Homemade Breakfast Sausage

Wife kitteh gave me a meat grinder about two Christmases back and other than some boudin, I haven't done anything with it. We're both going stir crazy in our little house, waiting for our remodel to be done, so I dragged it out and decided to make some breakfast sausage with it. I won't link to the recipes here because neither one was very good. 

For meat, I used 2 1/2# of pork shoulder and 1/2# of pork belly. It ground very nicely.

I made a sage version and a Cajun version. The Cajun one had finely chopped onions, which turned out to be a mistake. The sage one came out a bit darker. I don't think I added much, if any, salt to either of them.

Sage.

"Cajun."

When I cooked them up the next morning, the Cajun one fell apart because of the onions. The sage one held together just fine.

I have no idea what was supposed to make the Cajun one all Cajun-y and neither had a stunning flavor. On the plus side, they were easy to make, cheaper than the store-bought ones and can clearly be tuned to whatever flavor you want. Their texture, when cooked, was pure breakfast sausage. That part was a hit.

The fun part is coming up now. I'm going to separate these into small batches and play with the seasonings. Yes, I've already ruined the experiment with the seasonings I used at the start, but it will still give me a platform to study different spice combinations.

The meat grinder is about as easy to use as you could imagine and cleaning it afterwards is really simple. I've been intimidated by the task of stuffing sausage skins, but that's a learned skill and I need to spend some time learning it. After that, it will be easy to make all the homemade sausage I want. It could make excellent presents for friends and family, too!