Low-fat and Herb-loaded Sausage

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Try making sausage on a quiet weekend, or invite some friends over and make a party of it. The recipes may look complicated, but they’re fun and doable. Making your own ensures that you can pronounce the name of every ingredient.

The seasonings

A good sausage balances the sweet pungency of tropical spices—allspice, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, grains of paradise, mace, nutmeg, and pepper—with the flavors of leafy herbs. Those used most often in sausage making are workhorses in the kitchen and are probably already growing in your garden. Typically, they are the herbs we associate with the Mediterranean region—sage, bay, thyme, lemon thyme, sweet marjoram, Italian oregano, winter savory, chives, and parsley. Herbal seeds, especially caraway, coriander, cumin, mustard, and fennel, contribute much to traditional sausage flavor, and vegetables such as garlic, onion, shallot, mushrooms, and chiles add an incomparable depth.

Basil, cilantro, and Mexican mint marigold may be used in quickly cooked fresh poultry or seafood mixtures, but they rapidly lose their flavor in sausages that require more cooking. We love to experiment with sausage seasonings, and we believe that any herbs are good with any foods if a light touch is used and none is allowed to overpower.

Sausage mixing

Pan sausage is a good first foray into sausage making. It can be as simple as adding your choice of seasonings to ground pork, beef, turkey, or chicken from the market, then forming the mixture into patties. Or you can grind your own.

Texture, largely determined by the mixing and grinding, is one of the defining characteristics of good sausage. It’s also the badge of honor among makers of Texas home-style sausage—the rural families who still butcher hogs in the fall or those once-a-year hunters who pride themselves on their venison sausage. But texture is also a matter of personal taste, so you may need to experiment to find your favorite.

Most of our recipes start with chunks of meat or other ingredients that are tossed with seasonings and then run through a meat grinder twice, first coarsely, then with the finer-holed plate. When using a food processor to grind meat, partially freeze uniform chunks, then process lightly to avoid making a paste.

A little sugar in most pan sausages helps them brown. We prefer coarse kosher salt to table salt as it lumps less readily. The inclusion of a little fat keeps the sausage from becoming dry and hard as it cooks. With low-fat poultry combinations, we are most successful when we also include moist, aromatic vegetables or fruit.

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