Sausage

I did not know sausage could be this good.

I made this in preparation for something later. I looked online for what kind of spices go into sausage and it turns out to be anything, but looking at what people say did give me a good idea of amounts and range. I would not have imagined ginger or wine. I did imagine all the other things. I have frozen pork roast out the wazoo and once I began cutting into one of them I decided to use the whole thing. That turned out to be three pounds, twelve ounces. Or maybe it was two pounds, twelve ounces. Whatever, it was large bowl full.

I went through the spice cabinets pulling things out. Originally I pulled garlic powder then put it back in favor of fresh garlic. I have no fresh ginger, although I have it in unfresh jars, powder, and crystalline forms. I chose a red wine somebody gave me a long time ago. I went overboard with the chile peppers. I used cayenne and chipotle powders, and my own mix of flakes, so that turned out to be a lot of chile pepper. This sausage is hot. You might not like it because of that, and I wouldn't consider serving it to children.

• cumin

• coriander

• ginger powder

• fennel seed

• caraway seeds

* black pepper

* Brittany sea salt

* sage, lots of sage, mostly sage. I think three rounded teaspoons full.

* oregano

* mixed dry Italian herbs

* different kinds of red chile peppers, powder and flakes one teaspoon each (too much probably)

* fresh crushed garlic ( a whole bulb, just the big cloves, not the little ones)

* red wine.

I think that's it. 

I coated the semi-frozen meat cubes with spice powder before grinding it. The meat chunks did not take up all the spice, therefore, I packed the extra spice into the grinder between increments of pork cubes. At the end, I packed cubes of my own old bread to clear out the grinder. When the bread started coming out then I stopped. So the meat has a tiny amount of ground up bread too, but not much.

I thought double grinding would be a good idea. It's not. The portion that was double ground was too mushy. I mixed that portion in. So in the end, about 1/16 is double ground and tended to more evenly blend the regular grind. This made a difference with the final texture. I'll keep that in mind -- the idea of double grinding a portion of whatever meat I'm grinding to smooth out the finished product without overdoing it to pure mush.

The sausage patties brown and cook surprisingly quickly. The extra was wrapped and packaged in FoodSaver air-sucking-outie bags.

Honestly, for a first time try, and without a clue what I was doing, I've never had sausage this delicious. Even though it would be too hot for some tastes.