Mariner's Quick and Easy Italian-Style Sausage

Let's be clear about this, right from the start. This recipe is not an Italian Sausage recipe. For one thing, there's no fennel in it. For another it has a lot of what Americans think of as traditional Italian seasonings, that do not appear in any of the "real" Italian Sausage recipes I have found. So, what we really have here, is a basic pork sausage that attempts to taste the way most Americans might think an Italian sausage should taste - hence the appellation, "Italian style".

My recipe for Mariner's Breakfast Sausage notwithstanding, I'm a culinary minimalist: I'm pretty lazy about ingredients, preferring short lists over long ones. It also means that I'm prone to use generic pre-mixed seasonings, as long as I know what they contain. For that reason, the list of ingredients for this sausage is pretty short - hence the appellation "quick and easy". Not too much measuring involved.

This recipe is for a nominal 1 US pound (454 g) of meat, and can be scaled up pretty easily (at least when using US measures!).

Ingredients:

lean ground pork	454	g	1	lb
red wine (or red wine vinegar)	15	ml	1	Tbs
salt	6	g	1	tsp
black pepper	2	g	1	tsp
parsley flakes	0.7	g	1¼	tsp
garlic (granulated)	3	g	1	tsp
onion powder	2.3	g	1	tsp
generic italian seasoning blend	6	g	1	Tbs
red pepper flakes	0.5	g	¼	tsp

Directions:

Wash your hands thoroughly, and in a large chilled bowl, completely mix all components. Cover the meat mix and refrigerate overnight. Hand mix again before packaging. Package and freeze as bulk sausage, or stuff into casings. If you stuff casing, use about 30" (about 76 cm) of 1¼" (32 mm) casing for each pound (454 g) of meat. You might observe a small amount of wasted casing, but remember: the other ingredients increase the total volume of the meat mix!

This is a fresh pork sausage and should always be thoroughly cooked before consumption!

In the bulk form, use this sausage in the same manner as any other fresh pork sausage: as breakfast patties, in a baked loaf, or "scrambled" for use in preparing sauces. The main point is that the meat must be thoroughly cooked, to an internal temperature that assures the safety of the consumer

To prepare cased sausage, cook the links in simmering water (212° F or 100° C), turning frequently, until the internal temperature reaches at least 150° F (66° C), then drain and brown in a saucepan with a little oil.

Which ever way you prepare the sausage, it will be flavorful and strongly aromatic, from the mixture of seasonings.

Discussion:

This project was an experiment, to determine if I could produce a desirable Italian-style meat mix, using a commercially-available seasoning product. I by-passed a lot of the preparatory processing by using readily available ground pork (90% lean), rather than selecting and grinding my own. The commercial 90/10 ground pork worked fairly well in this application, but if I were to make a larger quantity, I would likely select, debone, and grind a lean pork shoulder, and the lean/fat ratio would be more like 85/15.

Most of the herbs and spices used are common and present in many home kitchens, except perhaps the particular Italian seasoning blend that I used. We like to eat a lot of things that use Italian seasoning, so we buy Tone's® Italian seasoning in the large containers, sold by our nearby "warehouse" store. The net effect is that the recipe is actually more complicated than it looks, because the seasoning blend already contains oregano, basil, thyme, rosemary and sage! I just didn't have to measure them out individually.

Conclusions:

I actually made two 1 lb batches of this sausage, so that I could try it out both as a bulk sausage and a cased sausage.

The bulk sausage works well as a breakfast patty, although the flavors and aromas were a good bit stronger than what we are accustomed to; but that is a good thing. We were after "something different", after all.

The cased link sausage, prepared as described, had the same flavors and aromas, but not as strongly as the bulk sausage. The texture was also different, and somewhat drier. It works well with "over easy" eggs and toast; the eggs moderating the strength of the spices even more.  We also tried the cooked links as the meat in an open-faced sandwich, smothered in a much-augmented marinara sauce, with good results.

Overall, I am quite pleased with the outcome, and will occasionally make the sausage again, both in bulk form and cased form. I'll probably reduce the amount of black pepper next time, and when I make the cased sausage, I'll most likely make it as an emulsified sausage, in order to bring the moisture level up.