Patties and Bulk

Not every sausage needs a casing, and I want to make a case for the ones that don’t — because bulk sausage is where most people should start, and because a few of the best sausages in the world have never seen a casing at all.

The word “sausage” comes from salsus, salted. It is about salted, seasoned, ground meat. The tube is packaging.

Why start here

If you have never made sausage, make bulk sausage first. You get to practice the two things that actually matter — the cold chain and the bind — without adding the two things that are fiddly and demoralizing on a first attempt, which are casings and stuffing.

You will know within one fried patty whether your seasoning is right and whether your bind developed. That is a complete feedback loop in twenty minutes, and it is a far better teacher than a bad first batch of links.

I still make more bulk breakfast sausage than anything else, because it’s what actually gets eaten in this house.

What changes without a casing

Less than you’d think, and the differences are worth knowing.

The bind matters more, not less. A casing holds a sausage together mechanically. Without one, the primary bind is doing all the structural work. A patty with a weak bind falls apart in the pan; the same mix in a casing would have held. So if anything, mix a touch further for patties.

Fat can go slightly lower. A casing traps rendering fat and keeps it in contact with the meat. A patty in a pan lets it run. I’ll take a breakfast patty down toward 25% where I’d want 30% in a link, because the fat that renders out isn’t coming back.

No cure needed, usually. Bulk sausage is a fresh product eaten within days or frozen. It doesn’t need Cure #1 unless you’re going to smoke it.

Seasoning reads stronger. More surface area meets the pan, more browning, more direct contact with the tongue. I season bulk slightly lighter than the same mix destined for a casing.

Forming patties

Weigh them. Sounds fussy; it isn’t. Even patties cook evenly. I use 2 oz for breakfast, 4 oz for a sandwich patty. A scale and a quick portioning takes no longer than eyeballing and the results are visibly better.

Cold hands, or better, cold tools. Same argument as everywhere: warm hands soften the fat. Wetting your hands with cold water stops the meat sticking and keeps some heat off.

A dimple in the middle. Press a shallow depression into the center of each patty with your thumb. Meat contracts as it cooks and a flat patty domes into a ball; the dimple gives it somewhere to go and the patty cooks flat.

Don’t compress hard. Press just enough to hold the shape. A patty squeezed dense eats tough — you want it to be held together by the bind, not by compaction.

Parchment between them if you’re stacking, and they’ll separate cleanly from frozen.

Chubs, rolls, and the freezer

The most practical form for bulk sausage is a roll, wrapped tight in plastic wrap or butcher paper into a cylinder about 2 inches across, twisted at the ends like a sweet wrapper. Freeze it. Then you slice patties straight off the frozen roll with a heavy knife, exactly like slicing a log of cookie dough, and they go straight in the pan.

This is how I keep breakfast sausage, and it means there is always sausage without any planning.

Vacuum sealing is better for anything staying in the freezer more than a couple of months — ground meat has enormous surface area and freezer burn is fast. A tight roll in plastic is fine for six weeks; vacuum-sealed it’s fine for a year.

Label with the date and the formula. This is not optional if you make more than one kind. Frozen sausage rolls all look identical, and “is this the sage one or the hot Italian?” gets answered in the pan, badly. See scaling and recordkeeping.

Crumble, and cooking bulk

For crumbled sausage — for gravy, for a pizza, for S.O.S. — break it up in a cold pan and let it come up to heat with the pan. Dropping cold sausage into a screaming hot pan sets the outside instantly and the crumbles end up with a hard shell and a raw middle.

Break it with a wooden spoon or a stiff spatula as it warms and it separates into even crumbles. Don’t stir constantly; let it sit long enough to brown.

Brown is flavor. Most home cooks under-brown bulk sausage — they cook it until it’s gray, which is done but not good. Get real color on it.

The sausages that are genuinely meant to be uncased

This is the part I’d like people to know, because “patties” sounds like the beginner option and several of these are anything but.

American breakfast sausage. Sage, black pepper, sometimes a little brown sugar or maple, sometimes red pepper. It is a patty by tradition — the pan-fried breakfast patty is the canonical form, not a compromise. Mine is on the breakfast favorites side of the site.

Sheftalia and skinless kebabs. Sheftalia is Cypriot and technically wrapped — in caul fat rather than casing, which is its own beautiful thing. Caul melts away entirely in cooking and leaves the sausage self-basted.

Ćevapi. The Balkan skinless grilled sausage, and one of the great ones. Beef and lamb, minced fine, worked hard for a strong bind, rested, then formed into fingers and grilled. It has no casing by definition — the bind is everything, which is why ćevapi mix is worked so much harder than a bratwurst. I have a recipe for these and they are worth the effort.

Merguez is usually cased in sheep, but the mix works beautifully as a patty.

Longaniza and some chorizos are commonly sold and used as bulk — Mexican chorizo in particular is a fresh, bulk, crumbled product in most of its actual use, which is one of the clearest lines between it and the dry sliced Spanish kind.

Caul fat deserves its own mention: the lacy membrane from around the stomach, used to wrap crépinettes, faggots, sheftalia and coarse pâtés. It holds the shape while raw and vanishes in the heat, leaving fat behind. If your butcher will get you some, it is one of the best ways to make an uncased sausage behave like a cased one.

Crépinettes and the flat-sausage family

A crépinette is a flattened patty of seasoned forcemeat wrapped in caul — French, old, and very good. It sits exactly between a patty and a sausage: formed like a patty, self-basting like a link.

Faggots are the British version, coarser and with offal in them, baked in gravy. Skinless breakfast sausage, sausage meat for stuffing, and the sausage in a Scotch egg are all the same idea: the mix is the product, the packaging is optional.

Sausage meat as an ingredient

Half of what a bulk sausage is for is being an ingredient in something else, and this is where the 136 sausage-using dishes in my collection come from.

Sausage meat is a seasoned, bound, fatted forcemeat. It goes into stuffing for a bird, into a meatloaf, into a ragù, under the skin of a chicken, into a pie, into a Scotch egg, into gravy. A good bulk sausage made in a morning is the base for a fortnight of other cooking.

The point I’d make: making your own sausage meat is the single highest-leverage thing in this whole section, because it is easy, it needs no equipment beyond a grinder, and it improves a dozen other dishes immediately.

Testing, and the one habit worth keeping

The patty fry test is a formality when you’re making patties — the first patty is the test. Fry one, taste it, adjust the whole batch, then form the rest.

That is the entire advantage of bulk sausage in one sentence, and it is why I still recommend starting here.

Part of Making Sausage. Next: puddings and loaves — the sausages that are cooked before they’re sausage.