How To Make Sausage

In 2010, when I was 25, I began a little company called Smokey Ridge Charcuterie. I made hand-crafted fresh and cooked sausages, pates, bacon, duck confit, and other specialty charcuterie products. It started with an apple sausage recipe that I launched out of a little farmstand in an area of Northern California called Apple Hill. After the farmstand closed for the season that first year, I expanded the sausage varieties and products that we offered and began selling them at regional farmer’s markets. We gained quite a following and launched a club where several hundred loyal customers could give us their credit card numbers to make 6 packages per year filled with whatever types of sausages and charcuterie I felt like making at the time. This arrangement was a chef’s dream. For 10 years I made sausage by hand for club members, customers, and restaurant goers. Between 2010 and 2020, I hand twisted over 100,000 lbs and sold around $1 million of sausage, and I have developed several dozen tried-and-true sausage recipes. My secret to the best sausages is simple: high-quality meat, well-trimmed of any undesirable bits, fresh ground spices, fresh herbs, and 7 grams of salt per pound.

In 2020, the restaurant closed, a casualty of the Covid Pandemic. And like millions of chefs and restaurant workers everywhere, I took this as a cue to exit an industry that I’ve had a love-hate relationship with since I was a kid working my first job. Long story short, I have a bunch of amazing beloved recipes and years of know-how that are no longer being used commercially and I want to share them with the world, starting here with this in-depth guide to sausage making – my way.

I’ll go into detail about these steps below but here’s a cheat sheet for quick reference.

EQUIPMENT

Before I get into the steps of sausage making, I want to spend a second on equipment. Sausage making is fairly intensive when it comes to equipment. If you are planning to make a small 2 lb batch of bulk sausage – go ahead- buy already ground meat and use the grinder attachment and mix with your stand mixer. If you plan on making batches of sausage bigger than 5 lbs, you really should invest in some equipment. These are my recommendations for economical home-grade equipment suitable for 10 lb batches (all my recipes are 10 lb batches):

Cimeter

A cimeter is a long curved knife that is really handy for breaking down cuts of meat. Something about the curve of the blade lets you easily separate whole muscles without cutting through them. I recommend a 10-12 inch cimeter for breaking down pork butts. A Victorinox is a decent economical choice.

Grinder

I recommend a stand-alone grinder, not an attachment to your stand mixer. I have this one from butcherpacker.com. It costs $160, has 3 grinder plates, and can grind 10-20 lbs of meat fairly quickly without overheating. It came with attachments for stuffing sausage which you could definitely try out to start. I prefer a separate sausage stuffer but if you only make sausage a couple of times per year, this one machine would probably suffice for grinding and stuffing. It also grinds breadcrumbs, tomatoes, etc.

Mixer

I recommend a hand crank mixer like this one with a 20lb capacity for $180 from homedepot.com. You may be tempted to use your household stand mixer but I would strongly advise against it. A stand mixer can only handle about 2 lbs of sausage at a time and is prone to overheating. If you are making a 10 lb batch that would be about 25 minutes of hard work for your mixer and you’ll risk blowing out the motor.

Stuffer

If you plan to make sausage regularly, I highly recommend a vertical sausage stuffer with a 5-15 lbs capacity like this one. There are several brands to choose from and several capacities. I used to use Cabela’s in a 20 lb capacity when I was just getting started, before switching to a hydraulic sausage stuffer that could stuff hundreds of pounds in a day. The smaller the capacity the more you’ll have to refill it, this can be a pain if you are doing really large batches. These stuffers have gears that help press the meat through the canister and out the sausage tube at the bottom. Look for one with all stainless steel parts.

Whatever you do, do not get the old-fashion cast iron manual stuffers. These are really hard to use, especially with drier sausage types.

Other things you’ll need:

• Sheet pans to contain the links when twisting.
• Mixing bowls– for dry spices, for fresh ingredients, for liquids, and for meat.
• Casings
• Sausage poker (can use a needle)
• Lots of fridge/freezer space to store ingredients and to cool equipment parts.
• Lots of clean, sanitized counter space.

HOW TO MAKE SAUSAGE

1) Select the Meat

The general rule of thumb is to aim for 25-30% fat in your sausage meat mixture. You can make leaner sausage and you can make fattier sausage, but 30% fat is the standard. Fat is essential in achieving the bind (more on that later) and pork fat is the best. Pork butt (which is actually shoulder, don’t know why they call it butt) with a 1/2 -1 inch fat cap is perfect for sausage all by itself. Or you can mix lean and fatty cuts like pork loin with pork belly. You can mix different types of meat too, for instance, venison with pork belly or pork back fat.

It’s possible to make all-beef, all lamb and all venison sausages, but in my experience it is difficult to get the prefect texture without using pork fat. Pork fat is softer and makes for a better bind and better final texture. It is also more cost-effective. Unless you are avoiding pork for religious purposes, I highly recommend using pork belly, pork back fat, or plain old pork butt as the main source of fat for your sausage.

If you want to make leaner sausages without sacrificing the bind and texture, you can make the standard 30% mix and then use a substantial amount of diced or course ground lean as an internal “garnish” folded in.

For poultry sausages, use boneless skinless chicken thighs with some fat left on them, duck breast with fatty skin on or a mixture of fatty duck or goose with leaner poultry like turkey, and chicken breast (as in my Turducken Sausage – recipe will be posted soon). Poultry fat is less saturated than pork fat and tends to liquefy and separate from the meat when cooked. To improve the texture I add dry-milk powder to all my poultry sausages at a rate of 1-3 grams per pound.

Can You Use Frozen Meat?

Yes! Ideally, you would only be using the highest quality fresh meat for sausage making and charcuterie. However, if you are using your own harvested meat trim or buying specialty meat products like duck breast, chances are you will be using frozen pieces. I have made tons of sausage using frozen meat products with great success. If you are making raw cured sausages like saucisson sec or salami, you should only use pork that has been commercially frozen to kill trichinosis.

The important thing is to make sure the meat has only been frozen one time, is well-sealed, and was frozen at a low temperature. Properly frozen meat is frozen at temperatures of -10 F or lower. Commercially frozen meat from the grocery store or a food service vendor is frozen at these low temperatures. A high-quality, high-efficiency, newer chest freezer will freeze and hold food around -10 F, provided you are not overloading it with room temperature foods to freeze all at one time (in which case it will slowly pass through the 32F- -10F and freeze with large ice crystals, damaging the cell structure of the meat). Jamming 10 lbs of venison into the small freezer section of your kitchen fridge will not freeze at these low temperatures and is not recommended. Snow-like ice crystals and pooled icy liquid indicate freezing and thawing and refreezing and is no bueno. Also bad news is white freezer-burned pieces of meat. Small amounts can be cut off, but if a large portion of the meat surface is freezer burned it will taste oxidized and cardboard-like.

2) Trim the Meat

Thoroughly trimming the meat is, in my opinion, imperative to a high-quality sausage. I think most people believe that sausage is where all the undesirable scrap pieces can go. I know for a fact that many butchers take this position. I do not. In my process, meat trimming takes up about 30% of the entire sausage-making time in the kitchen, followed by about 15% mixing and grinding and 55% filling and twisting casings.

Meat should be trimmed of glands. These are located in the shoulders and legs in triangular pieces of fat between muscles. In the legs, it is just below the bottom round. In the shoulder, the gland is located between the coppa (aka cottage roll) and the rest of the shoulder flap. If you are buying pork shoulder or Boston butt in the grocery store, chances are it has already been trimmed of glands. However, if you are buying cases of primal or subprimal cuts of meat from a food service vendor or are butchering your own animals, you will need to do this yourself.

Meat should also be trimmed of bone fragments, thick tendons, connective tissue, and excessively bloody veins and arteries. Run your hands over the cut of meat to feel for small bone fragments that were left behind during butchering and remove these if present. If using boneless shoulder cuts or boneless legs, sometimes there will be a small piece of bone left where the shoulder blade or hip was removed. For chicken thighs, feel around the perimeter of each thigh to remove small pieces of chicken bone. Chicken thighs are the most tedious piece of meat to debone and the main reason why I made only a little bit of chicken sausage despite it being constantly in high demand.

Thick tendons should be removed. You can get away with being a little lax on this if you are making a finely ground sausage, after all, unlike glands, there is nothing inherently gross about tendons (aka collagen). However, if you are making a course ground sausage or medium ground sausage, the tendons will result in unpleasant crunchy bits that’s make the eater wonder “what is this?”. Which is never good thing to wonder when you’re eating sausage.

3) Scale the Recipe

All my recipes are set for 10 lbs of meat, primarily, because this is an easy number to scale. In my opinion, if you are making links, any lesser amount would not justify the set-up, clean-up, and effort. Furthermore, 1 standard hog casing uses roughly 10 lbs of sausage mix. However, if you are making bulk sausage, a two-pound batch is totally acceptable in which case, simply multiply all ingredients by 0.2.

Unless you are buying meat already ground, expect to scale the recipe as the amount of meat you end up with after trimming is almost guaranteed to be off by 10-20 %. If you end up with 8.5 lbs of meat after trimming, simply multiply all ingredients in the recipe by 0.85. If you end up with 12 lbs of meat, multiply all ingredients by 1.2. When scaling a recipe, do the math all at once and write it out. That way you don’t run the risk of scaling all ingredients except one, because it just slipped your mind. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this happen in the kitchen.

My Sausage Recipes (more coming soon, so check back)

• Bratwurst
• Apple Breakfast Sausage
• Andouille
• Duck Apricot Bourbon Sausage

4) Prep your Spice and Liquid Mixes

When making sausage, you will end up with 1)a bin of meat, 2) a container with dry spices, 3) a container of fresh ingredients like garlic and fresh herbs, 4) a container of liquid and 5) a container of casings soaking in water (if using). These components can be prepped ahead of time and stored in the refrigerator.

The dry spice component will include salt, sugar (sometimes), and dry spices. Whenever possible spices should be fresh ground. Buy spices in whole seed and grind them at home for the best-tasting sausage. It really makes a huge difference. Even better, toast them first in a dry pan. Bulk spices can be bought for cheap at sfherb.com, and other online retailers or bulk foods store. Once the dry spices are all measured out, you can go ahead and combine with the trimmed meat bin. It saves space in the fridge and lets the flavors soak in.

Keep the fresh ingredients separate from the dry spices until ready to grind. Otherwise, the salt will pull liquid out of these ingredients and wilt the fresh herbs and make the mixture wet. These are things like garlic cloves, fresh onions, and fresh green herbs. If you are grinding with a medium or fine die you can leave the garlic cloves whole and other vegetables coarsely chopped. However, if you grinding through the large die, you will want to mince everything beforehand.

Combine the liquids in a separate container.

If you are planning to make links with natural casings, soak the casings with water in a separate container.

5) Grind

It is very important that the meat stays cool during grinding and mixing. Cool all removable parts of the grinder in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes prior to grinding. If you are making sausage in a powerful commercial grinder this is less of an issue because you are doing such a large amount of meat and the meat moves through it so quickly it just doesn’t have a chance to warm up. However, if you are making sausage at home, some grinders are painfully slow. Motors get overworked and hot and this can become a major issue for your sausage making.

Most grinders come with a fine, medium, and course die. It is really a personal preference which dies you use though some sausages are traditionally done with one or the other. The medium die is good for most varieties of sausage including bulk breakfast, bulk Italian, and bratwursts. Course die is good for the sausages that you see with the big chunks of pork belly/fat studded throughout like Andouille. Course die is also good for grinding meat to be used as an internal garnish folded into a finer mix. The fine die is for smoother types of sausage, like bockwurst or hot links.

NOTE: You can buy ground pork or other ground meat if you want to take a shortcut. If you do this, I recommend getting it from a butcher shop and specifying the cuts and fat ratio that you want.

6) Mix

Mixing is the step that transforms your meat mixture from a ground hamburger-like texture to a juicy sausage by creating the “primary bind”. This is a bind between meat protein, fat, and salt. This is the most important and most fraught part of sausage making. This is where things can get really f’d up. The good news, it’s hard to over mix and easy to err on the side of caution.

Return all your meat to the fridge or freezer to get it nice and cold. It could even have some slightly crunchy frozen bits on the top. This is especially important if it took a long time to get through the grinding process.

Place your seasoned meat and fresh ingredients (if the recipe calls for any) in the mixer, turn the mixer on, and mix for 1 minute. Slowly add the very cold liquid and mix for another 4 minutes. The meat mixture should look tacky and sticky. This indicates the bind has formed. Keep mixing until this happens.

You can mix by hand if you don’t want to invest in a mixer. Make sure your meat is very cold as your hands will warm it up. This works for quantities of 5 lbs. or less. For large batches, this becomes a real workout and the coldness of the meat on your hands will test your toughness.

If you undermix the sausage or if the meat gets warm during this process, you will ruin the texture of the finished product. I’ve done it before with a 100 lb batch and it’s a really sad thing when it happens. You cannot really overmix sausage (unless it mixes for so long that it gets warm), but you can under mix it!

Now You Have Bulk Sausage

At this point, you have bulk sausage. Think Sausage patties, spaghetti sauce, stuffed mushrooms or peppers, scrambled eggs, and soup. Bulk sausage is a versatile ingredient to have on hand in a variety of flavors. There is nothing wrong with stopping here. Simply bag up your sausage in user-friendly quantities and freeze until ready to use. Alternatively, you can fill and twist links.

7) Twist the Links

To make sausage links you will need 1) your casings 2) your sausage stuffer, sanitized and set up with the nozzle that fits your casings and 3) lots of completely cleared and cleaned counter space and couple of sheet pans or 2 inch hotel pans. Links can be ordered off of butcher-packer.com or sausagemaker.com as can all of your equipment.

Types of Casings

• Natural Casings: These are the only kind of casing that I use. I like the tradition behind them…. and I like the pop. Natural casings are made of intestine, bung or stomach. They come either packed in salt or in brine. If packed in salt, they need to be soaked in water for a minimum of 30 minutes though more time is better up to 12 hours. Change the water out a couple of times. If packed in brine, rinse the casings before use. Either way, you will want the casings stored in fresh water while you are making sausage so they don’t dry out and become fragile. If using another kind, simply follow the directions for that specific kind of casing.
• Collagen: Comes in either Fresh Collagen for fresh sausages or Smoked Collagen for smoked sausages. The fresh collagen is more fragile and doesn’t hold up to smokehouse hanging so if you use these make sure to purchase the right ones for the type of sausage you are planning to make.
• Fibrous: These casings are most often used for Summer Sausage, Salami and Mortadella types. They are not edible. You will remove them prior to eating the sausage. Fibrous casings are very tough and durable. You can fill them to capacity without them breaking and will end up with a sausage product of uniform diameter.
• Alginate (vegan): As the name implies, these casings are made from algae. They are vegan friendly. Which begs the question, Why? As it happens, I just learned about alginate casings when I was cooking up a package of store bought brats that were encased with an unrecognized gelatinous thing. It’s unusual that I encounter something in the sausage sphere that is entirely new to me so I was intrigued. However, the gelatinous alginate casings had no pop, which is in my opinion, the best part of a brat.

2) Fill the sausage stuffer with the sausage meat mixture.

3) Place the casing on the nozzle so that about 4 inches overhang Begin slowly pressing the sausage meat out of the stuffer. Once the sausage reaches the end of the nozzle and begins to fill the casing, pause, tie a knot in the casing, then continue pressing until the casing is completely and evenly filled or the sausage stuffer is empty.

4) Now it’s time to twist the sausages. Start with the knotted end. The other end should have no knot in it yet. Using your thumb and index finger on each hand, squeeze the casing at the length of one sausage. Twist it. Now, skip the length of one sausage and pinch off the 3rd sausage. Twist it in the same direction as the first. Continue twisting every other sausage in the same direction. When you get to the last sausage in the link, tie a knot.

It will take a while to get a feel for this. If you fill the casing too tight it will pop when you twist. The slower you press, the tighter the fill will be. If you fill it too loose, it will require a lot of twists before it is tight and will end up much shorter. Gauging how fast you should press and how long your sausages should be based on how tightly your casing is filled to achieve uniformed sausage lengths is an art that comes with lots of practice.

If the casing pops while twisting, just pull out the meat from that one popped sausage and continue twisting. The meat can be added to the sausage stuffer for the next casing or set aside for bulk sausage. You’ll trim out the empty casing segments later.

5) Pop the air bubbles. You can buy sausage pokers at butcher-packer.com or sausagemaker.com or you can use a needle. Just prick each sausage all over quickly. Go all the way through. Don’t be timid about this, you won’t hurt them. Some air bubbles you cannot see.

6) Hang the sausage in the fridge or your freezer. This tightens and dries the casings. If you don’t have space to hang the sausage, you can lay them out flat over a rack on a sheet pan. If you are vacuum sealing your sausages, freezing them beforehand keeps the meat from being pulled out of the casing during the vacuum sealing process. You can also poach or smoke sausages before packaging them and freezing them.

8) Package or Cook Your Sausage

To store sausages – pack them tightly into a quart size freezer ziplock bag and squeeze as much air out as possible. Then freeze until ready to use. Alternatively you can vacuum seal or wrap with plastic wrap and butcher paper.

Fresh uncooked sausage is good for 3-5 days in the refrigerator. Poached or smoked sausages are good for up to 7 days in the fridge, or 4 weeks if vacuum sealed.

For tips and tricks for cooking sausages, check out this post. How To Cook Sausage Links Perfectly