Louisiana Hot Links Recipe

1 / 2

Our New Orleans native customers leave the shop with a giant smile on their faces and fire in their eyes and bellies.

Photo by Chris Carter and James Peisker

2 / 2

"Homemade Sausage" by Chris Carter and James Peisker has been revised to be up-to-date on USDA safety standards and now features 100 recipes for sausages (cased and uncased) and 50 recipes for cooking with sausage, all written for contemporary tastes and cooking styles.

Cover courtesy Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc.

Yields 5 Pounds/15 Links SERVINGS

Ingredients

5 pounds pork
1-1/2 ounces salt
1/4 ounce black pepper
1/8 ounce cayenne pepper
1/4 ounce red pepper flakes
7/8 ounce hot paprika
1/4 ounce garlic powder
Pinch of allspice
Pinch of dried bay leaves
1/2 ounce mustard seed
29–32 mm hog casings

Directions

In a large bowl, mix all of the ingredients together with your hands until they are equally distributed.
Grind the mixture two times through a grinder on a medium die. 3. Using your hands, mix the ingredients again thoroughly until they become sticky and emulsified. (The sausage should stick to your hand when it’s turned upside down.)
Add the loose sausage mixture to the stuffer; pack it down to remove all of the air pockets.
Stuff the sausage into the hog casings and twist links 3 to 1 pound. (Generally, each sausage should be 5 to 6 inches long.)
Lightly poke each sausage link with a poking tool 3 or 4 times.
Put the twisted links in the refrigerator, uncovered, and chill overnight to dry out the casings.
Snip the sausage at the seams to separate them into links.
Try these other recipes from Homemade Sausage:
• How to Make Kielbasa • Irish Sausage Recipe • Pork Liver Pate and Pate Spice Recipe

Reprinted with permission from Homemade Sausage by Chris Carter and James Peisker and published by Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc, 2016. Buy this book from our store: Homemade Sausage.

PRINT RECIPE

Making your own sausage at home has never been easier or more alluring. In Homemade Sausage(Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc., 2016), the award winning team from Porter Road Butcher in Nashville has brought together all the techniques and recipes you’ll need to make sausage at home.

You can purchase this book from the MOTHER EARTH NEWS store: Homemade Sausage

Back in Porter Road Butcher’s early days, we noticed an influx of customers hailing from New Orleans who continually patronized our shop. Coming from a land where fresh sausages and local butchers weren’t the same kind of novelty that ours was (and still is) in Nashville, they expected to find products in our case similar to those they would find in the meat markets from their homeland. And though we did have a mean Andouille to offer them, we received quite a few inquiries for spicy Louisiana links. So we obliged. Hey, it’s always fun to have an excuse to experiment! We found the list of ingredients on a grocery store reconnaissance, and soon our New Orleans native customers left the shop with a giant smile on their faces and fire in their eyes and bellies.