With little equipment or time, you can make fresh sausage at home

Sometimes, you really do want to know how sausage is made.

I'm afraid to know all the details of what goes into the gray links of mechanically separated and preservative-filled meat or the plastic-wrapped tubes of salty breakfast sausage or "taco-seasoned beef," but it's worth knowing how to make freshly ground, chemical-free sausage from scratch using tools you probably already have in your kitchen.

Now, when it comes to smoked sausage, I leave it to the pros: The charcuterie masters, if you will, of the smokehouses in Elgin and Taylor, who make very nice, fast-cooking smoked sausages sold in grocery stores that keep longer than fresh sausages.

But fresh sausage — made with pork, beef, venison, bison, lamb, chicken or fish or some combination thereof — has its own purpose: In patties or links with breakfast; browned for tacos, spaghetti sauce or chili; rolled into spheres and loaves for meatballs and meatloaf. (The primary distinction between sausage and meatloaf or meatballs is the bread crumbs or egg to bind the meat.)

From the blank canvas of ground meat that is salted and bound with liquid and fat, you can use any combination of herbs, spices, aromatics, cheese and liquids like beer and wine to create a sausage as simple or complex as you'd like.

Using recipes for spicy garlic sausage and chorizo from Michael Ruhlman ("Ratio," Scribner, 2009) and Victoria Wise ("Sausage," Ten Speed Press, 2010) for reference, I set out into my garden and into my pantry for inspiration.

Cilantro, sage, oregano, thyme are in their prime right now, so I chose two of them (cilantro and sage) to mix with finely chopped green garlic — the young, scallionlike garlic plants from my garden that I thinned out — to make a sausage that tasted like a fatty burst of spring.

Fresh chorizo from Mexico, not the cured kind from Spain, is usually a little too intensely flavored for my liking, so I took a lighter approach. By combining ancho chiles with figs and spices, including pumpkin pie spice, I created a smoky sweet chorizo that I prefer over maple-sweetened sausage.

Even though you'll find low-fat sausage on grocery store shelves, sausage traditionally is made with three parts meat to one part fat. The fat binds the meat and keeps it from drying out. Because you're striving for a 75/25 mix of meat to fat, if you buy a lean cut of pork shoulder or pork butt, which is usually closer to 85/15, you'll need to add fat in the form of salt pork or its slightly more well-known cousin, bacon. Tasso or chicken schmaltz are also good sources of flavorful fat.

Now comes the tricky part that usually prevents home cooks from attempting to make sausage: Grinding the meat.

Manual or electric meat grinders are the preference of butchers like Bryan Butler, one half of the Salt and Time charcuterie team that sells both fresh and smoked sausages as well as aged and cured meats like prosciutto at the Barton Creek and HOPE farmers' markets. (To watch a video of Bryan and Salt and Time founder Ben Runkle breaking down a hog, go to austin360.com/food.)

Home meat grinders cost between $30 (manual) and $100 or more (electric) and can often be found in stores that sell restaurant, hunting or outdoor cooking supplies, but you can use a food processor or even a knife, if you're using easy-to-cut proteins like chicken and fish, to reach your target texture. (Some fresh sausages, like chorizo, are more finely ground than the meat used in a breakfast sausage.)

Or you could skip the tools and cleaning required to grind meat and use meat that has been preground at the store or farmers' market, but you certainly have more control of the meat-to-fat ratio and texture of the final product if you grind your own.

With store-bought ground meat, you don't need much more than a bowl and your hands to make sausage, and it also allows you to make smaller batches of sausage to experiment with different flavor combinations. Just be careful when scaling up if you use teaspoons and tablespoons as your measuring tool, Butler warns. "Scaling up regular recipes is a recipe for disaster," he says. "No pun intended." Because spices and salt take up wildly different amounts of space or volume, measuring by weight is a more accurate. The rule of thumb is 0.25 ounce salt for every pound of meat and fat, which works out to be about 1½ teaspoon of kosher salt, but test to be sure. Everyone's palate for salt is different, and you might find this ratio to be too salty for your liking.