Homemade Beef Sausage
When shopping around for pork, unprocessed sausage and bacon can be difficult to find. You think you’re buying a one ingredient food, but when you check the label, you realize that there are all kinds of sneaky additives and ingredients. When you begin shopping for providers who raise their animals humanely, that poses another challenge.
Since grass-fed, grass-finished, and pastured beef is often easier to find than pork, you can easily add a few spices to ground beef to make your own beef sausage. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s pretty close! I’m sure you know that pork sausage comes in a plethora of flavors, so the opportunities to try different flavors of beef sausage are endless. Here’s one recipe to get you started!
You can substitute this cleaner sausage in any of these OAMM recipes:
- Sausage and Broccoli Egg Muffins
- GFDF Sausage Egg Casserole
- Hearty Italian Sausage Stew
- Beer and Bacon Pancakes
- Sausage Stuffed Loaf
- Italian Sausage Dressing
- Tahoe Brunch
- Italian Sausage Tortellini Soup
- Holiday Quiche with Sun-dried Tomato and Sausage
- Italian Sausage Risotto
Homemade Beef Sausage
Author/Source:
Christine @ Onceamonthmom.com
Ingredients:
- 1 pound ground beef (pastured, grass-fed and finished preferred)
- 3 teaspoons paprika
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 1/2 teaspoon fennel seed
- 1/2 teaspoon pepper, freshly ground
- 1 teaspoon sea salt
- red pepper flakes, to taste (if you like spicy!)
Directions:
Mix spices together in a large bowl. Add meat and mix thoroughly. Use and cook as usual.
Freezing Directions:
Wrap uncooked or cooked meat in plastic wrap and place in freezer bag.
Servings: 4
**conversion chart image provided by Erik Spiekermann
Yay! We don’t eat pork, so this is perfect! You just can’t find fresh beef sausage anywhere, and turkey sausage is often in pork casings, so it’s still off the menu. This looks totally doable, and sounds like it would be great for meatball subs, lasagna, spaghetti … Woot!
The flavor likely gets better after a couple of days in fridge or freezer to to let the spices meld into the beef. We’ve noticed that with our homemade turkey sausage. (Also, if you want pork-free casing, you can buy cellulose or lamb casing to make link sausages at home, too.)
Good to know about the lamb. I’ll look into that!
When making beef homemade sausage in the past(over a decade ago) finely grinding about 1/8 to 1/4 of the meat (almost to pate state) helped keep the patties or links together and more like the commercial product. Start with about 1/8th of the meat, mix and cook a patty. Adjust seasoning and regrind if necessary for texture you prefer.
With turkey or chicken sausage, adding *freshly* ground nutmeg enhances the flavor. No it doesn’t smell like eggnog LOL. Thanks for this recipe.