Freezing homemade bulk sausage
We make our own andouille sausage. Fresh (never frozen) pork, but the pork fat used is frozen from the butcher.
We have always saved out a pound of the uncooked bulk product and made a killer sausage/potato/kale soup. We have always browned the fresh bulk sausage.
Last round of sausage making, we didn't have the time to do the soup. I froze a pound of the bulk sausage.
My wife thawed and browned the sausage today and made the soup.
While I don't smell it, she says the soup smells like something has "gone over".
All the remaining ingredients are fresh.
The question: Could the defrosting of the porkfat, then re-freezing of the bulk sausage, have made the sausage "funky"? No other component of the sausage was frozen/thawed/re-frozen.
Thank you in advance for your insights.
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Likely it is something else. I make homemade sausage all the time with both fresh and frozen pork & fat and then re-freeze. So far no problems in taste and I'm still typing! To be honest, most of the stuff I freeze started out as fresh, but there's still at least 30% that was a double-freeze.
Fat, on the other hand, may have gone rancid before it was frozen the first time. If you know your source and feel comfortable with them, I'd look at something else.
