Woke up this morning and decided to make my own breakfast sausage. So an unplanned post. I started with Alton Brown’s recipe on the Food Network website. You can find it here:

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/breakfast-sausage-recipe-2103185

As you can see it is basically a some pork shoulder and fatback ground together with spices. I played with the spices a bit and will again when I next make it. Always fiddling.

I know you’re not supposed to want to see the sausage being made, but here it is. I used my Kitchenaid Grinder attachment which worked very well. You can see that the tray is filled with fresh cut (and thoroughly refrigerated) pork and chunks of fatback that had been mixed with my choice of spices and then extruded through a fine grinder attachment.

I froze much of it for future use but fried up a couple along with some Bob Evans commercial sausage patties I had on hand for a blind taste comparison. Happy to say we both preferred the home made version, both because of the seasoning (which I will continue to develop) and because we could taste it was very fresh and knew there were no fillers or other additives!

Should you attempt this? It is a lot of work that goes beyond picking it out of a grocery store refrigerator case. But you know the product is fresh and exactly what goes into it. I made a double batch and look forward to trying it again. I recommend you try it to see if you like it!

As always you can find more at http://www.walterthinnes.com and on Twitter @walterthinnes