How to make homemade sausage for pizza
I've posted twice
about how
to cook an old chicken,
but in the two and a half years since then, my recipes have gained
sophistication. When it came time to cook our
mean rooster, I
earmarked most of his flesh for pizza sausage (aka Italian
sausage.) I used to think that making my own sausage sounded
scary, but lately I've decided that it's actually one of the easiest
ways of dressing up tough meat. If you plan to use the sausage in
pizza, spaghetti sauce, or gravy, there's not even any need to mess
with casings or to worry about fat to protein content. You can't
really go wrong.
For this ultra simple
recipe, you need:
- 0.75 pounds of tough chicken meat (or any other kind of tough or not so tough meat. I've used venison, lamb, and beef hamburger, all with good results.)
1 tbsp of whole fennel seeds- 0.5 tsp pepper
- 0.75 tsp salt. (As you can see, we actually made the recipe
with a full teaspoon, but it felt a bit on the salty side.)
- 3 big cloves of garlic (or several smaller cloves)
If it's not already
ground, cut the meat off the bone and put it in the food
processor. Whir the meat up until it looks a lot like ground
meat, and if you're really using an old chicken, pick out the
connective tissue. (This will look like white, shiny lines of
dental floss. The connective tissue won't hurt you, but is
awfully tough and will be hard to chew. We give it to Lucy.)
Next,
crush the fennel seeds. If you own a mortar and pestle, I'm sure
this is a breeze, but it's not that tough even without one. I
pour out the seeds onto a large cookie sheet or a clean counter and
roll over them repeatedly with the rolling pin. You'll need to
keep pushing the uncrushed seeds into the center of the pile with your
hand until they're all crushed, so this might take two or three
minutes. Some folks put the seeds in a ziploc bag before crushing
to make the process even simpler, but then you have to throw the bag
away.
Pour the crushed fennel seeds
into the ground meat along with the pepper, salt, and pressed garlic
cloves, mix well, and refrigerate for at least four hours. This
time is necessary to allow the flavors to work their way into the meat.
When you're ready to use
your sausage, fry it up in a skillet on medium to high heat, stirring
often and crushing the clusters with a fork so the sausage doesn't
clump up. You might find a few more threads of connective tissue
that you missed --- pick them out. Then spread the pre-cooked
meat onto a homemade pizza and bake.
We
stewed up the bones (and residual flesh) into a simple chicken soup and
then used the rest of the flesh in the recipe above. The sausage
is a bit too much for two pizzas, so I have enough left over to add
into some homegrown omelets. All told, I figure our old rooster
served as the main course for a full fourteen people-meals.
That's not bad!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Mark --- Thanks for saying that! I didn't realize the sausage had passed the test with such flying colors.
David --- You'll have to give it a shot. Sausage is so much easier than it looks! (And, as you can see, gets you major brownie points.
)
This certainly looks wonderfully tasty to me, and since my husband's favorite pizza topping is sausage, I think I'll have to give it a try too - thank you for sharing!
On a side note, I've tried that whole "putting things in a zip-loc bag and rolling over them" method, and all I ever got out of it was a very moth-eaten bag and a paranoia about eating plastic. I definitely like your method or a nice mortar and pestle better!