You can fry this sausage in patties, stuff it into casings, or use it as an ingredient in other recipes that call for sausage. I use it in stuffings, in biscuits, smoked in links for gumbos, and as a breakfast meat. Use the recipe as a guide only. The wonderful thing about making your own sausage is that you can season it to taste.

　　

Ingredients

Makes about 3 pounds

　　3 pounds fatty pork or 2 pounds lean pork and 1 pound pork fat

　　1 tablespoon salt

　　1/2 teaspoon black peppercorns

　　1 teaspoon hot red pepper flakes

　　1/2 teaspoon rubbed sage or 3 or 4 fresh leaves

　　1 teaspoon Quatre-Epices

　　1 teaspoon herbes de Provence or Italian seasoning

　　1 teaspoon fresh rosemary leaves or 1/2 teaspoon dried

　　1/2 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves or 1/4 teaspoon dried

　　6 to 8 feet of cleaned hog casings (optional)*

　　

Step 1

If your meat grinder comes with a coarse and a fine grind attachment, grind the meat first through the coarser disk. Put all the remaining ingredients in a spice mill or blender and process until ground evenly. Add the ground seasonings to the meat and mix in well. In a frying pan on top of the stove, fry a little piece of the sausage and taste for seasoning. Correct the seasoning to your own taste. If you think the sausage is too fatty, you may add some more lean meat (and it needn't be pork: veal is fine, and oysters are delicious); you may want more hot peppers.

　　

Step 2

Put the properly seasoned forcemeat through the fine grinder.

　　

Step 3

If you are stuffing the sausage into casings: Run the mixture through the meat grinder set on the fine setting (and with the sausage stuffer attached and the casings tied at one end and placed over the end of the funnel, ready to be filled). Tie off stuffed sausages into 4-inch links. Cover the sausages and place immediately in the refrigerator.

　　

Step 4

You can smoke some or all of the sausage — or partially smoke it. And you can freeze the sausage as well.

　　Note:

　　Casings, available from your butcher, are sold sometimes frozen, packed in salt. To clean them, run water from a faucet through them several times until they are free of all salt crystals.

　　Excerpted from Hoppin’ John’s Lowcountry Cooking: Recipes and Ruminations From Charleston and the Carolina Coastal Plain © 1992, 2012 by John Martin Taylor. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved. Buy the full book from Amazon or Bookshop.