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Award-winning chef, author and forager Alan Bergo. Food is all around you.

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Homemade Italian Sausage with Bee Balm

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dried wild bergamotI try to remember to dry as much stuff as I can to use during the Winter, which if you live in the Midwest you know can mean a lot of time in doors fighting cabin fever and looking for things to do.

Inevitably I usually have plenty of bee balm (Monarda fistulosa) every year since it’s easy to harvest and pretty similar to other dried herbs you probably already have in your kitchen like oregano and thyme.

I’ve made plenty of things with the dried bergamot, but one of the best things, and the one I’ve served most often at restaurants is this sausage. It’s a great bee balm recipe to try if you have some dried leaves from the past season. 

bergamot italian sausage

I’ll always remember the best Italian sausage I ever had, eaten 0n one of my first days working at the now shuttered Il Vesco Vino in St. Paul. The sausage was on my station (the grill) and was the work of Roman Butcher Fillipo Caffari, now owner of the Butcher Block in Minneapolis.

bergamot italian sausage

The sausages were big and thick, flecked with fennel seed, perfectly salty, respectably spicy, but most of all they were porky and extremely fatty (read as juicy). I loved sneaking bites here and there during service. After a while, the restaurant changed a bit and we stopped buying sausages from Fillipo and made them ourselves, since my chef used to work for him and knew the recipe.

A couple years later, I wanted to re-create the sausages in some way and called my old chef for the recipe. I was shocked at how few ingredients were in it: just pork, fennel, salt, pepper and red pepper flakes.

I’ve made plenty of complicated sausages (that were delicious) but there is really something to be said for less is more. Sometimes the most delicious things are the most simple, with simple food though, comes a need for good technique. My sous chef and I had an exchange about the sausage before we made it a few months ago at Lucias. It went something like this.

Me: So often less is more, simple food taste so much more pure

Sous Chef: Simple things are also way easier to fuck up

In hindsight, after reading into his words a bit I might be a little hard on employees for mistakes here and there, but he’s right. If you forget something simple like toasting the fennel seed in a fennel sausage, it won’t taste the same, something will be missing. When only a few ingredients are in a dish, they better be treated right.

Back to the sausage itself, it’s basically Fillipo’s recipe, with the flavor of the bergamot as the main character instead of fennel. Eating the finished version made me think both about my past, and a future where I have more time to pick herbs and make sausage.

bergamot-italian-sausage_

 

bergamot italian sausage
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Homemade Italian Sausage with Bee Balm

Yield: 15 six ounce sausages
Prep Time1 hr
Course: Appetizer, Main Course
Cuisine: Italian
Keyword: Bergamot, Italian Sausage, Wild Oregano

Ingredients

  • 5 lbs pork shoulder cut into 1 inch pieces and chilled
  • 1.5 tablespoons kosher salt
  • 2 cloves of garlic to yield roughly 1 tablespoon finely chopped
  • 3 teaspoons crushed red pepper flakes
  • 4 tablespoons crushed bergamot picked over for tough stems

Instructions

  • Combine the diced pork and remaining ingredients and mix well. Chill the mixture and allow it to sit overnight so the flavors can meld.
  • The next day, grind the pork through a coarse die of a meat grinder, then mix in a stand mixer with the paddle attachment. Remove a small piece of sausage and cook to double check the seasoning, then adjust as needed.
  • Pack the sausage into casings and tie off roughly 6 ounce sausages. From here the sausages can be refrigerated until needed, or wrapped tightly in plastic and frozen in labeled, dated packages.

Notes

If you don't have a meat grinder at home (if you have a kitchen aid mixer you should just buy the attachment already) you can always season pre-ground pork and let it sit overnight to infuse, then make patties and cook. I may pack this into casings or leave it loose depending on what I want to use them for. For example, if I'm making pizza or pasta sauce, I'll probably leave it loose. If need a piece of meat for a small plate on my bar menu, or if I'm going to grill the sausages, I'll pack them into casings.

More 

Foraging and Cooking with Bee Balm 

bergamot italian sausage

The sausages are excellent braised until soft Italian style with beans, diced mirepoix and wilted kale.

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. McRae Anderson

    January 7, 2017 at 11:24 am

    Are you talking about bee balm?

    Reply
    • [email protected]

      January 19, 2017 at 9:35 am

      I believe he is!

      Reply
    • Alan Bergo

      January 30, 2017 at 6:39 pm

      Yes, but only the wild version. Garden versions have a different flavor. Monarda fistulosa.

      Reply
  2. Sarah Lecouffe Axtell

    January 7, 2017 at 12:24 pm

    Wonderful timing. Ill be doing up sausage this week and am happy to see i can do a few rounds of your italian recipe (thanks!) with bee balm/bergamot I dried this summer. ours has a strong thymol taste and easy to use in place of oregano !

    Reply
  3. Peter Jaeger

    January 7, 2017 at 9:28 pm

    Can’t wait to try this with a little venison mixed in. Really appreciate everything you share here and thank you for the dynamite dinner at Lucia’s tonight! That was our best meal ever.

    Reply

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FORAGER | CHEF®
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Author: The Forager Chef’s Book of Flora
James Beard Award ‘22
Host: Field Forest Feast 👇
streaming on @tastemade

Alan Bergo
Had a blast on the last day of the @wild.fed shoot Had a blast on the last day of the @wild.fed shoot cooking in the Garden of Eden, a.k.a Sam Thayer’s orchard. 

We’d planned on making ground squirrel, bullfrog and crayfish gumbo but only the crayfish came through. Luckily I had some back up andouille just in case. 

It’s may not be traditional, but gumbo with crayfish broth, a heap of @mushroomforaginginmn porcini, milkweed pods (in lieu of okra) wild rice and crayfish-chanterelle salad didn’t suck. 6 of us polished off a gallon 😁.

H/o to chef Lenny Russo who I pestered with questions on frog-based foods beforehand. Hyper-local meals like this are what we made at Heartland in St Paul during my tenure there. 

@danielvitalis 
@grantguiliano 

#ditchlobster #mudbugs #gumbo #crayfish #wildrice #wildfed
Long, fun day snatching crayfish out of the water Long, fun day snatching crayfish out of the water by hand with Sam Thayer and @danielvitalis for @wild.fed 

Daniel and Sam were the apex predators, but I got a few. 

Without a net catching crayfish by hand is definitely a wax-on wax-off sort of skill. Clears your mind. 

They’re going into gumbo with porcini, sausage and milkweed pods today. 

#crayfish #ninjareflexes #waxonwaxoff #normalthings #onset🎥🎬
Working all day on preps for cattail lateral rhizo Working all day on preps for cattail lateral rhizomes and blueberries for this weeks shoot with @wildfed 

Been a few years since I worked with these. Thankfully Sam Thayer dropped a couple off for me to work with. They’re tender, crisp and delicious. 

Sam mentioned their mild flavor and texture could be because they don’t have to worry about predators eating them, since they grow in the muck of cattail marshes. 

I think they could use a pet name. Pond tusk? Swamp spears? Help me out here. 😂

Nature makes the coolest things. 

#itcamefromthepond #cattail #rhizomes #foraging #typhalatifolia
I liked the staff meal I made for Mondays shoot so I liked the staff meal I made for Mondays shoot so much we filmed it instead of the original dish I’d planned. 

Cooked natural wild rice (not the black shiny stuff) is great hot, cold, sweet or savory. It’s a perfect, filling lunch for a long day of berry picking. 

I make them with whatever I have on hand. Mushrooms will fade into the background a little here, so I use a bunch of them, along with lots of herbs and hickory nut oil + dill flowers. 

I’m eating the leftovers today back up in the barrens (hopefully) getting some more bluebs for another shoot this week w @wild.fed 

#wilwilwice #wildrice #chanterelles #campfood #castironcooking
Baby’s first homegrown mushrooms! Backyard wine Baby’s first homegrown mushrooms! Backyard wine caps on hardwood sawdust from my lumberjack buddy.

Next up blewits. Spawn from @northsporemushrooms

#winecaps #strophariaaeruginosa #allthemushroomtags
It’s wild cherry season. I’ll be picking from It’s wild cherry season. I’ll be picking from my favorite spot tomorrow a.m. and have room for a couple helpers. It’s at an event on a farm just south of St. Cloud. 

If you’re interested send me a message and I’ll raffle off the spots. Plenty of cherries to go around. I’ll be leading a short plant walk around the farm too. 

#chokecherries #foraging #prunusvirginiana #summervibes
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