Howdy y’all!!

It’s a beautiful day to make sausage!

Mrs. Tex has been bugging me to make homemade chicken sausage. The other night, we saw what looked like an interesting recipe for a french chicken meatloaf, we thought it would make a pretty tasty sausage. As it turns out, we were right. 

Here’s the recipe:

Ingredients

• 1 stale demi loaf (sliced) or 2 cups of breadcrumbs
• 1 cup of fat-free half & half
• 5 chicken breasts*
• Herbes de Provence
• 1/2 cup of shallots, chopped
• 1 clove of garlic, minced
• 1/2 cup of curly parsley, chopped
• 1/2 cup of goat cheese
• Salt to taste

*We chose to use a 50/50 mix of boneless/skinless thighs to breasts. This will help keep it moist. We prefer organic chicken...just because. 

The damn pics posted out of order, but you get the idea.

Break up the bread, don’t worry too much about the size, it’s gonna run through the grinder later. Soak it in the half and half and put it aside for now. 

Grind the chicken. We used a coarse grind, as it’s going to run through the grinder a second time. 

Chop the shallots and parsley. Again, don’t worry about chopping it fine. It will run through the grinder in a second...add garlic, kosher salt, and pepper. 

Mix the bread with the shallot mixture, and run it through the grinder. Take this, and add it to the chicken. Mix by hand. Add the goat cheese. Make sure you mix this up real nice. 

At this point, we fried up a little sample of the sausage to test seasoning. We hit it on the mark the first time. Tasty!!

I use a natural hog sausage casing for my sausage. You can usually get it at your butcher shop or your grocery store. I know Shop Rite carries it in the frozen section. It is packed in salt, so make sure you rinse the casing well inside and out. Thread it onto your sausage stuffing attachment for your meat grinder. Don’t tie the end off yet....run a bit of the sausage mixture into the grinder to ‘prime’ the stuffer. Once it comes out the end, pull the casing back and knot it off. 

Begin stuffing your sausage. You’ll develop a feel for it. Every so often, about 10”, twist the casing a few times to separate links. Here I am in action..

It helps to have a 3rd hand, so I encourage you to either grow one, or enlist your lovely spouse to assist you. This is a messy job, but SO worth the effort. Pretty soon, you’ll have some lovely homemade sausage, no preservatives, no chemicals, and made with love by your own two (three) hands. 

We also made a second batch, as variation of the above recipe. We substituted the herbs de province and shallots with caramelized onion, and parsley. Used Parmesan cheese instead of goat cheese. Other than that, the process is the same. 

I vacuum sealed everything to keep it fresh in the freezer. 

Good eats, y’all!!!

How do you cook this typically?

I’ve done it various ways. Grilled, pan seared, steamed, sous vide, smoked. You can do almost anything with it. 

i'll take a dozen links, smoked please.  Thanks

....looks awesome Jeff!