I experimented with many and varied recipes for making breakfast sausage, but I was never completely happy until I tried a modified version of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's maple sage breakfast sausage, which is in his great food science book, The Food Lab©.
The economics of making the sausage is amazing. You can buy pork shoulder for $1.29/pound (think $1.79/pound in 2022!) and get about 60% yield of flesh and fat. The rest is skin, bone and excess fat. So the real meat cost is $2.15/pound (etc. for inflation effects!) for the finished product. After you add the spices and other ingredients the total cost per pound is $2.45. But what you get for the money is vastly superior in quality to the supermarket brands. You can also buy a Boston Butt roast, which is a pork shoulder with the bone, skin and most of the fat removed, for about $1.99/lb.
I tried an alternate approach with great success. That was in getting pork fat from the supermarket and buying pork loin for the flesh. Thus, no waste at all. The loin varies in price from $1.49/pound to $1.99/pound (maybe, now in the 2022 timeframe). The fat was free. Taking the higher price the total cost of a pound of sausage I make is essentially $2.40 ... and some of that extra cost is maple syrup. That means some tinkering with maple flavoring like Crescent® Mapleine® and some light corn syrup could bring the price per pound down to about $2.10. But most important, think about the superb quality of the sausage you will make compared to the commercial brands. You can whip the pants off those players when it comes to quality/taste. As for actual price per pound, do the math for your present time, and compare this method prices to commercial prices for breakfast sausage.
Most breakfast sausage recipes call for buying and processing pork shoulder, which works but is labor intensive and the meat/fat yield is not consistent. The boneless, skinless version of pork shoulder, Boston Butt roast, is much easier to process. The pork loin/pork fat approach described above is the easiest of all.
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt describes the combining of the pork, cut into 1" cubes (3/4" cubes will process better), some hickory smoked bacon, the salt and other seasonings in a plastic bag and refrigerating that mixture for, ideally, twelve to twenty-four hours prior to making the sausage. The purpose is to partially dissolve protein and allow cross-linking, resulting in a sausage that is more moist and springy, ergo superior. My advice is to do what Kenji recommends, procedurally, to have great sausage, so plan ahead. If you can't then rest the completed sausage for 24 hours in the refrigerator before cooking any of it.
I tried my modified version of Kenji's recipe for breakfast sausage in The Food Lab© ... the variation that starts with ground pork and uses maple syrup ... and it was delicious. The finest brand of dry cured hickory smoked bacon that I've found is Broadbents®. They are in Kentucky and they sure do know how to make bacon! You can order their bacon via the Internet. I buy their bacon slabs and cut them into slices with my commercial meat slicer at home. That saves money and is very easy to do, plus I get bacon exactly as thick as I want it.
Speaking of Broadbent's, their expensive breakfast sausage taught me to use more fat when making sausage at home. Lesson learned. Failure to use enough fat results in dry sausage at the table. Similarly, the Broadbent breakfast sausage is hickory smoked in cloth bags, so you want to add Wright's Liquid Smoke® to what you make. Or, if you have a smoker, do cold smoking of the sausage you make. Finally, having tried many variations of seasoning for breakfast sausage, I homed in on the three basics ... lots of salt, some pepper, plus a generous amount of liquid smoke. All the rest of the fancy seasonings will produce good sausage if used moderately but you can skip all of them and still have great sausage ... if you have plenty of pork fat, even in small pieces, in your sausage when you make it.
If you do not already have a meat slicer at home then get one now (one good source: Web Restaurant Store). They are too useful in multiple situations to ignore ... like making potato chips or shaved beef for steak sandwiches, or in this instance processing slab bacon. Or creating your own sandwich lunch meats, very economically. Just do it. You will be very glad you did.
Overall, it is quite easy to make sausage at home. The procedure is simple and there is little work involved. The results will make you cheer.
Ingredients: (makes about 6 pounds of sausage)
4 lbs. of boneless, skinless pork sirloin roast or pork loin cut into 3/4" cubes (or ground)
12 oz. of pork fat chopped fine (my addition to get the meat to fat ratio to about 70/30)
8 oz. of raw dry cured hickory smoked bacon, diced (Broadbents® in Kentucky is flavored best)
3 tbsp. of Kosher salt
1 tbsp. of ground black pepper
4 medium garlic cloves, minced
2 ounces of maple syrup
1/2 tsp. of red pepper flakes
3 tbsp. of dried sage
1 1/4 tsp. of dried marjoram
3 tbsp. of corn flour
1/4 cup of water
1 tsp. of Wright's Liquid Smoke® (optional)
1 tbsp. of peanut oil or canola oil for test frying a few sausage patties
Directions:
If you are going to follow Kenji's recommendation, cut the pork into 3/4" cubes, add all of the ingredients except peanut oil, mix well and then put it all into a plastic bag, seal it, and refrigerate it for 12 to 24 hours. Then proceed to the meat grinding step of this recipe below, and ignore the later instructions for adding seasonings, for you already did that.
If you decide you want to make the sausage immediately then proceed from here.
You cut up and then grind the pork and pork fat and bacon with a butcher knife on a wood cutting board and, of course, your meat grinder or meat grinder attachment for your electric mixer.
You want about 30 percent fat and 70 percent lean meat so that the sausage will fry well instead of burn in the skillet.
One way to be certain about the fat and meat ratio is to separate them during cutting and weigh them on a small kitchen scale. You can assume the bacon is 50% fat. If the amount of fat is too low, as it may be, cut up some of the fat you bought and add it in. Recently I asked the folks at Market Basket® to sell me five pounds of pork fat, and they gave it to me for free! Nice!
Process the cut up meats and pork fat through your meat grinder using the 1/4" diameter holes disk.
Use your electric mixer and regular beater to break up and blend the ground pork meat with the ground fat to create a fairly uniform mixture. Run it at medium speed for three minutes. Stop once or twice and use a plastic spatula to force the meat away from the sides of the mixing bowl and away from the top of the beater.
Add all the other ingredients to a bowl, except for the peanut oil, and mix them very well.
Turn the mixer to a slower speed and put the herb/spice/maple syrup/corn flour/water/liquid smoke mixture into the mixing bowl gradually, allowing each addition to mix into the meat.
When all of that mixture has been added, increase the mixer speed to medium. Run it on medium speed for three minutes, pausing after each minute to use the spatula to force the sausage mixture from the sides of the mixing bowl and away from the top of the beater.
At this point the sausage is complete. I recommend making and frying one small 1/3 inch thick patty right away to check the taste. Do not fry it for too long. Three minutes per side is fine if you start with a hot, lightly oiled skillet on medium heat. I recommend flipping the patty over a few times during the frying to heat the patty evenly from both sides. You will then see each side gradually browning and you will know when it is time to remove the patty from the skillet.
Now it is time to taste the sausage patty. If you are happy with the taste then proceed to vacuum seal and freeze the rest of the sausage. Otherwise, add whatever additional herbs/spices you want and mix for an additional three minutes. Then test fry and taste test another sausage patty. Repeat as necessary, but remember to make small additions as you can't take any out if you use too much in any addition.
You can vacuum seal the sausage in ten bags, about ½ pound each, and then freeze it. I flatten the sausage in the bag after vacuum sealing so that it is already the right thickness (3/8" to 1/2") to fry when I am ready to use it, which means I use a three cup vacuum sealing bag. Later, when the sausage thaws after deep freeze storage it is easy to use. You can make patties simply by cutting the thawed sausage into four or six rectangles with a knife. You can fry them as is or reform the rectangles into patties first.
Put the flattened vacuum sealed bags of sausage into the deep freeze. Use them within three to six months for best quality.
I know you will really enjoy this version of breakfast sausage. The sausages are tasty, crisp on the outside and tender on the inside and moist. Yummy!