Bonjour my friends, I'm Frankie and welcome to Club Foody!
Barbecue season is just around the corner and I like to prepare myself by making a few recipes
including condiments, homemade barbecue sauces, seasoning blends, and sausages.
Besides making my Andouille Sausage, Merguez or Garlic Sausage, I also like to make this one...
In today's episode, I'll show you how to make my Hot Italian Sausage! This is such a simple recipe
and quite easy to make. There's a beautiful blend of herbs and spices that gives it a great taste!
By making your own, you can decide how hot or mild you want it... I like mine hot! So my friends,
let's get cooking! First, let's prep a few ingredients... In a small skillet over medium
heat, we'll add fennel seeds and lightly toast them, about 3 to 4 minutes at the most.
We'll transfer them to a spice grinder and process until fine which it won't take any time at all...
about 10 seconds, maybe. The next herb we'll grind is dried rosemary. The same thing, we'll
process until fine. Last but not least, we'll grind a teaspoon of whole mixed peppercorns. All right, so
here's our beautiful pork shoulder that is about 75 percent lean - we want some fat when we make
sausage. So what we'll do is to cube the meat into roughly 2 inch pieces - doesn't have to be precise
because later on we'll grind it. When we're done, we'll transfer the cubes to a large bowl.
Next, we'll season the meat... So we'll add the toasted ground fennel seeds, the ground rosemary
followed by mild paprika then smoked paprika, some garlic salt, our ground mixed peppercorns,
1/2 a tablespoon of red pepper flakes - now if you want a milder version, reduce the amount...
Then ground Himalayan sea salt as well as Prague powder number one also known as pink salt
which is a cured salt and here's the brand I use. And finally, some cayenne pepper.
Now wearing a glove, we'll mix the ingredients very well until the meat is nicely coated.
Next, we'll mix cold red wine with some powdered sugar -
if you use granulated sugar instead, it won't dissolve. Then we'll pour a little bit at first
and toss until the meat mixture has absorbed all the liquid before pouring the rest and do the same.
We'll place some plastic wrap on top making sure it touches the meat to prevent from drying out
before transferring it to the fridge for 24 hours... The next day, we're ready to make sausages or patties.
So we'll grind the cold meat mixture using the large grinding plate - I'm not going into details
about the whole process of sausage making but to find out how, click on the top right corner
of your screen. When the meat is ground, we'll do one more thing before making the links. We'll form
a tiny patty, cook it in a small skillet so we can taste the seasoning and adjust if necessary.
From here, we can make sausages, patties or portion the meat and freeze it for later use...
And my friends, this is our Hot Italian Sausage! Spicy and flavorful, this is a great recipe
to have on hand! The beauty of making it from scratch is it can be used in many different ways
plus you can make it as hot or mild as you like... I hope you give it a try soon and be sure to
visit clubfoody.com for ingredient amounts, directions and more info... Until next time my friends, bon appétit!