Beef breakfast sausage

Question

I found a beef sausage recipe using ground beef. The flavor is great, but it fries up kind of stiff. I was wondering if I could put oatmeal or something in it to give it a more spongy texture, like traditional pork sausage. My question is: How can I make my ground beef breakfast sausage have a pork texture?

Answer 1

Professional charcutier here. We usually only make beef sausage from grass fed beef, which means our ground beef is very lean. Depending on the recipe, we have various tricks for improving the texture:

• We add beef fat if available to add richness, or even pork fat if we don't have enough beef fat.

• For a 5lb batch of ground beef for hamburgers, we'll add an egg or two and that
  will give it some cohesion.

• As thatdude says, cooked rice is a good way to give your sausage some starchiness, as in boudin.

• You could try mixing your sausage with heavy cream in addition to
  adding eggs (as is done with traditional bratwurst)

• Add about half a cup of milk powder for every 5 pounds of sausage.

Any one of the above should accomplish what you're seeking. You can even combine some methods. In our bratwurst, we add milk powder, eggs, and heavy cream. Experiment and see where your texture is after that!

Answer 2

Another alternative would be to possibly try adding rice to the sausage like a boudan (sp?) that you would find in Louisiana and Alabama. This may change the flavor a little bit, but it will make it a softer sausage.