Making Italian Sausage, from Scratch - Complete Step-by-Step Guide and Recipe

hello everyone my name is evo and welcome to cook with the koyas now today we are not cooking, we are actually

making

and if you have never made

sausage

s before, homemade

italian

sausage

s, after this video you will be able to make fantastic sausages and if you already make sausages, stay Stay tuned because I'm going to share with you all the tips, techniques, ingredients and all the things I've learned over the years to help you make a fantastic homemade sausage, so let's quickly get started with the equipment. I was lucky. enough for my brothers to give it to me, which is a phenomenal gift, so it's an electric meat grinder, which is fantastic, but you know, I grew up over the years with my dad and all we used was the hand chopper.

This is a size 10 meat grinder that I would recommend. The size 8 is the one my dad had it was a little small but a size 10 since this is perfect or a size 12 and these are the components that come with it. It's basically the same here as the electric one, so let's put our screw in, now the blade, the blade goes in next, there's a flat side where the cutting side is and then there's the rounded side, so the rounded sides continue . the inside you want the flat part facing outwards so it will sit nicely there. When it comes to the chopper plate there are different sizes so there is a half inch chopper plate with half inch holes which is approximately 13 millimeters which is the size we are going to use today 13 millimeters or half an inch as well there's a 3 8 inch size that's 10 millimeters a little bit smaller and I'll tell you when to use that one and then there's a smaller one One even this particular one is 3 16 or 16, sorry, six millimeters, this one, so this one small is mainly used if you want to grind your own, make your own burger, that's what these smaller ones are for the next 3 8 inches.

This one I like to use if I'm going to dry or cure my sausage because it has a smaller grind and it will cure and dry better so that's when I use the 3 8 inch but the one I'm using today is the half inch you want a larger grind and yes, it makes a difference when you're filling the sausage casing, the larger grind has a better texture, it cooks properly and comes out great every time and it makes a difference, there's a little groove at the bottom here and this just It sits in that slot and locks it in place, that's it, okay, if you had the manual meat grinder, it would be assembled the same way, okay, the other thing I really like about this particular one is that my friend Joe gave me a nice foot pedal so instead of having to turn the machine on and off all the time I just use the foot pedal and it makes it so much easier, well let's get into cuts of meat and proper cuts of meat to make sausages, so when you go to your supermarket or your local butcher, you will see various cuts of meat offered to make sausages, usually there is the pork leg, there is the whole pork shoulder, which is also called a new york shoulder or there's a picnic roasted shoulder or a roasted shoulder, so and the butt is not this one, it's the shoulder, so just to be clear, okay, for all intents and purposes, those are your four different cuts. , the pork leg. just take that out of the equation because pork shank yes you can use it to make sausage and if you use it make sure you mix it with some pork shoulder because shank is very lean, it doesn't have a lot of fat and it's not a sausage as good as the shoulder, so let's discard the pork leg at this point which leaves us with the whole shoulder, the picnic or the pork shoulder.

My favorite cut of meat for

making

sausages is pork shoulder now. the picnic, but the picnic roast shoulder is also this size, there are both this size and in fact, if you look at the whole pork shoulder, the whole pork shoulder would probably be this big and the whole pork shoulder consists from a picnic roast and a butt what I like to do is just use the pork shoulders and the reason is that the picnic roast is a little bit more, I'm going to say fattier fat, it's fattier and it has more of that type of fat. fat, whereas this one, the shoulder butt, has a firmer fat, what I'm going to call a better, better fat.

You can see that this fat here is very, very firm. You can see here that there isn't much. This is maybe a little bit more, you can see that they're a little bit looser and fattier, but most of the fat in this pork shoulder is firm and the other thing that I like to do is, if you have the option, this in particular it has no bones. It just makes it a lot easier for me to cut and it's quicker to use, so when it comes to making sausages, now I'm going to cut this and depending on your machine, I like to cut very small pieces, especially if I'm using the crank the larger the pieces, the harder the crank will be.

Now in my case I have the electric one, it will chew this meat like it's nothing, so that's about the size of you know the pieces that I want to cut if you cut them smaller. okay, even better, but that's about the size you want to cut and actually before we grind them we're going to weigh our meat because everything is calculated when it comes to making sausages and we have to know how much meat. We're starting now that we know that the best cut of meat for sausage is pork shoulder and you'll see here, I'm not going to throw away any of this fat sausage that needs fat now.

If I see a little bit of this thick fat, maybe you know I can trim it and remove it like this little bit here, for example, sure, cut it off and get rid of it, no problem, if you see fat you don't like, get rid of it, but As a general rule, your sausage should be somewhat fatty, and in fact, the sausage you make at home is not as fatty as the sausage you buy at the store, so I remember the first time I grew up making sausages with my dad. I've been making it since I was so big and I always remember my dad kept the fat in the sausage and when I started making sausages on my own, the first thing I said was, oh, I'm going to make healthy sausages, so I brought my sausage home . and I cut all the fat, a lot of fat, I cut a lot of fat and I thought, here we go, a nice healthy lean sausage, guess what it was like to eat sawdust?

Please don't make the sausage need fat if I'm going to hang the sausage to dry and cure it that way, then of course I'll start removing the fat, it may be leaner, it's perfect for drying, but no for the typical cooking sausage, so I'm going to cut it. I'm going to finish cutting this and what we're going to do is weigh it up and move on to the next

step

, so okay, and this particular cut had very little waste, in fact there was basically no waste, it was already pretty lean. And what I did cut out is that there's a little gland that's usually embedded in the fat and I just like to remove it.

If I see it, I don't want it on my sausage, but you can see here that there's something greasier. cuts and then some leaner cuts once everything is ground it will be absolutely perfect now speaking of ground if you don't have a meat grinder you can go to your local butcher or grocer and ask them to grind it for you. get it already pre-ground to the size you want and you can start by just seasoning and all you have to do then is just stuff and you can buy a stuffer to stuff the casings so you don't necessarily have to grind them. yours I like to grind mine I like to know exactly how much I'm putting in there, how much fat, etc. and if I see those little glands I like to remove them okay so the next very important thing we have to do is weigh our meat the reason we are going to weigh it is because I have a

recipe

for you in which I have calculated that all the spices are absolutely perfect and it comes out excellent every time there is no guesswork because everything is calculated and that for me is a big difference, I remember when I used to season with my father, we seasoned and then we fried a little, we mixed it, we fried it a little, we tasted it, seasoned it a little bit and did it constantly until we found out that it's okay, you taste it, yes, it needs a little more salt. leave a little more there's a little more of that and eventually you would get it right but sometimes you might have too much salt and you can't remove it so this way there's no guesswork so right now six pounds 15 ounces is close enough to seven. to call it seven pounds okay let's start grinding so clean hands are always a given okay so I don't like to run the machine dry you don't want me grinding with no meat in there so I like to start with meat. in the hopper and then once you start grinding, you're going to want to feed it continuously, but you'll see how it goes through here in the grind and how nice and thick the grind is and I'm going to use my handy dandy foot. pedal thanks joe makes it so much easier so this just grinds like it's nothing so again you can buy it already ground like this from your local butcher.

Okay, as you can see, now we're almost done and when you get to the end, what? I like to do this because there is still some meat inside this chamber, I take a little bit of this ground meat and pass it through to ensure that all the meat that has come out is drowned, so now we are going to unplug the machine. I don't necessarily like to put my hands near a blade when it's plugged in and I'll just remove this plate very easily, there we go and scrape, you can take all that out and I'll take my time getting that meat out.

From there you take out the blade, same thing, just remove the meat, okay, remove the screw and remove the meat, so now I have all my spices together and that's why my sausage comes out great every time, it's the choice of the cut. The meat I use is grind size and the ingredients are very very key so of course I have my

recipe

s here written out and I'll put all of this in the description for you, no problem you'll have it all there for you. I can repeat this without any problem, so for the salt, I have here four, four and a half grams of salt per pound, which is a total of 31.5 grams now, if you get 0.5, 0.7 or 0 ,8, just round up, it's okay to round up. round up than down so I have my salt and I like to use fine salt don't use coarse salt you need fine salt either table salt or sea salt it has to be fine salt okay now I'm going to use next, The recipe I normally use calls for 1.5 grams of black pepper per pound, but honestly, for the past few years black pepper hasn't done well for me, so I've been eliminating it and guess what sausage still comes out great? so I'm going to omit the black pepper, but feel free to use it, the next ingredient is my chiles.

I want it to be medium spicy, medium not overly spicy, not just mildly spicy. I want it to be medium hot, so for this it's .85 grams per pound, which is 5.95, so again six grams of chiles, so that's going to go in and the next ingredient is paprika. Two and a half grams per pound. I like to use Hungarian paprika, nice deep, dark color, and I think that also helps make a difference, so there's my 17 and a half, which I rounded up to 18 grams and then another spice that I like to use is fennel seed and the fennel seed, it just adds a really nice flavor to the sausage and the fennel seed. it's only half a gram per pound, so in this case 3.5 grams I rounded it up to four grams.

If you are a true fennel lover, you can do one gram per pound. Okay, now with all my ingredients or my spices, everything I do. It's just a fork to mix them all together so I'm creating my own mix please with the spices what I like to do now is spread them evenly over my meat so at least you have a good head start on spreading them. your spices and get a uniform flavor throughout the meat the next ingredient, this one is totally 100 optional, it's a little bit of red wine and I like to use a cup of red wine per pound again, you don't need to do this

step

of course, your sausage will be amazing with or without this, but if you like to add a little bit of red wine flavor, now is the time to add it, but again, that's 100 optional, that was my own homemade wine just a little bit. for flavor, but this one I also say is optional because I could mix up my meat and have a great sausage right now.

I say this is optional, but for me it is essential. This is one of the key ingredients to making fantastic homemade Italian sausage and it is pepper. pasta, also known as pepper sauce, but it's not a sauce like you imagine, like a cooking sauce, it's more of a pasta, but in this it could be called a sauce, it actually says sweet pepper sauce, but if you look at the ingredients. It's peppers, it's peppers, salt and a little bit of citric acid, that's it, there's no vinegars or anything of that nature, it's basically peppers, so that's what you want and if you take a look there, it's a thick paste and nice, so what I've calculated is this. a one liter jar just right or a little over a liter a one liter jar will do up to 40 pounds of meat so half a jar 20 pounds of meat in my case I have seven so about a quarter if I want to round up again above, you could make a quarter of a quarter jar of pepper paste for seven pounds.

I have to repeat this, it is a key ingredient now that I am using, thatIt's about a quarter jar right there, using sweet pepper sauce. You can control the amount of spiciness by using chiles. Of course, you have the option of using hot pepper sauce if you want. If you use hot pepper sauce, I recommend not using the chili peppers, if you take a look, you'll see exactly what I have in there, so all the ingredients are there and now what you want to do is basically throw these ingredients in and squeeze them all together , so turn it around. down and scream and squeeze them all together the key now the key is in the mixture you have all the right spices you have the right combination you have the right mixture so now if I just said okay, that's it I'm fine, it looks good, that's not it It's good, you have to mix it very, very evenly and I have an expression, and those of you who are tuning in and who happen to be friends of mine, you know what it is and that's when you think.

You've already mixed enough, mix some more because you can't, I repeat, you can't mix too much, but you can definitely mix less. Okay, you can see how I've plotted the background and I'm squeezing out all the spices and I've done this for a couple of minutes now and I got to the point where I thought I'd done enough, so I did a little bit more. Well, look at this perfectly blended meat mixture, all the spices are there and look at my hands, you have to look at this, it shows. with that pepper sauce and the paprika that nice color in my hand and that will also show in this sausage, okay, now that we have all our spices mixed and everything is well mixed, we are going to prepare our sausage casings and today I am going to use as always I use real sausage casings and for that I'm going to ask my wife Laura to come and give me a hand because normally that's her job what she does so let's get Laura here and get these. sausage casings prepared while this can be stored in the refrigerator or it is cold enough outside today.

I could leave it outside while we prepare the casings. Laura finally joined us, so it's time for you to get to work. Well, I'll explain how we go. to do this, yes, okay, so it's 20 yards or 20 meters of casings and 20 meters or 20 yards will yield between 25 and 30 pounds of meat, depending on the size of the casings, but as a general rule of thumb, 20 yards will yield between 25 and 30 lbs. I only have seven, so I'm only going to need about a quarter of these, so if you don't mind, Laura, you could show people how to wash and prepare the sausage casing.

Casings come in different types of containers, plastic containers, even bags. If the butcher is going to give you some he may just put them in his butcher paper but when you put them in a container like this it looks like a big mess, there is a small way to this madness and let me give you a close up and I will show you How, the intestines are very, very salty and that is what preserves them, but if we take them out of the container somewhere here we will find a small plastic circle like a ring. and that's keeping all the pieces together so we can find the middle of the ring and we can separate them while I'm separating them.

I'm going to take half and put it in a bowl right as I'm separating them. and they will just come, they will untangle very easily so you can see I have the

complete

piece, but I have one end and a bowl on the other, this will help prevent them from tangling, so if I go if I need a quarter of this, I can split it and leave this ring on so I can split it in half and then take that half and split it some more. I'm leaving this ring on because I want to wear it later, so I'm going to separate that and start taking out what I need.

You can see how easy it is, it doesn't get tangled at all. Now I can put this in a second container and I'll be able to continue holding that. ring and put them back in your storage container, keep that ring up and put the salt back in because that salt really helps preserve it. Now I can take this amount and take it to the kitchen sink because I'm going to need to soak it in a little bit of water to bring it back to life because it's dry. I need to put the humidity back in. We just need cold water.

I left the salt there and just walked away. let it sit for a couple of minutes so I've soaked them for a couple of minutes now I'm going to turn them over or at least run water through them so you can separate them and We're going to want to run some water through that center . We have cold water and we're just going to pass it on. You can see where it is already filling and then just let this run until all the water is emptied. I can see what a big difference it makes to soak it and remove that extra salt.

Now you can use it this way or you can flip it over so to flip it over I'm going to run my fingers around the outside so have a little outside edge and then turn it over so the water can go to the back and I can take my two fingers to keep them together and then the water will just push it so that it turns inside out and bounces a little bit and that's just it's going to go all the way and it turns around. Now I'm going to take this and I'm going to put it in a bowl and I'm going to put one of the ends over the rim and I'm going to continually drop them by putting a rim over the top, so it won't matter how many you fill the bowl, we just want to put them in. in order so that we place the last one and in this case this will be the first. you lift it up and that way they won't get tangled if I take this one, which was the first one, it's trying to take it from the bottom so it gets tangled, so you can take it from that first edge and it won.

Don't get tangled up, so now we're ready to fill these guts and I'm going to give you a hand. Okay, now that Laura has our sausage casings ready to go and the rest are in the refrigerator, they are salted. hold it until the next time we go to put our machine together, there's a little spacer that we use first and foremost, oh let's put this back in, okay, it's on, our little spacer goes in, we've got our funnel and this is high precision , here it is. to get it right, let's go and tighten it up right, so now Laura's going to start filling in and I've got some strings here that I've pre-cut.

It's always great to have a bunch of pre-cut strings. ropes ready to go because we're going to fill these casings and tie them up as we go, okay let's start by filling the hopper so what I like to do is feed a little bit until it stops. I'll stop it right here and explain to you why I'm doing this. Okay, let's feed some and stop. Yes, you press the pedal, it stops, you press it again, it starts thanks. Okay, so Laura has everything organized for me, so I like to take the casing that has a little bit of the sausage meat coming out of it and start sliding it into the stuffer, but before I continue, what happens is I tried grease them and grease them, the guts like to stick. the stuffer, so if you turn it on and off a little bit more, real quick, maybe a little bit more right, so now what I do is, as I put the casing in, you can see that it's grabbing the meat here and it creates, basically creates. air and it doesn't allow another quick to hit laura, okay, and again, I'm just going to press that and there we go a little bit more and then at the end, it's not a problem now that you get to At the end you have to leave a little outside because we're going to have to tie that up and I'm using it now.

You can use any thin twine you have, thin but strong. You want it to be strong enough so that when you pull. on it it doesn't break and it's not going to open on you, so there you cut the end, there you have it, okay, it's time to fill, this is the fun part, okay, now, while you're filling, you want to maximize the filling. If you fill the casing too much and squeeze it too much it will break, if you don't fill it enough it will be very loose and mushy, so basically what you want and that's the job of the person here, feed it and fill it.

Go on so it's firm to the touch but not bursting firm okay let's get started let's try it so let's get started and you can feel as you go how firm or how full it is so I don't. I want to break the casing and if the casing gets stuck in the stuffer, that's where there's another chance you're at risk of breaking it. Well, I'm going to stop right there, so for me it's a good size, you know, for an average dinner party. You can make a huge coil if you want, but what I like to do is make it this size because if I have a big dinner then it's no problem because you just take out two packages if they're in the freezer.

It's not a problem at all so I prefer to have smaller size coils that I have more options with rather than the big ones so I cut one, tied one, sorry, tied the other end and now this. part, I'm just going to cut it off there, we have a nice sausage coil right there, let's start with the next one and you also have to unscrew it as you go, well, one of the disadvantages of the machine is it comes out relatively quickly and stops, so now, for this one, what I'm going to do is put it down and we're going to tie this end here, just tie it quickly, okay, cut the rope, take this little excess, put it on.

In there we have a beautiful coil of sausage there and again that's a really nice size and you can see how it's not mushy, it's firm now if you would like if you made it and it's only half full, let's say. you can tie you can take a rope I don't want to do this but you can take a rope and tie it I can probably get away with a little bit here okay you can make what I'm going to call smaller firmer links by just Working around the sausage and just I would do that if it's too loose.

This one I can almost squeeze all the way in, not all the way because I don't want to burst, so there's one and I'll make one more just for aesthetics. Here I'll take this one, it looks like it's a little bit firmer, I just do a little bit, I don't want it to explode, here we go, that gives a little bit of a different look to your sausage, but it has these smaller links and again a little bit on the end We can put that in there, but isn't it a good coil? There are two two good coils so far and that will make a fantastic meal, let's fill the rest of these, okay?

We just started on this last tripe and I noticed there's not much meat left so I'm going to find that we're going to finish this off whatever size it is okay okay let's do it right in fact it might be more or less the same. size oh no we're getting more now okay you're done okay let's let a little bit more happen as much as we can and stop okay so the last k shell is full and as you can see we had enough. casings, so the math on how many yards of casing per meat works perfectly all the time, so seven pounds of meat, well, we got one, two, three, four, five beautiful coils of sausage, right there, seven pounds , five coils, depends on the size of the coils.

It depends on the thickness of the casing how many links you get, but here's a general rule: seven pounds, five good-sized sausage casings. Now what you do there is this chamber is still full of meat, so Laura, if you can unplug the machine. Okay, now what you have is this funnel that's full of sausage meat, this is also full of sausage meat, so this is what you can do and I probably should have mentioned that you can make a sausage patty before, so I'm going to make my favorite, yeah. they're actually your favorite, now I'm going to clean it up really good, but just to show you and I'm also going to get all the meat out of this funnel, but just to show you that with this recipe you can make sausages or sausages or sausage patties.

In fact, many times what I will do is make two batches and I will turn half of the meat into burgers and some of the meat I will even leave loose to use in other recipes, yes, for pasta. sauces and things like that, so there's a nice sausage patty right there and the other thing I can do is leave it as a burger or I can go straight to the stove and try some, although I already know this is going to be very flavorful and delicious . The other thing to keep in mind is that it is freshly made fresh sausage.

Great, if you let it sit in the refrigerator overnight until tomorrow it will taste much better because all those flavors that we've added, all those spices, go away. to infuse now into the meat and have time to settle and get much better, it will taste great right now, oh yeah, but give it a day, it will taste even better, you can keep them in the refrigerator for a few days. of course or you can freeze them put them in freezer bags and freeze them if you freeze them I use freezer bags but if you have a vacuum sealer or a vacuum sealer that works even better because they last longer but in our case they don't last they are very long, they don't last a lot in the cold in the freezer so I just use ziploc bags but if not I would use a food saver and vacuum seal those bags because they keep much better.

Now you will have learned if you follow this recipe directly for a tea and all those tips along the way, I guarantee that right now you will be making one of the best sausages you have ever tasted, much better than the ones you buy in a store and just filling of flavor and me. I actually can't wait to get into this and maybe we'll do another episode showing how we cook because we like itcook them with peppers and potatoes and there are many ways, yes, maybe we will do it one day, but you really need it.

Trying to make sausages when you make them yourself from

scratch

is always a lot more enjoyable so thanks for your help Laura, yeah well that's always my job yeah. It's always nice to help and that's the other thing when you make sausages, do it with the family, do it with friends, make it a social event, have a drink or two if you want or a cup of coffee on the go and make it a fun event. We had fun today. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and if you haven't already, feel free to subscribe. We have plenty more tips and techniques to share with you, so I look forward to it. to do it thanks for tuning in until next time good luck and bon appetit