Home Sausage Making

BadCooking’s Big Book of Sausage Recipes

I’ve never made sausage before! Where do I start?

You start here, of course, at HomeSausageMaking.com! All you really need are recipes, ingredients, and a few tools.


Home Sausage Making: How-To Techniques

Is making sausage hard? Will it be worth the effort?

The key to making excellent sausage at home (or doing anything, really) is to set yourself up for success. While you don’t need to break the bank on cookbooks, meat, and equipment, having the right stuff keeps your sausage-making dreams from turning into a meaty, messy nightmare.

All you really need are some simple, high-quality recipes; a few tools of the trade, and your own two hands.


Do things right the first time; make it easy on yourself!

What do I need to get started?

1. A really good recipe.

You could have all the skills and equipment in the world, but they’re worthless if your recipe falls flat. You can browse this site for a few good ones, but my personal go-to-guide is BadCooking’s Big Book of Sausage Recipes. This practically inexhaustible bible on sausage making also covers smoking and working with other meats like whole hams. If you love meat (and I know you do it’s worth it’s weight in gold. And the best part is, you can get it instantly!

2. A stuffer and a grinder.

Full disclosure; you don’t HAVE to have a stuffer and a grinder to make sausage. A bare-bones operation would involve buying pre-ground meat (or grinding it in your food processor) and stuffing the casings manually using a friend and a funnel. Also full disclosure–THIS IS SUPER HARD! Not to mention messy, time-consuming, and unsanitary. And don’t even get me started on pre-ground meat. NOT ONE of the great commercial sausages you’ve enjoyed started with pre-ground meat, or involved someone sitting on their kitchen floor with a funnel in one hand and a pile of meat in the other. And YOU aren’t going to make great sausage that way either. So round up a real grinder and a real stuffer and get ready to have some fun!

3. Raw ingredients and know-how.

Fragrant spices, perfectly harmonious and bursting with flavor; meat so fresh you can practically taste the farm it was raised on; crisp-tender casing that bites back–if you can get all of these (and you can), then you can have juicy, homemade sausage that looks and tastes like it came out of a gourmet butcher’s shop.

Even if you’ve never made sausage before, you can make something truly wonderful and delicious. All the information on this site is designed to help you make sausage the right way the first time and every time. It has all the basic facts and tutorials to help you get started. For a much richer, juicier sausage education (get it?), I would heartily recommend The Complete Book of Butchering, Smoking, Curing, and Sausage Making: How to Harvest Your Livestock & Wild Game by Phillip Hasheider. Phil is a cattle-raising and butchering expert, so you’d better believe he knows his stuff about crafting delicious meat products. His book is as close to a sausage making encyclopaedia as you will ever come.

If you’re operating on a smaller scale, Home Sausage Making: How-To Techniques for Making and Enjoying 100 Sausages at Home is also an excellent choice.

And for a stash of recipes that just won’t quit, look no further than Bad Cooking’s Big Book of Sausage Recipes.