Rabbit and Pork Sausage

I hunt rabbits and I’ve raised them, so this one comes at me from both directions. Rabbit is pale, delicate, extremely lean, and a little sweet — closer to a fine chicken than to red game — so it wants a gentle, French-leaning treatment rather than a big smoky one. Boned out and ground with pork and a good amount of back fat, seasoned with white wine, thyme and a little mustard, it makes a pale, mild fresh sausage that’s genuinely elegant. The one real chore is the boning: rabbit is a fiddly little animal.

Ingredients

MEAT BLOCK (1,810 g / 4 lb)

• 900 g (2 lb) boned rabbit meat, all silverskin removed — ~50%
• 450 g (1 lb) lean pork shoulder — ~25%
• 450 g (1 lb) pork back fat — ~25% (rabbit is one of the leanest meats there is; it needs the fat and the pork to carry it)

SEASONING

• 32 g salt (~1.8%)
• 4 g white pepper
• 5 g fresh thyme, chopped (or 2 g dried)
• 6 g fresh garlic, minced
• 3 g Dijon or dry mustard
• 1 g ground nutmeg
• 90 ml (⅓ cup) dry white wine, cold

NO cure — fresh sausage

• 28–32 mm hog casing

Directions

1. Bone it out: this is the work. Rabbit is small and its meat clings to a lot of thin bone — take your time, and save the bones for a stock. Pull the silverskin as you go.
2. Keep pork in the mix: half rabbit, quarter lean pork, quarter back fat. Straight rabbit-and-fat is too delicate to hold together well; the pork gives it backbone.
3. Grind cold: through a 1/4” (6 mm) plate, everything near-frozen, together.
4. Mix gently with the wine and seasoning — just to a bind. This is a mild sausage; don’t beat it into a paste.
5. Stuff: 28–32 mm hog casing at ~13 cm, or leave bulk for a pâté-style crumble.
6. Cook gently: poach, or brown in butter and finish low. Like all the lean game here, it dries out if you push it — pull it right at cooked-through.

Notes

Squirrel works here too — and I’ve made it. Squirrel is a little darker and nuttier than rabbit but just as lean and just as fiddly to bone; treat it exactly the same. Both are small animals, so a batch takes a pile of them.

This is the French cousin of the collection. Rabbit terrines and rillettes are classic French charcuterie, and this fresh sausage is the simplest end of that tradition — pale meat, white wine, thyme, mustard. If you want to push it that direction, it makes a lovely coarse pâté baked in a terrine instead of stuffed.

Fat is still the rule. Even at 25% added back fat plus the pork, this is a delicate, fairly lean sausage. Do not try to make it leaner — the fat is what keeps rabbit from going dry and cottony.