My signature scrapple recipe

I've been making scrapple much of my adult life. I began in grad school, making it the traditional way with a heavy-duty hand-cranked meat grinder. But over various life changes I parted ways with the grinder and stopped making scrapple.

Then a few years ago I found an online recipe for "easy scrapple" using ground pork. I tried it and we liked it. I experimented and ended up with an easy scrapple recipe I liked. Here it is.

Then, a while back, I saw a sale on a small kitchen meat grinder. I bought it and decided to return to traditional scrapple. Interestingly enough, now it tasted too "gamey" for us, compared to the easy scrapple we were used to. So I started experimenting again.

I now have, I think, the outline of a permanent recipe that we both find very tasty indeed. And it uses the grinder. Here it is.

Rough chop the following: a large carrot, a medium turnip, a medium onion, a stalk of celery. Cover with water. Add chopped garlic and a bay leaf. Season with salt and pepper and optional seasonings. Sometimes I use about a TB of Italian seasoning.

Bring to a boil and simmer for at least an hour.

Mix one and a half pounds of ground meat, and here you can experiment. What I like is: one pound of Jimmy Dean Sage Sausage, 1/4 lb of Dean Maple sausage and 1/4 lb of Dean Hot sausage.
Shape the mixture into medium sized meat balls and add to the simmering veggie liquid. Keep simmering for another hour.

Drain and cool.

Into a bowl put: the meat balls, 3 or 4 chunks of carrot, 3 or 4 chunks of turnip and a handful of onions. Mix everything by hand and put it through the grinder, medium grind.

Add two cups of remaining liquid above to pot and bring to simmer. Add the ground meat mixture above

Mix: one cup of white oatmeal and a package of gelatin. Add a cup of cooled liquid above. Add everything to simmering pot. Continue simmering and stirring until thick, pour into loaf pan.

Cool to room temperature, then into refrigerator overnight.

As you can see, there is lots of room here for your personal touch. The key, we think, is the veggie liquid. We save the leftover, skim the fat, and use it to drink or as broth. It's tasty!

Have fun.

See photos of my process.