Sausage Making

J decided the other day that we needed to make sausage again.  We recently had a new Kroger's open 5 minutes from our house and they've had good deals on their meat, so had I picked up quite a few pork butts and pork tenderloins for the freezer.  I pulled them out and put them the fridge last night and today we started our project.

We ended up with 5 different types.  I thought I had quite a few sausage making cookbooks, but only found 2 in the cookbook closet and both were pretty much worthless and are now in the donate pile.

So I ended up using 3 recipes found on the Internet and two pre-mixed spice bags.

First up was breakfast sausage patties, using this recipe.  We like the premise of this one, but I thought it was too heavy on the rosemary and thyme, would cut those in half if we made it again.

This is an Anne Burrell recipe that can be found here.  We used this before and it works pretty well for us. 

The first of the pre-packaged mix.  This was bratwurst and I used 6.25 lbs of meat and a quarter of the mix.  The spice ratio was just right, but I'm not a bratwurst fan, J is.  He likes it (which is good since we now have a ton of it):

Maple breakfast sausage (with a mix); a little bland, but since the bag calls for 25 lbs of meat and we used about 4 lbs, I ended up using about 2 ounces of the mix to ensure I didn't over do it: 

The next two pictures are for a green onion sausage, and we used this recipe.  No picture of the test piece we cooked, but I would add a little more spice (pepper) next time and eliminate the cinnamon, but it wasn't bad.

The grinding process (yes, this makes a big mess); we used a medium grind for each flavor:

And the finished products, bagged and ready for the freezer (I need to do something about those appliance cords):

And because I did not feel like cooking dinner after our afternoon, we promptly ordered Domino's, which is not a favorite, but rather convenient because they deliver to our neighborhood.