in the seasoning than I could do by hand, and the double grinding gets the bind right.
Cheese and jalapenos. If you're wanting to make a jalapeno cheese sausage, one pound of hi-temp cheese to ten pounds of meat gives you a cheesy sausage without being too much. Use hi-temp. It's been specially made to not melt at higher temperatures, and will keep the cheese from melting out when you cook it, leaving voids in the sausage. For jalapenos, one per pound of meat works well, and if you want it milder, take out the veins and seeds. I've made some test batches using dried jalapenos, and I'm going to convince my dad to do that this year, because I hate seeding and chopping peppers. I believe FIDO *98* posted a recipe using roughly 80 grams of dried jalapenos to 10# of meat. I like that, but my mom thinks it's too hot, so I dial it back.
Bind and Binders. One of the most important things in making sausage is getting the proper bind. It means that the fat and water in your sausage is emulsified, and you won't end up with a puddle of grease when you cut into a cooked sausage. How you check for it as noted above, is to take a small patty and press it into your hand. If you can turn over your hand, and it stays there for 10 seconds, you have the proper bind. Keeping your meat cold will help in getting everything emulsified properly. You will know you're getting close when the meat starts getting hard to mix, and a film starts to form on the surface of whatever you mixing it in/on. If you only grind the meat once, you will have to do some hand mixing to get the bind right.
We don't use a binder, but for a beginner, I would strongly recommend you use one. Potato starch or hi temp non fat dry milk powder are two of the most common. The dry milk powder you can get at the grocery store is not the same thing and should not be used in sausage making. You'll need to order it online.
Casings. We've always used natural hog casings in the 32-35 mm size. If you're not making a lot of sausage and don't want to mess with natural casings, you can use collagen casings. The one problem I've had with collagen casings is they tend to disintegrate when cooking in a wet environment (like making bratwurst and poaching them in beer). You should always rinse natural casings in warm water to remove the salt. I also go to the trouble to flush the insides out with water as well, because you'd be surprised at the gunk that comes out from flushing. We used to go to the trouble to flip them inside out, but I've quit doing that as I found it unnecessary. You will see sources online about adding baking soda to the water to make the casings more slippery. I've not done this, but I'm going to try it this year. It's half a teaspoon to two cups of water.
Stuffing and linking. Probably the hardest thing to do right, but it gets easier with practice. The first step is to stuff the meat into the canister of your sausage stuffer and get out as much air as possible. That will reduce the air pockets in your sausage and reduce blowouts. If you're going to cut individual inks and tie them off to hang, stuff the sausage until it feels like the casing is going to bust. If you're going to make individual 6" links by twisting, you don't want to stuff it too tight, or you won't be able to twist the links without bursting the casing. This will take some practice to figure it out. If you can pinch the sausage coil between two fingers without busting the casing, that's the right amount of pressure. You can always tighten it up by twisting the links more times. I'm not going to go into detail here about linking, but there's a ton of resources online for this.
Smoking. If you're not going to smoke your sausage and you're making individual links, it's best to lest the sausage set in the refrigerator or walk-in cooler overnight. That will set the casing and allow the twists to dry, so that when you cut them apart, the twist will stay together when you cook them.
There are two ways to go when smoking your sausage: hot or cold smoking. They both have their place. Hot smoking means you're cooking the sausage with heat and smoke until the desired final temperature is reached. It takes a little practice to get it right, because you generally want the smoker temperature to be about 25 to 30 degrees hotter than the internal temperature of the sausage, and that will change over time. If you have a smokehouse that has a temperature controller, that takes a lot of the guesswork out. But at the end, you will have a ready to eat product that only has to be heated through when you want to eat. The only thing I technically hot smoke is summer sausage, because I do that in an old gas oven that I can increase the heat on over time.
Cold smoking is much easier but takes a bit longer (that's what cooler of cold beer is for). You don't want much heat, you only want enough to make smoke. Generally one or two shovels of coals in our smokehouse is enough. For wood, we use green pecan wood because we have access to it, but use whatever hardwood you like. There's no need to smoke it past four hours, as there's only so much smoke the casing can absorb.
Resources. There are some excellent resources online, but if you're into reading books, Stanley and Adam Marianski's Home Production of Quality Meats and Sausages is one of the bibles to have about making any kind of sausage or cured meat. It's over 650 pages of technique and recipes.
2 Guys & A Cooler Youtube Channel. Eric has an incredible selection of over 150 sausage recipes, and during the month of October, they post a new recipe every week. A wealth of knowledge.
Chud's BBQ Youtube Channel. Primarily a barbeque channel, but Brad has some excellent sausage recipes too. The Meat Church Youtube Channel has great recipes as well and other things to make with sausage.
ButcherPacker.com. Has more equipment for commercial users, but they also carry bacteria starter cultures if you're wanting to get into making fermented sausages. They're a good resource if sausagemaker.com doesn't have what you need.
Sausagemaker.com. My go-to for supplies. Reasonable prices, a good selection, and their customer service phone number is excellent if you need help with something.
Waltons.com. This is where I go for seasonings and sausage seasoning mixes. They have 39 different seasoning blends for bratwurst alone. Their Blue Ribbon Bratwurst is the one I get for brats, and the #114-C is a very good breakfast sausage.
That's probably enough for today. If you have questions, please ask away.
