I have been tweaking my home made pizza recipe for years. I am currently in the middle of a self-help experiment to make my own "Hot Italian Sausage". For years I have been using Johnsonville "Hot Italian Sausage", not real deal Italian sausage like I used to get growing up in new england, but close enough. For the last few months Walmart stopped stocking it. I checked with Johnsonville and nobody in my area ordered any. Not surprising, hot Italian is not exactly a red neck delicacy.
To truly DIY my own sausage, I recently bought a meat grinder that uses the power take off from my Kitchenaide blender. I do not need to push sausage into casings, I can cook up some loose sausage to top off my pizza.
Last weekend I did two 1# experiments. My first pound almost was too hot to eat. My eyes were watering and my nose was running.
My second experiment was actually edible but not right. I found a credible sausage recipe on the WWW but it was for making a 7# batch. Trying to scale that recipe down required resolution finer than my 0.1G scale.
I purchased a 0.01G resolution scale**** that should work. I have reduced the recipe to 4 key ingredients, there is a 5th ingredient for variably adding heat, hot pepper paste. A jar of that is due in today. Not sure I need more heat, I threw some of my dehydrated jalapeños from my garden two years ago and that brought more than enough heat.
Now that I have adequate accuracy to translate that recipe down to small batches my first experiment will be to strictly follow the recipe. If that is too bland I can experiment with adding some heat. I have the recipe entered into a spread sheet so I can tell it how big of a batch and it calculates the portions of the several spices (fennel, paprika, chili pepper flakes, and salt).
JR
**** I don't recall how cheap the 0.01G scale was, but it was pretty cheap.
It has a cute feature, the scale ships with a 100G reference weight that the scale can use to auto calibrate itself. The scale maxes out at only 200G.