Sweet Italian Turkey Sausage

Turkey sausage gets a bad rap- some people find it is dry and flavorless- but I think that properly made, it’s tasty, even without the addition of pork fat. It has a lighter flavor and is much leaner than most sausages, but has that familiar sausage texture and flavor. 

The key to making good turkey sausage is not just to treat it as a substitute for pork or venison- it’s got its own thing going on. Treating poultry sausages as a separate category, and brining the meat before grinding it, is the key to a juicy, flavorful turkey sausage. The brine ups the moisture content, which will help keep the sausage moist while it cooks. It also adds a subtle base flavor that works well with the Italian herbs.

You can use any brine you want, but keep the flavors mild. I use this wet brine recipe.

You can make this sausage with either white or dark meat, or a mixture of both. The dark meat of the legs has more depth of flavor, and looks and tastes more like traditional sausage. If using white meat, the sausage will have a much lighter taste and texture. I used mostly dried herbs because there's not much for fresh herbs in our garden in the winter, but if you have fresh herbs to work with, it’ll make this recipe even better.

You can case the sausage if you want- we didn’t, because we were making the sausage for a friend who has alpha gal, the dreaded “red meat allergy” that is caused by a tick bite, and the pork casings would have meant he couldn’t eat it. So we kept this sausage loose, for pasta sauces, meatballs, and lasagna. Even without the addition of pork fat, the meatballs we made out of the sausage were perfect- not dry, not crumbly, but flavorful and succulent.

Turkey Sweet Italian Sausage Recipe

As always, we use metric measurements and go by percentage weight for our sausage recipes. We do this to make the recipes easy to scale and replicate exactly, batch after batch. If you’re thinking of getting into sausage making and don’t own a kitchen scale, please do yourself the favor of buying one. They’re inexpensive relative to the cash outlay of all the other equipment you’ll need to pick up, and will save you a lot of effort in terms of scaling recipes into imperial measurements. To measure your ingredients, first weigh the meat you are using, and then calculate the weight of all the other ingredients based on the weight of the meat.

Prep time: 1 hour

Ingredients:

Turkey meat- breast or leg, or a mix of both

1.5% salt

1.5% garlic, minced

.25% fennel seed, toasted, crushed

.25% black pepper

.5% sweet paprika

.25% basil, dried

.25% oregano, dried

.25% savory, dried

.25% parsley, dried

2% water or white wine

Method:

Brine the turkey meat overnight. Remove from brine, debone, and remove skin and any tendons. Cut into approximately 1 inch cubes. Weigh the cubed meat in grams and record that weight- use it to calculate the amount of the remaining ingredients on the list.

Combine all remaining ingredients with the turkey meat and mix well. Grind through a fine plate.

Sweet Italian Turkey Meatballs

1# sweet Italian turkey sausage

½ cup breadcrumbs

¼ cup grated parmesan

2 eggs

Mix ingredients and form into 1 inch balls. Smaller meatballs cook faster, and because these do not have a lot of fat, the shorter cook time keeps the meatballs juicy. 

Brown over medium high heat and finish in the oven at 300-350F or simmer them in your favorite red sauce until internal temperature reaches 150F.

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