A recipe for old-fashioned homemade pork sausages, simply seasoned with salt and pepper
Sausages gently browning in the frying pan, and the kitchen already smells like a Sunday meal. This homemade sausage recipe recaptures the flavor of food made by hand, with simple seasoning you can adjust to your taste. It calls for just a few basic ingredients and will please anyone who loves homemade charcuterie. Once the meat grinder is out, you’ll wonder why you didn’t get started sooner.
What Is Old-Fashioned Sausage?
It’s a fresh sausage meant to be cooked, made from ground lean pork and pork fat, simply seasoned with salt and pepper, then stuffed into a casing. From there, the base can be customized with herbs, tomato, or bell pepper.
Sausage in French Regional Cooking
Sausage has been made in the various regions of France for centuries. Each area has its own version: Toulouse sausage, known for its simplicity and high meat content, pork rind sausage, and dry sausage from the Ardèche.
Originally a way for farmers to preserve meat, it eventually found its way onto every table. The whole world enjoys this simple method, from Catalan sausages to chorizo, by way of Tunisian merguez. And the family goes well beyond that, from boudin blanc with porcini to cervelas.
The Main Ingredients in Old-Fashioned Sausages
The recipe comes down to four ingredients: lean pork (shoulder or fresh ham), pork belly fat, salt, and pepper. Allow about 70% lean to 30% fat.
Use fine salt rather than the coarse salt or curing salt often used in pâtés. It spreads more evenly, and the flavors are better distributed through the meat.
Technical Pointers for Stuffing Sausages
To stuff sausages with a meat grinder fitted with a guide and stuffing tubes, should you keep the blade and a plate in place? On some models, from size 8 up, a “guide disc” is supplied to replace the blade during stuffing. The auger then pushes the meat into the sausage funnel, and this disc, or a special spacer, holds the auger in place so it turns without moving back and forth.
If your grinder doesn’t have this spacer, fit a coarse plate along with the guide disc to keep the auger from moving.
Avoid grinding the meat a second time as you stuff it with the auger: the ground meat would lose water and the sausage would lose flavor. If you have to run it through the grinder again, use the plate with the largest holes possible to limit this effect.
Equipment
- Meat grinder
- 12 casings
Ingredients
- 700 g lean pork shoulder or fresh ham
- 300 g pork fat belly
- 15 g salt
- 3 g pepper
Instructions
- Grind the pork and the pork fat through a 6 or 8 mm plate, depending on the texture you want.
- Mix all the ingredients thoroughly, kneading by hand until you have a uniform mixture.
- If you have a meat mixer, you can use it to make mixing easier.
- Stuff casings with the mixture using a meat grinder fitted with a 20 mm sausage stuffing tube.
- This is a base recipe. You can customize the seasoning by adding herbes de Provence, tomato, bell pepper or any other ingredient you like.
