We are currently using a raw sausage and I like it but it does have its downfalls, cross contamination. slowing production, employees struggling to not hand pinch baseball size chunks etc… I have tried a couple pre cooked products and they always just seem like sausage flavored bread to me. Does anybody use a precooked product that they are in love with?
We use my grandfathers recipe from Italy He was an Italian meat maker on the weekends and worked in the slaughter house during the week. We mix our season pack into it and then weigh it out on patty paper. We pinch it raw on the pies and continually get compliments on how much better it is than any premade stuff. Little thinks make a big difference in the final product. Walter
This is what we currently do an it is super good. We are just getting so busy and its slowing us down alot. I figured if I could find something that was close I would consider it but if I can’t then we will keep pluggin along.
I felt the same way, I wanted to put a sausage ricotta pizza on my menu, the sliced kind didn’t look right on the pizza
Im glad I went with the nugget style its my most popular specialty pizza
People want to buy it in bulk all the time but we don’t have the time to do that. Unfortunately we don’t share our recipes. Hopefully your palate is strong enough to create a sausage that compliments your entire pizza.
here is ours. Yours is looking good. IMO for every corner you cut you through the balance of the pie off and in the long run things suffer with how the public reacts to your product.
We use DiRusso medium sausage. We get it raw in 5# tubes. Chop and cook in oven. Chop and cook in oven again. Grind in meat grinder on our Hobart. Cook some more. Cool.
People love it, spreads great, etc. NOT cheap. We pay $2.60/#, yield about 75%… that 30# case turns into about 22.5# and bumps the price up.
Housemade sausage is so easy imho. Like the above poster we’ve been making it in house from the get go.
Jetro supplies ground pork frozen in 10 or 15# packs. We grind in food processor: 10oz raw garlic with (iirc) 1.25 oz salt, 1oz fennel seed and .75oz chili flake. Mix it with 10# ground pork and pack into quart delis. Cooks grab about 6oz of it at a time and pinch off raw onto the pie. More handwashing than usual, but its a far superior result than anything you can buy premade and cooked, free of preservative and quick and inexpensive to prep. You want to make sure you are going through a batch in a couple of days.
The seasoning is really up to you, you can go in a bunch of different directions with the flavor to suit your uses. Happy R&D!
Oakland Sausage Recipe: (if oz are weight oz’s)
100% ground pork
6.2% fresh garlic
6.2% fennel
0.8% salt
0.47% chili flake
Your recipe is encouraging me to use much more fennel than I have in the past. I am surprised at the low salt, perhaps this is what balances with your pie though. (I thought sausage salt was typically near 1.5% to 2%?)
Yeah, the salt is low compared to a cured or preserved sausage. We use it fresh, so I didn’t approach from a preservation perspective, but one of flavor. We use a pretty salty dough, and often pair our sausage w veg toppings (Sausage and Kale w Fresh Mozz, Caramelized Onion and Chili Flake is a customer fave). So we don’t want a meat that’s so salty that it over powers.
As for the fennel, I just double checked the recipe and we actually go 1.5 oz per 10# meat. You converted it as 10 oz, not 1 oz- which is what I thought it was. Yeah, 10 oz would be crazy fennel
Thanks Oakland… I see it now… drat the dyslexic blending together… how many times I read it as 10 z… and it is 1 oz!! Perhaps I can share my 10 lb container of fennel with a friend now! haha.
We get fresh local sausage in bulk, mold it into links and cook it up, cut them thin, weigh them and put them in snack size ziplocks. Its alot of labour and i wish we could cook it raw onto the pizzas which tastes 100 times better because the fat and flavour get transferred all over the pizza. The reason why we dont is because we wont be able to use up the sausage that quick before it goes bad. Anyone have a solution to this? Fresh sausage will only stay fresh for about 72 hours im assuming.