For as many years as I have been hunting, or had breakfast with sausage, or sausage bites as an appetizer, or made it in a dish; I have never made sausage from scratch. Well I can officially take that statement back because today… I made sausage from scratch.

Our class today made sweet italian sausage, spicy italian sausage, and bratwurst. I was in a group of three and we were assigned the spicy sausage task. Let me tell you, this was fun!

We started by mixing together a bunch of seasonings: 3 tablespoons(T) fennel seeds, 2T ground coriander, 1T sugar, 2T sweet Spanish paprika, 2T hot Hungarian papricka, 2 teaspoons cayenne pepper, 4 T crushed red pepper and 1 T coarse ground black pepper.

We tossed all of our seasonings together with 5 pounds of pork meat and 2.5 pounds of pork fat and 1 cup of ice water.

We also put it in a large mixer and let it go a little while to make sure everything was all the way incorporated, but by that point I had so much pork gunk on my hands I figured I shouldn’t reach into my pocket to grab my phone for a picture.

Then started the fun part. We used a sausage stuffer, but you could also use piping bag to stuff the casings. We stuffed the top of the filler with the meat mixture and put the casing on the piper and started churning it out.

 

My friend Jen took this picture on her phone, that’s why it’s so small. Hi Jen!

Once we had it all stuffed we tied it up into links.

 

Then we put it in the smoker with some cherry wood for about 20-25 minutes or until an internal cooking temperature of 150 degrees.

 

Once we were done we all sliced up the links and got to tasting…

Now that I know that sausage making isn’t as intimidating as I once thought, maybe I’ll tackle the challenge in my tiny apartment kitchen someday soon. Any helpers?