Recipe: Homemade Turkey Sausage

I sort of made my own sausage today. I mean, only sort of because it's not like a put it in casing or anything like that, and I only made a 1/4lb of it and uh, yeah. But it was really good!

I found this recipe somewhere online for a variation of andouille sausage, but I didn't have all the ingredients, so I had to kind of futz around with it, but I'm pretty happy with how it came out. I mean... really good. There's something oddly warm about it, which is probably that some of the flavours are very fall/winter flavours for me (clove and allspice and sage), and it wasn't as spicy as I'd thought/hoped it would be, but that's probably because I didn't have any cayenne and under-guessed how much red pepper flakes to put in instead.

Anyway, so I don't lose it, this is how I made the spice, for about 1lb ground pork (or turkey, which is what I used):

1/2 tsp salt
1/8 tsp paprika
1/8 tsp red pepper flakes
1/8 tsp ground sage
1/8 tsp ground cloves
1/8 tsp ground cumin
1/8 tsp allspice
1/8 tsp ground bay leaves
1/4 tsp thyme leaves
(and 1 clove crushed garlic, when you mix it all together)


Like I said, it wasn't as spicy as I'd hoped it would be, but I did like the flavour a lot, and I added a lot of spice into the soup that I used the sausage in. That had some similar flavours - thyme and red pepper flakes, anyway, and then onions, garlic, sliced mushrooms and pasta. It came out looking a little bland because of the colour of the sliced mushrooms, pasta, and sausage. But it tasted really good. I think I'd definitely make this again on a rainy day.

ETA: Since I didn't put it in a casing - I wouldn't have wanted to even if I had a machine to do it, since I was cooking it for use in a soup - what I did was put all the raw meat into a zip-lock bag, then cut off a corner and used it like a piping bag. I piped out little three-quarter inch lumps of sausage meat straight into the hot frying pan and cooked it that way before adding it to the soup.