Making sausage egg and cheese casserole own sausage isn’t rocket science. Take on this fun project with our step-by-step homemade pork sausage recipe.

How to Make Homemade Sausage Making your own sausage isn’t rocket science. Stuff into casings or enjoy it as-is. Hank has authored five cookbooks, the latest in 2021. His website Hunter Angler Gardener Cook won Best Food Blog by the James Beard Foundation in 2013. Yet the flavor of a well-made link surpasses the sum of its parts, and a truly great sausage is fit to be served as a main course at a fancy dinner. Good sausage is all about balance.

Balance of salt and savory, balance of meat and fat, balance of spices and herbs within the whole. You also need a proper amount of fat, at least 20 percent — I have not yet met a low-fat sausage worth eating. You can toss in as many or as few herbs and spices and other flavorings as you’d like. Anything from water to fruit juice to wine to cream. Usually pork, but beef and lamb are also good, as are game animals. Do you want a fine grind or a coarse one? I like 25 to 30 percent, but you could go as high as 50 percent.

A good start is a typical Italian sweet sausage, and this is what I’ll walk you through here. Sweet sausage is only slightly sweet — it’s really called so to differentiate it from the Italian hot sausage, which has paprika, chiles, and oregano. First, you need a proper meat grinder. Stand-alone meat grinders are good, too, and you could even use one of the old hand-cranked grinders. You need at least two dies—coarse and fine—that dictate how wide the strands of ground meat will be when they emerge from the grinder. Are you going to stuff your sausages into casings?