Homemade Italian Sausage
Our family recipe for Italian pasta sauce includes lots of Italian sausage, of course. While Italian sweet sausage from the grocery store works just fine, I sometimes take the time to make the sausage from scratch. The art of sausage making reaches all levels of expertise – even for a beginner, like me. Homemade Italian sausage is amazingly easy to make: all you need to do is mix the right ingredients with ground pork, and you have genuine Italian sausage. The smell of freshly mixed sausage is wonderful, and when cooked the taste is divine. Store bought Italian sausage is good, which is why it's one of the most popular sausages in the USA…but once you've made it yourself, the spicy flavor is so much more intense and simply better than store bought sausage. You may never be satisfied with store bought sausage after you've made it yourself. And here's a very basic recipe for homemade Italian sausage:
Ingredients
- 1 pound ground pork shoulder 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
- If you're using actual red wine instead of vinegar, use 2 tablespoons red wine – preferably pinot noir. Vinegar is more acidic and more concentrated than wine because it's fermented.
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon freshly cracked black pepper
- 1 teaspoon garlic powder
- 1 teaspoon onion powder
- 2/3 teaspoon paprika
- 1/4 teaspoon brown sugar
- Ground spices, use a spice grinder or mortar and pestle:
- 1 1/4 teaspoons dried parsley
- 1/2 teaspoon dried basil
- 2/3 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes, or to taste
- 1/4 teaspoon ground fennel seed
- 1/4 teaspoon dried oregano
- 1/4 teaspoon dried thyme
Dried herbs are more concentrated than fresh, so if you're using fresh herbs rather than dried herbs, you'll need to use larger amounts. The typical ratio for fresh herbs is three times the amount of dried herbs. For recipes using teaspoons of dried herbs, substitute tablespoons of fresh herbs. This sausage recipe would use 1/2 tablespoon of fresh basil, or 1 and 1/4 tablespoons of fresh parsley.
Mix it all together, and shape into patties. You can stuff sausage casings if you want, or even roll the sausage into meatballs. Fry the patties in a cast iron skillet until the internal temperature reaches 165 degrees Fahrenheit. Serve the cooked sausage however you like – on buns, in rolls, with other foods, or any way you want.