I have been curious about experimenting with sausage making ever since I learned it was possible to make it at home, but I've always been intimidated by it. This past Christmas, however, I was gifted the KitchenAid meat grinder/stuffer attachment (the metal one), so I've been itching to give this a try!
I know the KA attachment has some drawbacks: it's inefficient and heats up quickly; moreover, the sausage stuffer seems to be in the "well, yes, you can, but you can also cut your grass with scissors" territory.
Still, it is what I have so I decided to give it a go tonight. To keep things simple, I elected to make breakfast sausage patties and thus put stuffing off to another time so I could just concentrate on grinding.
One video I watched advised for the KA to cut any meat into 1/2" cubes rather than the 1"-1.5" chunks you normally see. To make this a bit easier on myself, I picked up some pork "country style ribs," which, of course, is just pork butt cut into strips. I used pork butt as this seems to generally get you around a 70/30 meat-to-fat ratio.
Here is two pounds, diced up.
Next the meat and the grinder went into the freezer for 45 minutes. My objective (and what is advised for the KA) is to keep the meat between 30 and 33 F at all times to counteract the KA's tendency to heat up and smear fat everywhere.
After that amount of time.....I got to a' grindin'!
I was fearful that this would be one-false-move-and-it-blows up, but it was just fine. Fine? Heck it was fun!
Another piece of advice is to drop the pieces into the chute and let the auger pull them through rather than mashing them down with the plunger. I really couldn't see a difference. I elected to run the pork through only once just so I'd have a basis of reference.
Now....seasonings..... there are a plethora of breakfast sausage recipes on the internet. I elected to go with some I found here on The Pit from our very own texastweeter. I could probably do far worse than using him as a starting point!
I made two different types of sausage. One pound for was my wife and was maple syrup, coriander, salt, pepper, and MSG. The other pound was for me and had salt, pepper, cayenne, coriander, sage, msg, and ghost pepper flakes.
I didn't know how aggressively to mix the sausage. I know for cased sausage you want to mix fairly aggressive. Here I just mixed to combine. I then formed each batch into 4 oz patties and got them in the refrigerator to chill and firm up a bit (especially the maple syrup one as it was obviously a bit wetter).
Into a skillet heated over medium heat, four minutes a side until a good crust formed, and then flipped every minute until 160 F internal.
I then plated up on some Pillsbury buttermilk biscuits. Here's my wife's (with a little extra maple syrup).....
...and mine, which you would have no idea there are ghost pepper flakes in there.
Oh wow. Jimmy Dean this is not! For my first foray into this, I did pretty good! Rich flavor, moist sausage....what more do you want? Just the little mixing to combine that I did resulted in a cohesive sausage, not dry or crumbly at all.
Mine had a delightful burn to it that did not overwhelm the flavor of the pork. And I think I'm going to incorporate texastweeter's idea of putting a bit of MSG in there. I kinda want to do a hot maple syrup sausage one!
So, I think I have now fallen into the rabbit hole. The grinding wasn't difficult and was very straightforward. Now I want to figure out the stuffing, which I have learned with KA is significantly more difficult.
I know the KA attachment has some drawbacks: it's inefficient and heats up quickly; moreover, the sausage stuffer seems to be in the "well, yes, you can, but you can also cut your grass with scissors" territory.
Still, it is what I have so I decided to give it a go tonight. To keep things simple, I elected to make breakfast sausage patties and thus put stuffing off to another time so I could just concentrate on grinding.
One video I watched advised for the KA to cut any meat into 1/2" cubes rather than the 1"-1.5" chunks you normally see. To make this a bit easier on myself, I picked up some pork "country style ribs," which, of course, is just pork butt cut into strips. I used pork butt as this seems to generally get you around a 70/30 meat-to-fat ratio.
Here is two pounds, diced up.
Next the meat and the grinder went into the freezer for 45 minutes. My objective (and what is advised for the KA) is to keep the meat between 30 and 33 F at all times to counteract the KA's tendency to heat up and smear fat everywhere.
After that amount of time.....I got to a' grindin'!
I was fearful that this would be one-false-move-and-it-blows up, but it was just fine. Fine? Heck it was fun!
Another piece of advice is to drop the pieces into the chute and let the auger pull them through rather than mashing them down with the plunger. I really couldn't see a difference. I elected to run the pork through only once just so I'd have a basis of reference. Now....seasonings..... there are a plethora of breakfast sausage recipes on the internet. I elected to go with some I found here on The Pit from our very own texastweeter. I could probably do far worse than using him as a starting point!
I made two different types of sausage. One pound for was my wife and was maple syrup, coriander, salt, pepper, and MSG. The other pound was for me and had salt, pepper, cayenne, coriander, sage, msg, and ghost pepper flakes.
I didn't know how aggressively to mix the sausage. I know for cased sausage you want to mix fairly aggressive. Here I just mixed to combine. I then formed each batch into 4 oz patties and got them in the refrigerator to chill and firm up a bit (especially the maple syrup one as it was obviously a bit wetter).
Into a skillet heated over medium heat, four minutes a side until a good crust formed, and then flipped every minute until 160 F internal.
I then plated up on some Pillsbury buttermilk biscuits. Here's my wife's (with a little extra maple syrup).....
...and mine, which you would have no idea there are ghost pepper flakes in there.
Oh wow. Jimmy Dean this is not! For my first foray into this, I did pretty good! Rich flavor, moist sausage....what more do you want? Just the little mixing to combine that I did resulted in a cohesive sausage, not dry or crumbly at all.
Mine had a delightful burn to it that did not overwhelm the flavor of the pork. And I think I'm going to incorporate texastweeter's idea of putting a bit of MSG in there. I kinda want to do a hot maple syrup sausage one!
So, I think I have now fallen into the rabbit hole. The grinding wasn't difficult and was very straightforward. Now I want to figure out the stuffing, which I have learned with KA is significantly more difficult.
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