sauergeek

After a fair bit of experimenting, I've come up with a fairly foolproof sausage recipe, assuming you're comfortable with cooking by sniffing the spice rack. The basic recipe: for each pound of ground meat, mix up one teaspoon of salt and three teaspoons of whatever not-salt that sounds good, into a spice mix, and then mix that into whatever your ground meat is. Cook however you deem appropriate; I usually make patties or crumbles.

I am so unreasonably pleased with this go-around that I want to record it. Scaled to 1 lb:

1 lb ground beef (80% lean)
1 t salt
.5 t dried summer savory leaves
.5 t ground chipotle
.5 t ground sage
.5 t dried thyme leaves
.25 t ground ginger
.25 t ground mustard
.25 t ground allspice
.25 t celery seed

Mix the non-beef ingredients together, then mix thoroughly into the beef. Cook in a wide pan into crumbles. Pull the meat out of the pan with a slotted spoon to avoid picking up too much of the fat. After draining most of the fat and other drippings out of the pan, I also cooked shredded cabbage and chunks of apple in the same pan afterward. I used some of the tasty drippings — from below the fat — to pour over the cabbage-apple mix. Served the whole thing over bread.