Italian Sweet Sausage

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Instructions

For Ground Sausage

1. Cut the meat and fat into chunks you can fit into your meat grinder. Put in the freezer until the meat and fat are between 30°F and 40°F. Put your grinder parts (auger, dies, blades, etc) in the freezer, too, and put a bowl in the fridge.
2. Grind half of the mixture through the coarse die on your grinder, and half through the fine die. If your meat mixture is still at 35°F or colder, you can go right to binding.
3. If it has heated up, you need to chill everything back down. Use this time to clean up the grinder.
4. Once the meat is cold, place the ground pork and red wine vinegar in a mixing bowl. Sprinkle with salt, black pepper, parsley, garlic powder, onion powder, basil, paprika, red pepper flakes, fennel seed, brown sugar, oregano, and thyme.
5. Knead until flecks of spice are evenly distributed through the sausage.
6. Divide the sausage into thirds, and form into 3 separate packages; store in a freezer bag or vacuum package.

Place packaged sausage into a freezer, or store in refrigerator for at least 12 hours before cooking.

For Sausage Links

1. Get out about 15 to 20 feet of hog casings and soak them in warm water.
2. Follow steps 1-3 above.
3. Once the meat is cold, place the ground pork and red wine vinegar in a mixing bowl. Sprinkle with salt, black pepper, parsley, garlic powder, onion powder, basil, paprika, red pepper flakes, fennel seed, brown sugar, oregano, and thyme.
4. Mix well with your hands for 2 to 3 minutes -- a good indicator of temperature is that your hands should ache with cold when you do this. You want to to mix until the meat binds to itself. You can also do this in a stand mixer set on its lowest setting, but you don't get as good a bind as you do when you do this by hand.
5. Put the loose sausage into a stuffer and thread a casing onto it. Stuff the links well but not super-tight, as you will not be able to tie them off later if they are too full. Don't worry about air pockets yet.
6. Stuff the whole casing, leaving room on either end to tie them off; about 3 inches
7. To form the individual links, from one end of the coil, pinch off spots of about six inches apart and twist them closed (without stressing the casing). Roll the link lightly between your hands to form nice rounds. Turn the preceding link to measure where to start the next sausage pinch, for uniformity.
8. Look for air pockets. To remove them, set a large needle or a sausage pricker into a stove-top burner until it glows, then pierce the casing at the air pockets.
9. Twist the final links a little and gently compress them until they are nice and tight. Repeat this process with the rest of the sausage.
10. Hang your links on a drying rack for at least an hour, or up to overnight if you can hang them in a place that doesn't get any warmer than 40°F or so. This lets the links cure a little, filling their casings and developing flavor.

Once you've taken the links off the hanger, they can be refrigerated for up to 3 or 4 days, or frozen for up to a year.