Homemade Sausage Spice Recipes

[jonp]

Wife and I bought a sausage grinder from Cabela's using our points and used the Cabela's branded spices for the first batch of links.

What does everyone use in the way of packaged spice mixes and does anyone use a homemade recipe?

[cwlongshot]

Most pre made mixes are junk. Might taste ok but sub quality ingredienxe or allotnof salt you dont want or need.

But bulk slices YOU LIKE and use them. What Sausage are you looking to make? Breakfast, Sweet Med or hot, Italian, Summer, Hunters...

I make Sweet and Breakfast. Onion & Garlic powders Sage, Fennel, Ground blk and salt.

I made small batches and tried them. Found what I liked. To me Italian says Fennel and Breakfast says sage. BOTH need Onion and Garlic.

Good luck!!

CW

[Winger Ed.]

Get to digging around on the net. There's a few sites that have dozens and dozens of recipes.
I make sausage once a year and often try different recipes. I haven't found a bad one yet.

[Outpost75]

The real Italian dry sausage “ salame crudo “ is made with boar meat or venison and fat, cut with a knife, not ground in a grinder. The preservative is a mix of saltpeter (potassium nitrate), cayenne pepper, paprika, garlic, sea salt and other optional spices. Wine is usually added to the mix, which is carefully stuffed into natural casings , taking great care not to leave air pockets inside the salami, which is then hung in a cellar to dry.

The location of the cellar and the climate of the place make half of the mystery of this art. What is called
Genoa salami in America is locally known as Salame di Sant’Olcese, a suburb of Genoa up in the Hills ( where the wild boars roam). Its characteristic is a good quantity of garlic in the mix. The town of Varzi in the Hills south of the Po river is the home of the best salami. All the pig goes went into salami, the hams included, as raw ham is not made there.

Pre-refrigeration they used saltpeter and spices to preserve the meat. The real thing, made in the traditional method and kept in a cool cellar, should keep until the next year’s salami is ready to eat. If they age too much, they dry up, depending on their weight and diameter. A good five pound Varzi lasts longer than small cacciatorini. The soppressa of the republic of St Marcus have bigger diameter and keep their softness for longer time. In days gone by the pigs were slaughtered in after the new year in January, because the weather was cold.

In the war of 1859 the army‘s meat followed the soldiers on the hoof, being butchered in the evening, boiled over night and eaten with broth and bread for breakfast.

If you have a salami which is old and hard, leave it overnight wrapped up in Barbera red wine and it will be ready to eat the next day. Pasteurizing salami is a wicked thing.

[jonp]

Right now, breakfast sausage. I planted a herb garden next to the kitchen door and have most of the herbs fresh and ready to go.

[DougGuy]

I use Legg's #10 it's good country style breakfast sausage seasoning. Their #6 sounds good too, you can go to their site and look at the variety of sausage seasoning they sell. Good stuff!!

I also use extra sage and crushed red pepper in addition to the Legg's seasoning.

[Blanket]

I really like the pork breakfast sausage our local meat counter makes and asked to buy the spice packets they use. Was cheaper than I could buy the ingredients, like $15 for enough to make 250 lbs. Mix ground pork and deer 50/50.

[nannyhammer]

+1 for A.C. Leggs #10 seasoning, I also add 1-2 teaspoons cayenne, 1-2 teaspoons red pepper flakes for every ten pounds if you want heat. Sometimes it ends up a little warm but has excellent flavor for bulk breakfast sausage.

[Gregorious]

https://www.conyeagerspice.com/

Interesting company, might have what you seek.

[Jeff Michel]

http://www.sausagemakersupplies.com/ They will have anything you need. A.C Leggs is just about foolproof. Home brewed recipes are ok if you know your stuff and are proven to be palatable. I see R&D people throwing out 100's of pounds of product everyday at work when they formulate new recipes that a dog wouldn't eat. It's all cut and try and you will find your the owner of product you won't or can't eat if your traveling in uncharted waters. Leggs and Con Yeager make their spice blends in 25 pound batch increments. You can make smaller batches but it's nigh on to impossible to separate the spices evenly and your quality will suffer. Get some friends together and make yourself a batch to split up. It will keep your sausage fresher and the quality will be be improved because it won't be laying in the freezer for months. As a suggestion, if you make any "additions" to a recipe, make it small, and the cook a piece and taste it. Small additions of a strong spice, e.g. Mace, will have you carrying your batch of Bratwurst to the curb if your not light handed. After blending, put it in the refrigerator for a day before you stuff it or package it. It gives the spices a chance to flavor the meat evenly. I used to do my own formulations and have been collecting recipes for forty years, but having the spices laying around getting old or spoiled and more expensive than you would first think, the end result was not that good. For 2.85 for the spice pack, it's fresh, proportioned correctly, microbial tested and me and my associates have three or four months worth of sausage to work through. The majority if not all use these two suppliers for their prepackaged spices. Have fun.

[Lloyd Smale]

leggs and witts make good packaged sausage. I use leggs #10 all the time. everything is pre measured and you end up with the same thing every time. Sure you could save a few bucks and buy all the spices but if its just plain breakfast sausage or bratts you want to make theres no need to bother.

[Lloyd Smale]

leggs and witts make good packaged sausage. I use leggs #10 all the time. everything is pre measured and you end up with the same thing every time. Sure you could save a few bucks and buy all the spices but if its just plain breakfast sausage or bratts you want to make theres no need to bother. I use this place for all my sausage. summer, snack sticks, breakfast and even some odd ball stuff. I still make a lot of my own bratts but honestly there not much better. Some speciality sausages I make myself. But leggs 10 is tough to beat for breakfast sauage and the meat cutters summer sasuage and snack stick kits come with casings ties and everything you need and youd probably end up paying more if you bought it all separately and ive yet to find a better summer sausage. Everyone that's tried it says the same. I stay away from the box mixes gander mountain Walmart ect sell. But some even like them. if you want to do your own this is a great book https://www.sausagemaker.com/Great-S...-p/26-1010.htm

[jonp]

Leggs #10 seems worth a try but it's all on your heads

Now, collagen vs natural casings. Any difference as the collagen are quite a bit different and with the natural I've seen both hog and sheep. Difference there?

[Lloyd Smale]

collagen is fine for snack sticks. For bratts and breakfast links I like natural. Hog are bigger and work well for bratts. For smaller breakfast sausage I use sheep. Really sheep are the best but there more expensive and a bit harder to work with because there more delicate and my least favorite sausage making chore is trying to flush out those little sheep casings. That I usually leave to the wife or lots of swear words are used. But to me theres something about those little breakfast links. Might be in my head but I think any sausage used for a breakfast sausage tastes better in links then without them. My guess is they do have you frying all the fat out of the meat. Fat that has the same spice flavoring as your meat and we all know fat tastes good .

[Hogtamer]

Another vote for the Leggs and another vote for what Jeff said. IMO pork butts make the best sausage, about 30% fat. I do like to add say 2 tablespoons of coarsely chopped red pepper flakes,
4 tablespoons of minced fresh garlic, 1/2 cup minced sweet onions and 1/4 cup minced fresh sage to a 25 lb recipe with the Leggs. The fresh herbs and spices add a little extra moisture and flavor that takes your sausage from wow to WOW! Mixing is important too. Too assure you have the spices evenly mixed, after the meat is cut into grinding size pieces sprinkle spices and herbs evenly over meat and for 25 lb add about 2 cups white wine or apple cider over that. Mix and mix again until everything is evenly distributed and the liquid helps with that. I think sitting overnight is good too, then mix again before you grind. Make sure to keep everything cold, sometimes harder here in the south! As for casings, don't make that good sausage then stuff it in junk! Hog casings are cheap and wonders of nature. They let smoke in but hold moisture too.

[jonp]

We bought an 8lb Picnic Shoulder on the way home. Ground it with the fat but didn't add any and used Cabelas Breakfast Sausage Spice/Collagen Casings that came in a pack we bought at the same time as the grinder to get us started. Stuffing was interesting and resulted in some odd looking links but it was our first try. We didn't add much water, we just added enough to the spice to make a paste and mixed it into the pork.
Fried some up this morning. Very lean it seemed but tasted great. At .98/lb cheap sausage. On sale I've seen Shoulders down in the .50/lb range.

On Sausage Maker Supplies http://www.sausagemakersupplies.com/natural-hog-casing/ the cases come in different sizes. Any ideas for breakfast sausage?

[Jeff Michel]

Collagen for little pigs and smoked sausages. Sheep casings for casing wieners and knockwurst and hog runners for everything else. 16-18 mm is good size for for breakfast sausage. 25 mm for Italian, Bratwurst,Fresh Kielbasa. For most uses, pork butts are just about perfect tissue to fat ratio for sausage, add 3% water for spice blending and moisture loss. Soak your natural casings for at least an hour before use and keep your collagen cases dry. Collagen is nice to use, fast but expensive.

[pertnear]

This is based on an old Alsatian recipe from Castroville, TX. Been the family deer sausage standard forever.

Sausage Seasoning
(Per 100 lbs of meat)

2 lbs canning salt (4 cups)
6 oz black pepper
2.5 oz garlic powder
8 oz coriander
1.5 oz cloves
1.5 oz All-Spice
1.5 oz nutmeg
1.0 oz Sage

Optional: Add red-pepper flakes to your taste

[blackthorn]

Go to your search bar and type in www.woodforsmoking.com, and you will find some very interesting information.

[Kent Fowler]

Also check out Allied Kenco in Houston. They have a pretty large catalog dedicated to sausage making supplies.