Spicy Italian Calabrian Chili Sausage Recipe

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Cooking With Anadi

12K subscribers · sweet and spicy calabrian peppers with fennel and anise

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A topping that I’ve grown to love on my pizzas is a spicy sausage. Something that’s so rewarding to me is making typically store-bought foods at home. I do this by experimenting with homemade spice blends, such as Homemade Taco Seasoning, and Homemade Italian Seasoning and also homemade sausage, such as my Homemade Mild Turkey Sausage! You don’t always have to go to the store to have a great sausage! Whether you need it for pizza or pasta, this sausage is absolutely so easy to make and it will be extremely versatile! All you need is ground chicken, turkey or pork and some spices, which most probably is already in your pantry!

The key to this recipe is the Italian Calabrian peppers that are used, shown below.

These peppers are sweet and spicy and are marinated in sunflower oil. The chiles add a lot of flavor and some heat to the sausage. I also add a touch of Thai green chilies, which are much spicier. If spice isn’t your game, then don’t worry! You can omit the Thai green chilies or follow my Mild Italian Turkey Sausage instead! If you want a bit of heat but not too much, use the Calabrian peppers but omit the green chilies.

If you don’t get freshly prepared sausages at your grocery store, why not treat yourself by making this homemade Calabrian Chili Sausage today! And if you do, just think how accomplished you will feel after you enjoy sausage that you can truly customize to your own tastes. I can’t wait for you to give it a try and to let me know what you thought about it in the comments! How do you plan on using this sausage recipe first?

Tools Needed

• Mortar and pestle
• Rolling pin
• Large bowl
• Mixing spoon

Ingredients for Spicy Italian Calabrian Sausage

Here’s what you’ll need to make this excellent turkey sausage recipe!

• Ground chicken, turkey or pork
• Calabrian chili
• Thai green chilies
• Fennel seeds
• Anise seeds
• Honey
• Water
• Salt
• Pepper

How to Make Spicy Italian Calabrian Sausage From Scratch?

Preparing the Sausage

Begin by crushing the fennel seeds and the anise seeds.

If you don’t have a mortar and pestle, measure and arrange the whole spices on a paper towel.

Fold the paper towel over the seeds, making sure to have the spices gather in one spot.

Using the back of a knife or a rolling pin to crush the seeds. It does not need to be completely powdered, the coarseness adds to the texture and flavor of the sausage. Crush just enough to break down the spices and release their flavor and fragrance.

In a large bowl, add the minced meat (chicken/turkey/pork).

Using a spatula, mix all the ingredients together until well combined with the meat.

What Calabrian Sausage Actually Is (and What It Isn't)

Search for Calabrian sausage and you will get two completely different things. One is the cured stuff from the region itself, salami like soppressata and the spreadable, chili-heavy nduja, which is fermented and aged for weeks before anyone eats it. The other, which is what this recipe is, is a fresh Italian-style sausage seasoned with Calabrian chili. There is no curing, no casing, no meat grinder and no waiting. It is a bowl, ground meat, and about five minutes.

The Calabrian chilies are the whole point and they are not interchangeable with generic heat. They come jarred, marinated in sunflower oil, and they are sweet and fruity as much as they are hot, which is why a single teaspoon of chopped chili flavors the whole batch rather than just burning it. The Thai green chilies stacked on top are the sharp, immediate heat. Leave them out and you still have a properly spicy sausage; leave out both and you have a mild one.

Worth noticing what is not in the ingredient list: no garlic powder, no onion powder, no paprika, no dried red pepper flakes. The flavor comes from two fresh chilies, two crushed seeds and a teaspoon of honey. If you cannot find Calabrian chilies, the recipe notes suggest half a teaspoon of red pepper flakes, which brings the heat without the fruitiness, or an equal amount of harissa paste, which brings smoke instead.

Tips for the Best Homemade Calabrian Chili Sausage

Crush the seeds, do not powder them. A quarter teaspoon each of fennel and anise seed is all that goes in, and how you break them down matters more than the amount. The recipe is explicit that the coarseness is part of the texture, so you want cracked seeds that still have edges. A mortar and pestle is easiest, but folding them into a paper towel and rolling over them with a rolling pin or leaning on the flat of a knife works just as well.

Using both fennel and anise is a deliberate choice. Most Italian sausage recipes stop at fennel; anise seed adds a rounder, sweeter licorice note behind it. If you only have one, caraway can stand in for the fennel, and star anise can cover the anise seed at half the quantity because it is considerably stronger.

The teaspoon of honey and the teaspoon of water are not filler. The honey is the faint sweetness that makes a sausage taste like Italian sausage rather than seasoned mince, and the water keeps 6 ounces of lean ground chicken from tightening up and going dry. Maple syrup or agave nectar swap in for the honey at the same amount. Mix until everything is evenly combined and then stop, because working ground meat past that point makes it bouncy and springy instead of tender.

Ground chicken is what the recipe is written around, at 6 ounces for 2 servings. Turkey is an equal swap and just as lean; pork is an equal swap and noticeably richer, and if you want something closest to a shop-bought Italian sausage, pork is the one to use. Whichever you pick, the seasoning stays the same.

How to Cook It and What to Use It For

This is a loose sausage, not links, so it cooks the way any ground meat does: a skillet over medium-high heat, broken up with a spoon, until it is browned through and the fat has picked up the chili oil. It does not need extra oil at the start if you are using pork. Because it is a fresh mixture rather than a cured one, cook it through completely and treat leftovers like any cooked ground meat.

The obvious home for it is pizza, which is where this recipe started, and it holds up well because the crumbles crisp on top of the cheese rather than steaming. Beyond that it is excellent stirred through a tomato pasta sauce, folded into a baked pasta, spooned onto garlic bread, tucked into a breakfast sandwich, or scattered over a tray of roasted vegetables. Since you control the chilies, it is easy to make a batch mild enough for the whole table and simply add heat at the plate. Homemade Italian sausage really is this straightforward.

Bulk Sausage, Links or Patties? How to Scale and Store It

What this homemade Italian sausage recipe gives you is bulk sausage: a seasoned loose mince with no casing. That is the most useful form to have in a fridge, because you can crumble it into a pan, press it into sausage patties for a breakfast sandwich, or roll it into meatballs, and none of that requires a stuffer or a length of hog casing. Sweet Italian sausage links, the pale coils you see at the counter, are the same idea taken two steps further: usually milder, usually sweetened, and stuffed. This one is neither mild nor sweet.

Scaling is simple arithmetic on the recipe's own numbers. It is written for 6 oz of meat and 2 servings, so a full pound is a shade under three times the recipe and a 12-oz pack is exactly double. In metric that is 170 g as written and 500 g for a generous batch, and every seasoning multiplies with it, including the salt, which is the one people forget. If you are making a proper batch, a stand mixer with the paddle attachment on low for about thirty seconds mixes it more evenly than hands do and keeps the fat from warming up.

On the meat itself: ground chicken is the default here, turkey is an equal swap, and ground pork is the equal swap that gets you closest to a butcher's version. If you grind your own, pork butt is the cut sausage is traditionally made from, because it sits at roughly the 20 to 30 percent fat that keeps a sausage juicy. Leaner grinds are exactly why this recipe includes a teaspoon of water.

Two things worth flagging against most Italian sausage recipes you will find. There is no garlic in this one at all, which is unusual; the flavor is carried by the chilies and the crushed seeds instead. If you want it, a clove of minced garlic or half a teaspoon of garlic powder folds in without upsetting anything. And where many recipes reach for brown sugar, this uses a teaspoon of honey, which dissolves into raw mince far more evenly than sugar crystals do.

For storage, portion the raw mix flat inside freezer bags, press the air out and freeze it in a thin sheet rather than a mound — it thaws in a fraction of the time and you can snap off half a bag. Label it, because raw seasoned mince all looks the same after a week. Thaw in the fridge overnight and use it within a day of thawing.

Sausage and Peppers, and Other Dishes to Build Around It

The dish this sausage is made for is sausage and peppers. Get a wide pan properly hot with a little extra-virgin olive oil, break the sausage in and leave it alone long enough to take a nice sear on one side before you stir — that browning is most of the flavor and you lose it if you fidget. Lift the sausage out, drop the heat to medium heat, and cook two sliced red bell peppers and a couple of medium red onions in the fat until they slump and sweeten, which takes longer than you think. Return the sausage, and finish it however you like: as is, piled into a hoagie roll, or with a can of tomatoes stirred in and torn fresh basil over the top.

From there it goes almost anywhere. Spoon it over soft polenta and you have dinner in twenty minutes. Stir it through soups — a white bean and kale soup is the obvious one, and the chili oil in the sausage seasons the whole pot. Cook it down with greens: broccoli rabe is the traditional partner and its bitterness is exactly right against the heat, though broccolini is gentler and easier to find, and a couple of bunches of spinach wilted in at the end costs you nothing. Sliced mushrooms browned alongside it work well too, and mild banana peppers are worth adding if you want the tang without more heat.