Canning Sausage

To be honest, I've never loved Illinois in January. Or February. Or really even in March. Too cold and I usually feel housebound. This year, I'm enjoying it more. Not that I don't wish it was warm, but I'm started to enjoy slowing down. I love summer, but it's a lot of work. I love to garden and to can fresh produce so that takes up a lot of time. Wintertime, is just slower. You don't have to pull any weeds. It's not even time to start seeds yet.

This year, I am purposing to can year round. To have convenience foods when I'm in a hurry. Today, I'm canning breakfast sausage patties. I have a new canning book by Jackie Clay. I love her. She is a contributor to Backwoods Home magazine. She's amazing. She doesn't own a freezer or a refrigerator. She cans everything. I thought I'd give sausage a whirl. I have pounds and pounds of ground pork in the freezer so I can play a bit. If it's terrible, I can feed it to the dog.

So I thawed 3 pounds of ground pork. I make my own sausage seasoning and I ground it all in the new coffee (spice) grinder I bought with Christmas money. The original recipe calls for salt, pepper, sage, rosemary, ginger, nutmeg, thyme and paprika but I left out the sage because it's supposed to become bitter when you can. I love the new grinder. It made all the seasonings into a fine powder. I usually add 1 T of spice/pound but decided to try 1/2 T instead since canning intensifies seasoning.

It went well. I formed the sausage into patties just a bit larger than a wide mouth jar and fried them to brown them but didn't cook them through. A pound or 6 patties fit well into a wide mouth pint jar with a 1 inch headspace. Jackie suggests pouring off the grease, adding water to the pan and bringing the juices to a boil (like gravy without thickening) and adding about 3 tablespoons to each jar before sealing. They are in the canner right now (pints process in a pressure canner for 75 minutes at 10 pounds pressure). I can't wait to try this.