The Best I Ever Had: Breakfast Sausage (Revised 2017)
How to Make Your Own Breakfast Sausage in Home Kitchen Quantities
The following piece, updated here, was published at “Old Ones Dream” November 21, 2017, and as contribution to the book “Magnolia Elegy: Place In the Edisto Fork” published April 14, 2022.
The sausage that we made from our own Berkshire pigs when I was growing up, and during my young adulthood, was the best that I ever had. I thought once that we had found its equal, but it was temporary. It is difficult to sustain that kind of quality on a commercial scale. That flavor and quality became casualty to growth.
On the other hand, we recently picked up local pastured pork sausage and pork chops from Trofel, a health food store in Cheticamp, Nova Scotia, Canada that we had shopped in before and liked a lot. We were not disappointed. The meat was fresh and flavorful still as we remembered it from 5 years before. The quality had been sustained.
Perhaps you can’t go home again, but the sausage that we made on the farm when we were young can be revisited. You grind fresh lean meat from humanely raised and processed pigs, pigs with Berkshire and other breeds with high meat quality in their parentage, seasoned perfectly with salt, black pepper, red pepper and a suggestion of sage. It should contain only enough fat to grease the skillet when it cooks, and you will know it when you have arrived. It is consistently the freshest and leanest taste ever, and the best I ever had.