Maple Breakfast Sausage Recipe

One of our favorite things to do with our friends Nate and Stacey is to get a whole mess of pork and make sausage together. A couple months ago we got together and made our tried and true Sweet Italian Sausage recipe. This is a recipe that we've been formulating and perfecting over the years and I'm extremely pleased with the flavor and consistency of the sausage each time we make it. Everyone who tastes our sausage loves it and we've passed the recipe on to many of our friends and family.

As both of our household freezers were lacking again in the sausage department, we decided to hold another sausage making night. This time, we wanted also make Breakfast Sausage.

Zach and I have attempted breakfast sausage in the past and each time I haven't been happy with the flavor. But I feel like last night we made a winner!

The original recipe that got us going I found on a site called Coleen's Recipes. We were thankful to find her list of ingredients which we used most of. But after doing several taste testings, we changed the proportions, increased several herbal additions, added maple flavoring and made it our own.

Here's what we came up with:

Maple Breakfast Sausage

6 lbs ground pork (we used a shoulder cut)
8 1/2 tsp dried sage
2 tsp dried savory
2 tsp dried marjoram
5 Tbsp brown sugar
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
1/2 tsp ground cloves
5 1/2 tsp kosher salt (if you use sea salt decrease the amount)
3 1/2 tsp fresh cracked black pepper
2 tsp maple flavoring (we used McCormick brand found in the baking aisle)
breakfast sausage size collagen casings. (Tell the butcher how much meat you are working with and he/she can help with how many casings you will need.) We always get our casings and bulk spices at Great Lakes Butcher Supply.  

We started by trimming the skin from the pork and removing the meat from the bone. We removed the tough layers of fat and silver skin, and cubed the meat for easy grinding. (Sorry, I don't have any photos of this process, my hands were full of meat!)

Then we fitted the large grind on the hand crank meat grinder and did our first grind.

In a medium bowl whisk together all the spices, salt, sugar and flavorings.

Add it to the meat and work it by hand. We've tried several different ways to make this process more "civilized" but the best method is to just dig in with both hands and work the spices throughout the meat.

Fit the grinder with the smaller attachment and do a second grind. At this point, if your grinder has a small tube attachment, you can begin filing your casings. Our's doesn't so we had to use our Jerky Press Tube. It works best as a two person job, one squeezing the gun and another twisting the links.

When it was all done we finished with
90 Breakfast Sausage links plus extra for patties.
50 Sweet Italian links

Nothing was wasted in this process. I baked the skins and cartilage until much of the fat had rendered. The dried skins I saved for Oliver to chew as a treat and the bones I put in the crock pot with onions, celery, garlic, and parsley from the garden to make a rich pork bone stock.