Around here we ask for a Chili-grind to coarsely ground meat. I don’t know why the common ground pork is so ground so fine. Perhaps carefully boning pork is too much trouble and they need to avoid getting bits of bone into the product, or maybe they just have lots of the mushier loin meat left over since ‘boneless pork chops’ are such a big seller and butchers are mainly buying primal cuts and not whole carcasses.
While my butcher has excellent breakfast sausage i still like to prepare my own bulk where I add ground bacon to increase the fat content and use fresh rubbed sage to bring out the flavor. He sells precooked patties also, nice and handy for a quick breakfast, and I see those in the freezer section at the grocery. I think next time I grind up a batch of bulk I’ll get them partially frozen and cook up a bunch of patties ahead of time.
I’m not sure I’ve been to s a supermarket that didn’t at least have raw Italian sausage (I can’t ever remember seeing that sold cooked) and almost always bratwurst, as well (although they will sometimes have a cooked version of it.) This is in addition to the raw breakfast sausages. Do they not sell Johnsonville sausages out by where you’re at? Plus here almost every meat counter has at least a couple sausages for sale, with some groceries having nearly a dozen kinds. But this is Chicago, where we may love our sausage more than most.
You may find a lot more uncooked Brats where you live, they’re harder to find around here, but Johnsonville is available. I can’t stand the pre-cooked ones myself, I prefer them grilled and on the dry side.
Yes, I misspoke. Breakfast sausage, Italian sausage, and brats are all sold raw. But you can’t get uncooked Hillshire or Ekrich types of smoked sausages raw. I’d like to be able to find those type of sausages raw so I could smoke them myself.
Johnsonville is pretty much the commercial brand you will find around here, but you’ll often find prepackaged store brands as well, like Archer Farms (at Target), or something in the deli case, although not every grocery I shop at has their own house-made bratwurst. But they all seem to have their own version of Italian sausage and (given my neighborhood), chorizo.
Ah. So you’re just looking for like a plain garlic sausage or something like that to smoke. A bratwurst would work fine. Seriously, any of those raw sausages are good on the smoker. I can find fresh Polish sausages here to smoke, but that’s because I live in a neighborhood that has been historically Polish and adjacent to some still-Polish neighborhoods. My favorites for smoking are actually just bratwurst and Chicago-style hot links (which I realize you’re not going to find anywhere else, and even here you have to know which places to go to.)
Oh, no. Bulk Italian sausage saves me a step and some time when I make pasta sauce. Don’t have to uncase all the sausage, you see. Ditto for making Spencerburgers (25% sausage, 75% ground chuck). Not to mention bulk chorizo.
That recipe is pretty damned good by my reckoning. It’s definitely better with fattier pork- shoulder/butt is about right, and loin is too lean. The pre-ground grocery stuff is somewhere in between- not ideal, but not as bad as the ground loin my wife has made in the past (mostly chop trimmings and leftovers).