Pork Sausage with Apples and Hard Cider

According to Wikipedia, Otto von Bismark never actually said that, "Laws are like sausages, it's better not to see either of them made." But making sauage wasn't that bad.*

First, a couple of basic ratios, courtesy of Michael Ruhlman. You want about a 3:1 ratio of meat to fat in the sausage (25 to 30% fat). Once you have a final weight for your sausage, you want 60 parts (by weight) sausage to 1 part salt. So that's about 1 1/2 teaspoons of kosher salt (or .25 ounces) per pound of meat.

This sausage was a breakfast sausage, so I went light on spice. But this is one of those recipes that you can customize all you want. I started by finely chopping two cloves of garlic.

Next I brunoised a Gala apple. Just one, and a small one at that. It goes a long way, and don't hesitate to throw out the edges of the apple, or to save them for something like apple sauce. Doing a brunoise is hard enough, there's no reason to make it harder on yourself by trying to brunoise an irregularly shaped piece.

This is far from a perfect brunoise. The general idea for a brunoise is to cut the apple into 1/8 to 1/16" slices. They should be as even as possible, so pick one and take it as a goal, not a range. Then, cut the planks most of the way through, so that they remain connected at the top. Now rotate the apple 90 degrees, and slice evenly again so you get cubes. It's a little difficult to describe, but the goal is to get very small, evenly sized cubes of apple.

Mix the apple and garlic in with the pork, salt, and some pepper and let it all chill for a few hours, or overnight.

When you're ready to make the sausage, grind it all into a mixing bowl and mix for about 30 seconds. Add about 1/4 cup of liquid for every pound of sausage. In this case, I added 1 cup of hard apple cider, to a little under 5 pounds of ground sausage.

Mix just a little longer until it all comes together. Form patties and you're done. Well, cook it, but otherwise you're done.

That wasn't so hard.

A few notes: 5 pounds of sausage was way more than I needed. I can't begin to tell you how much extra sausage I had. Luckily it freezes well. Also, don't try to make sausage links unless you are willing to get messy. Preferably, don't try it unless you and a friend are willing to get messy. 

Ingredients:

3 2/3 pounds of pork meat

1 1/3 pounds of pork fat  

(You may have to eye ball this at the market, you want about 30% fat, all said and done)

1 1/4 ounces salt

1 Gala Apple, brunoised

2 cloves of garlic, chopped

1 cup of hard cider

Ground Pepper

Procedure:

Chop the garlic and brunoise the apple. Mix it with the pork, cut up in the chunks, salt and pepper and set sit for 2 hours or over night.

Grind the meat mixture into a mixing bowl.

Mix for 30 seconds, add cider, and continue mixing until it all comes together.

Form patties and cook over medium heat until cooked through.

*Sausage patties weren't that bad. After I made the patties I tried to make links. That was both gross and a disaster. I think it will get easier as I practice, but feeding the sausage stuffer, and holding the sausage casing all by yourself is a task.