Sourcing

Every other page in this section is about what the ingredients are. This one is about where I get them — which turns out to matter more than almost anything, because you cannot make a better sausage than your worst ingredient, and the worst ingredient is usually the one you didn’t think to source carefully. I’ve written the whole argument for why local, known meat beats commodity meat over on the meat itself and the vanished butcher; those are the opinion pages. This one is the practical one: here’s my actual supply chain, ingredient by ingredient, and what to ask for.

The meat — thirty miles and a first-name basis

Here’s my standard, and I hold to it: I source all my meat from farms within about thirty miles of me, and I know them by name. I know what the animals eat, how they’re cared for, and how they’re butchered — because in most cases I’m the one butchering them. That’s not a purity flex; it’s the single biggest lever I have on the quality of a sausage, and it’s available to more people than they think, especially here in Michigan where there’s still real farm country close to town.

I butcher everything myself except hogs and beef. The smaller animals — lamb, goats, rabbits, poultry — I break down at home, which means I control the trim, save exactly the fat I want, and nothing gets wasted. The big animals are too much for my operation, so for hogs and beef I work with a local butcher, or help one, and bring home the cuts and the trim and the fat I need. Either way, I know the animal. (And when an old goat has reached the end of its useful life, it doesn’t go to waste either — that meat gets butchered and long-braised for tacos and burritos, which is its own small argument for nose-to-tail.)

For anyone who doesn’t raise or hunt their own, the practical version of this is: find a real butcher shop or a local farm, and build a relationship. Then you can actually ask for what sausage needs, which is not what’s in the case:

• Fat — specifically back fat. This is the request that marks you as someone who knows what they’re doing. Most people never ask for fat; a sausage-maker asks for hard pork back fat by name (here’s why back fat and not leaf fat). A good butcher will save it for you.
• Whole primals and trim. Pork butt/shoulder for the workhorse blend, jowl for flavor, belly for bacon and richness. Ask about trim — the odd bits that are perfect for the grinder and cheap.
• Order ahead. Fat, casings, offal, and blood are all things a butcher sets aside if you ask in advance and won’t have if you don’t. The relationship is the sourcing.

Wild game — the most local meat there is

The other half of my meat supply doesn’t come from a farm at all. I hunt — deer, bear, goose, wild turkey, rabbit — and fish and forage besides, and a lot of my sausage is built on that game (my collection is full of it). You can’t get more local or more known than an animal you took yourself. Game is lean, so it needs added pork fat — I run roughly a third fatty pork into a venison or goose sausage — and it carries its own safety rules, especially the trichinae rule for bear, which I take seriously and you should too. But as a source, wild game is the ultimate expression of the thirty-mile idea: zero miles, and I know exactly what it ate.

The cure, the casings, and the cultures — the specialist stuff

Some ingredients you can’t get local, and shouldn’t try to improvise — these come from sausage-supply houses (the online outfits that serve home and small-shop makers), and it’s worth knowing what to order and what not to grocery-substitute:

• Curing salts. Cure #1 and Cure #2 come from the sausage-supply houses, not the grocery store — buy them clearly labeled, keep them clearly labeled, and store them where they’ll never be mistaken for salt. Morton Tender Quick is the exception you can get at a regular store (my mother’s summer sausage uses it). Don’t try to make your own cure; the whole point is a precise, safe, dyed dose.
• Casings. Natural hog, sheep, and beef casings come packed in salt from the supply houses (and from a good butcher) — they keep for a long time salted in the fridge. Fibrous and collagen casings come from the same suppliers. Buy the caliber to match your product (the sizing and handling is in the equipment section).
• Cultures. Starter and mold cultures are mail-order, and you keep them in the freezer — they’re living organisms with a shelf life. Order fresh, store cold, and rehydrate them in non-chlorinated water when you use them.

The spices — P.S. Seasonings, and fresh where it counts

For seasonings, my main source is P.S. Seasonings — a Wisconsin sausage-and-seasoning house that a lot of serious makers use — and I buy a fair amount of my spice blends and cures there. But I keep it minimal on the pre-made powders, on purpose, because the spice page is right that fresh beats old-jar every time. So the powders I buy are a base, not the whole flavor: I lean hard on fresh garlic straight from the bulb — never dried garlic powder — and fresh herbs wherever the sausage will take them. That’s the one line I’ll draw here that connects to the restaurant I want to open: fresh garlic, fresh herbs, minimal powders, and only natural casings except where a fibrous one is genuinely needed. I’m not ready to lay out the whole restaurant yet, but the sourcing standard behind it is exactly the one on this page.

Whole spices, bought whole and ground fresh, keep their oils far longer than pre-ground — so for the spices that carry a sausage (the caraway in a Landjäger, the fennel in an Italian, the marjoram in a Nürnberger), buy them whole when you can and grind them the day you use them.

The honest summary

So the supply chain, top to bottom: meat and fat from within thirty miles or from my own hunting, butchered by me or with a butcher I know; cure, casings, and cultures from the sausage-supply specialists; spice blends from P.S. Seasonings kept minimal; and fresh garlic and herbs from as close as the garden. None of it is exotic and most of it is cheaper than you’d expect once you’re buying trim and fat instead of retail cuts. The expensive part isn’t the money — it’s the relationships and the planning, the ordering-ahead and the knowing-your-farmer. That’s the part the grocery store optimized away, and it’s the part that makes the sausage worth eating.

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Part of Sausage Ingredients — the last chapter, where all the others come from. The argument for why local and known meat matters is on why sausage tastes different today. Back to the sausage program.