If you don't have a meat grinder you can request your butcher to grind a Boston butt roast (of your choice) for you, while you wait. Also, if your electric stand mixer is not large enough to handle five pounds of ground meat easily, for mixing, then make this sausage in two batches to assure even mixing of the seasonings with the meat.
You definitely want to make this sausage to compare its mildness and flavor differences to the other breakfast sausage. We all have taste preferences so why not find yours and make what you enjoy best?
Overall, once you start making sausage and varying the seasonings you can home in on what pleases you best.
Ingredients: (makes 5 pounds of sausage)
4 1/2 lbs. of pork butt
1/2 lb. of dry cured hickory smoked bacon, chopped fine
Enough pork fat so the ratio of lean meat to fat is 70/30
2 tbsp. of salt
2 tsp. of black pepper
1 tbsp. of dried rubbed sage
1/2 tsp. of ground nutmeg
1 1/3 tsp. of ground ginger
2 tsp. of dried thyme
1/2 tsp. of cayenne pepper
1 tsp. of Wright's Liquid Smoke®
1 tbsp. of maple syrup
3/4 cup of cold water
Directions:
Prepare the pork butt for grinding by cutting it into pieces that will easily fit in your meat grinder. Think 2"x3/4"x3/4" size pieces.
Remove excess fat and discard it. You want the fat to be 30% of the total weight of the sausage meat. You can make a pretty good guess visually, and consider the fat added by the bacon.
Grind the pieces of pork butt and the chopped bacon using the 1/4” diameter holes die in your meat grinder.
Now regrind the pork using the 1/8" diameter holes die in your meat grinder.
Put the water, the liquid smoke, the maple syrup and all the dry seasoning ingredients into a two cup bowl and stir to combine.
Mix the ground pork in the electric mixer on medium speed using the regular mixer beater (but keep the meat from climbing onto the beater by running it fast enough to toss the meat against the inside surface of the mixing bowl) while adding small increments of the water/seasonings mixture until all of the liquid and herbs/spices have been mixed evenly throughout the ground meat. A total of five additions of the water mixture is a good number, followed each time with two minutes of mixing. Note that you may need to use a soft spatula to scrape down the inside of the mixing bowl once or twice to assure even mixing.
Put the breakfast sausage into a one gallon Ziploc® freezer bag, squeeze out the air, seal the bag, then refrigerate the sausage overnight.
Weigh out 8 ounce amounts of the breakfast sausage and put each into a one pint/quart vacuum seal bag. Vacuum seal the bags and then press on them to make the sausage flat and of even thickness, roughly 1/2" thick.
Mark the bags to identify contents and keep the bags of breakfast sausage in the deep freeze until you want to use them.
Thaw the frozen sausage in the microwave oven on full power for 30 seconds. Then flip the bag over and microwave on full power for 20 seconds. Then put the bag on a counter and let it finish thawing for about 30 minutes.
At this point you can put the whole slab of sausage into the skillet as indicated below and cut it up into pieces while it is frying, or, you may want instead to make patties by hand of whatever size pleases you and simply fry them like you would the cut up pieces.
Fry the sausage in a hot thick bottom non-stick skillet into which one to two tablespoons of vegetable oil have been added and heated. If/as necessary, press on the sausage with a spatula to keep it flat and of roughly even thickness.
After one minute flip the sausage over, then (if you left it in a slab) use a sharp spatula to cut it into the size pieces you want to serve.
Continue frying the sausage pieces on low heat, flipping them over every two minutes, until they are nicely browned on both sides.
Serve the sausages hot along with whatever other breakfast items you provide to your guests. The planning and order of preparation are up to you.
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!