My Meat!.....DIY Breakfst Sausage

I have my mouth all set for a biscuit with sausage patty this morning.
You know, like what Mickey D's sells on their $1 Menu.....for a dollar. lol

But I didn't want to have to go there to buy it.
So I went hunting for rolled sausage at the grocery store while I was there this morning.
The first store didn't have any rolls of sausage meat!  Just a cut up already roll on a styrofoam tray of Bob Evans brand sausage.  Seems like they were hiding an expiration date or lopped off an end of the roll that went bad or something by selling it in this manner.  And they wanted $3.99 for not even 12 oz.
No way.

So store #2 had 1 brand of rolled sausage, Johnsville.
And they wanted $4.99 for a roll!
Not even a lb. of sausage....12 oz.  That comes out to .60¢ an ounce.
Nope, not buying it.

So I spied some containers of ground pork further down in the meat case.
Ground pork for $1.99 lb.
Hmmmm.....
Since it was already ground up(I don't have a grinder attachment for a stand mixer or a manual table mounted grinder)and I didn't want to make links(no casings to buy or deal with), I bought that pork.

I came home and printed out a breakfast sausage recipe(Alton Brown's HERE).  I gathered the spices....

And measured them out.....

I sifted the spices and dumped in the pork....

After a few minutes using my "mobile, manual mixing attachments"(aka my hands)my sausage meat looked like this....

Then I slapped some patties together and set em to cooking in the cast iron skillet....

Here is the finished product.....

And here they are in the "delivery system of choice"(aka biscuits).....

And the Verdict?
O.M.G.
Mickey D's just lost the battle for my sausage biscuit dollars!


* I love that after the cost of the whack biscuits on sale here this week for $1.25 a roll for Grands!, the cost of the ground pork and $1.00 to cover the cost of the spices used I can make 8 sausage biscuits for $4.92.(8 large patties came to $3.67+roll of biscuits at $1.25)  That's 61.5¢ per biscuit sandwich.  If you make your own biscuits your cost goes down significantly from there.
Me?  I'm lazy....

* I love that I found already ground fresh pork.  This makes it super easy since you don't have to grind the meat yourself.  My $1.99 lb. price wasn't the best but I could wait for a deal on that to purchase it for next time.

* I love that you can play with the spices to your own taste.  With the recipe I used I left out the red pepper flakes since it called for ground cayenne pepper too.  I also substituted 1/3 of the black pepper called for with some ground multicolored peppercorns for a depth of flavor and a little less heat.
You could also add more brown sugar and/or add real maple syrup if you like your sausage sweeter.
You can also add other spices to make some Italian sausage patties.   Just google a recipe for Italian sausage to find which spices you need.

 I will definitely be doing this again!  Next time I hit the warehouse type stores to find a nice big deal on ground pork.  Then I can fill the freezer with semi-homemade sausage patties.
Yumm!

Have you ever made sausage yourself?
Did you go the whole Charcuterie route and cut and grind your own meat cuts?
Or did you work from preground meat?

Sluggy