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This is an easy-to-make sausage that highlights whatever green onions you have handy. A perfect spring grilling link. You can also make this a Cajun green onion sausage with the addition of Cajun seasoning.
Springtime is time for green onions of all kinds. Ramps where I live in Minnesota, but any green onion, wild or farmed, works here. Other options would be scallions, chives, walking onions, nodding onions, young green garlic — even those “lawn onions” that show up everywhere.
Here’s a primer on how to harvest wild onions, if you want to go that route.
If you are new to making sausages, here’s my tutorial on how to make sausages at home.
Once you’re ready to go, this is a very simple sausage. I use 100 percent pork, but you can mix pork with turkey, or rabbit, pheasant or chicken. If you do, go with 3 pounds of the other white meat, and 2 pounds of either very fatty pork shoulder or pork belly.
You’re shooting for about 25 to 30 percent fat in these green onion sausages. If you can’t eat pork, you could do this with a light meat and beef fat, but I have not tried this.
The only unusual ingredient I use in this sausage recipe is C-Bind, which is a carrot fiber binder from The Sausage Maker. I find that adding a little binder helps a lot with the texture and moisture levels. You could use milk powder or Butcher and Packer’s “special meat binder,” or just leave it out. But I like it.
You can also play with the grind and amount of green onions, and make this a Cajun green onion sausage, too. I prefer a simple 6 mm grind — the standard “rustic” grind in many sausages — and a bunch of ramp leaves chopped up and then run through the grinder. I skip the Cajun seasoning.
But if you do add it, really try to find one without salt. If you can’t, skip the salt in the recipe and hope for the best. You could also mix up your own Cajun seasoning, or follow the mix in my recipe for Andouille sausage.
Once you make your links, I highly recommend that you hang them in a cool, breezy place for an hour or two. This dries them a bit and helps the sausage “bloom” in the casings. I use a wooden clothes hanging rack. Generally speaking, I’ll hang them at room temperature for an hour or two, and longer if the temperature is cooler. In a perfect world, they’d hang at about 38°F overnight.
These green onion sausages are really made for grilling or simple searing, served sliced or in a bun. That said, you can sub them in wherever you need a mild sausage, like where you’d use a mild Italian sausage or a bratwurst.
They’ll keep a week in the fridge and freeze well.
If you liked this recipe, please leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ rating and a comment below; I’d love to hear how everything went. If you’re on Instagram, share a picture and tag me at huntgathercook.
Green Onion Sausages
Equipment
- 1 Meat grinder
- 1 sausage stuffer
- 1 Rack to hang sausages (optional)
Ingredients
- 6 pounds fatty pork shoulder (2.8 kilos)
- 1 1/2 ounces salt (42 grams)
- 2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper (12 grams)
- 3 1/2 ounces chopped green onions (100 grams)
- 1/2 ounce C-Bind (13 grams) optional
- 1 cup chilled white wine
- hog casings
Instructions
- Optional first step. If you want a better bind on your sausage, cut the meat into chunks that will fit in your grinder, then toss with the salt. Let this sit overnight in the fridge. I highly recommend this step if you are not using the binder.
- Get about 15 feet of hog casings out and soak them in a bowl of warm water.
- Mix the meat, black pepper and chopped green onions together, then grind through a 6 mm die, which is "medium." If your meat isn't too full of connective tissue you should be good with one grind here. This is a rustic sausage. But if you want, you can grind it twice — just make sure the meat is below 40°F before grinding the second time, and ideally it should be partially frozen.
- When you are ready to link, mix the binder (if using) and the wine in with the meat and mix it well with your hands for about 90 seconds, or until the whole mass can be picked up at once, and you see white streaks on the side of the bowl.
- Stuff your sausage into casings, then twist off into links. (Here is a video on how to do that.) Use a needle to prick any air pockets, and then gently compress the meat in the casings to fill that gap.
- Hang your sausages at least 1 hour, and up to overnight if you can do this at refrigerator temperatures, which is below 40°F. Eat within a week or freeze.
Notes
- If you want to make this a Cajun green onion sausage, try to find a salt-free spice mix or else it will throw your salt levels off. You could assume that the mix equals salt, so use 1 1/2 ounces.
- You can add up to double the amount of chopped green onions. Your call here.
- If you can’t use alcohol, use ice water.
Nutrition information is automatically calculated, so should only be used as an approximation.
Oh I bet these are fantastic!
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