As usual, I studied various recipes and I found a perfect one that produces a delicious Sweet Italian sausage. This recipe is very close to that for making Hot Italian Sausage, but it doesn't use any red pepper flakes or cayenne pepper. If you want the hot version then add 1/2 teaspoon of cayenne pepper and one teaspoon of crushed hot pepper flakes to the ingredients in this recipe.
The meat to use is a boneless, skinless pork shoulder, which is sometimes labeled as a Boston Butt roast. The point is that a skin and fat trimmed, deboned pork shoulder, will usually have a near perfect ratio of meat to fat, around 20% fat. You can tell easily when you cut it up for grinding if you have to discard any excess fat. If so, do so.
I made this sausage and it is better than excellent. Try it and you will agree. It was so good that I eliminated the existing Food Nirvana recipe for Sweet Italian Sausage.
The picture shown with this recipe has the sausage in casings. I either use casings or simply make sausage patties.
Ingredients:
Directions:
Cut the meat into pieces that will easily pass through the meat grinder.
Grind the pieces of meat using the 1/4" diameter holes die ... presumably using your Kitchen-Aid® stand mixer and the meat grinding accessory.
Let the ground meat fall into a stainless steel electric mixer bowl.
Pour the water into a two cup bowl. Then add the pepper and the salt and the sugar. Stir briefly.
Put the fennel seed, coriander seed and caraway seed into a Magic Bullet® container and mix them on high speed for two minutes.
Empty the ground herbs into the bowl with the water, etc. and mix well gently.
Now add the water and herb mixture a little at a time to the meat and use your mixer to mix each addition into the ground meat. Do this until all of the water and herb mixture have been well incorporated into to ground meat.
Put the sausage into a one gallon Ziploc® freezer bag, squeeze out the air, seal the bag and put the bag into the refrigerator overnight.
In the morning weigh out 12 ounce amounts and put each batch into a one quart vacuum sealing bag. Then vacuum seal each bag, flatten it to make the sausage thickness uniform and put it into the deep freeze. Or, if you have the equipment, make sausage links, then freeze them and vacuum seal them and keep them in the deep freeze until you use them.
When you want to use some of the sausage, put a bag in the microwave oven for roughly 30 seconds on full power. Then flip the bag over and microwave on full power for 20 seconds. Then lay the partially thawed bag of sausage on the counter to complete thawing. Flip the bag over after 15 minutes. Fifteen minutes after that the sausage should be nicely thawed.
Put the sausage into a 12" diameter non-stick thick bottom hot skillet heated with a tbsp. or two of vegetable oil in it. Then cook the sausage briefly for about a minute or two and flip it over to the second side.
Cut the sausage into pieces of whatever size you like with a sharp spatula and flip them over a few times until they are cooked, which means nicely browned on both sides.
Enjoy the sausage pieces in any way you like. We simply love to make sausage and peppers and onions on a long roll.