What is the first thing you think you'd need in order to prepare this appetizing treat? That's right: Balls. A big set of balls. Because this is not health food. Let me repeat that: This is NOT health food. If you are into eating stuff that will lengthen your life, quit reading now. These are golf ball sized heart attacks. You can feel them killing you when you swallow. Several communities in America have made the cooking of these items illegal, including Ann Arbor, MI, Madison, WI, and Berkeley, CA.

Now that we've got that clear, the first actual ingredient you'll need is sausage. You could go down to the supermarket and buy some Jimmy Dean sausage, or you could do what my wife does: Go to your local farmers' market and buy your meat fresh from folks who raise and slaughter the animals themselves. You'd be surprised how much less grease is involved with any meat you buy straight from the farmer, as opposed to what you get off the grocery shelf. When browning ground beef for things like spaghetti and chili, you no longer have to have an old can sitting around to pour off all the excess grease. There is none.

Wherever you get your sausage, get a pound of it. The rest of the ingredients are retardedly simple. You can look up a hundred recipes for sausage balls on the internet and every one of them will tell you the same thing. Bisquick® (or some other biscuit mix) and shredded cheddar cheese. That's it. Three things. I add a couple of other things just because I'm a contrarian. Here are the dosages:

  • Three cups (24 oz.) of Bisquick®
  • One pound sausage
  • 12 oz. of shredded cheddar cheese
  • One half cup (4 oz.) of water
  • One egg
  • 20-30 drops of Tabasco sauce (IF you're using mild sausage)

As for the cheese, I find that you can use some generic Kraft® sharp cheddar, but it tastes better if you only use about 4 oz. of the cheap stuff and use about 8 oz. of good cheese. I prefer Canadian Black Diamond, myself. Sure, you have to shred it yourself, but it sure makes a difference in the overall taste.

As simple as the ingredients are, the mixing of them is excruciatingly hard work. Sausage is quite reluctant to being mixed with anything, but when you add Bisquick®, you are essentially creating an immotile wad which really has no intention of "working with you." I'd suggest getting some sort of large kitchen tool made for squishing stuff and doing that for a while before you attack it with your hands.

While you're working all this mixture up, try not to think about the scenes in Deadwood where they throw bodies not worth burying to the hogs down in Chinatown. The hogs eat the cowboys. The cowboys eat the sausage. The hogs eat the cowboys. The cowboys eat the bacon. It's a beautiful Circle of Life if you can get past the rooting around in mud with dead corpses part.

Preheat the oven to 375o. Get a couple of cookie sheets and grease those bad boys up. I prefer Pam olive oil cooking spray, but any sort of non-stick application will work. Form the mixture into small balls. The size of the aforementioned golf ball works quite well. Space them out on the cookie sheets and cook for seven or eight minutes. Then take them out and flip them over and cook for seven or eight more minutes.

Makes about 50 balls. They are easily frozen so that you can just get them out and warm them back up in the oven when you're ready for some more.

Most balls ever eaten in one sitting? I started to say: "Evil Catullus. Two." But that's probably not funny. Actually, I don't have any information on the record for eating sausage balls, but I can tell you from personal experience that if you get into double digits on these little bastards, you'll pay a price not too long thereafter.

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