A Guide to Our Pork Sausages
We make the same pork into several different things. The useful question is not which is best, it is which format you need.
We take the same pasture-raised pork and turn it into several things. Which one you want depends mostly on what it has to do once it is in your kitchen.
Links or ground
- Links. For grilling, for a pan, for a bun. They hold their shape and they are forgiving over a fire, which is why they are the right call for a tailgate.
- Ground. For cooking into something: a ragu, a stuffing, a hash, a pot of beans. No casing to work around.
The seasonings
- Mild. The plain one. Breakfast, gravy, anywhere you want pork rather than spice.
- Italian. Fennel-forward. Pasta, peppers, sandwiches.
- Chorizo. Paprika and heat. Beans, eggs, rice, anything that wants a red oil rendering out into it.
- GoldenWurst. Our breakfast blend. Patties and links.
“So smoking is not the same as adding smoke flavor. It's just not the same.”
Gray Shipley
That distinction matters more than people expect, and it is the same argument across the whole shop: what a thing is made of, rather than what it has been made to taste like.
“Yeah, when it's just, when it's made of food, I say food made of food. What I mean is food that actually comes from real. Food products, real things that are grown or raised things that are natural. And when you prepare something out of real food ingredients, it can just taste the difference.”
Gray Shipley
Cooking any of them
Moderate heat, not high. Sausage has fat and seasoning in it and both burn before the inside is done if the pan is too hot. Links want turning rather than pressing, and pressing a link is how you lose everything that made it worth buying.
“You don't see pigs in the far, in the mountains very much. And that's because pigs are hard on slopes because they root, because they dig, they need to be on flat ground because they'll cause erosion.”
Gray Shipley
Italian links. Fennel, pasture-raised pork, and they grill well.
View Product
Mild ground, no casing, maximum flexibility.
View ProductWhich pork sausage should I buy for what?
Links for grilling and tailgates, ground for cooking into things, and the seasoning decides the dish.
- Cook to a Safe Minimum Internal Temperature, FoodSafety.gov
- Grilling and Food Safety, USDA FSIS
Food-safety temperatures and storage times on this page are cited to the agencies above rather than to us.
Written at Shipley Farms in Vilas, North Carolina: a family cattle farm raising and dry-aging beef in the Appalachian Mountains, now in its fifth generation. No shortcuts since 1872.
Every quote on this page is Gray Shipley talking, the man who runs this farm. We sat down with him, turned on a recorder, and kept his own words. Hesitations are trimmed so they read on the page. Nothing else is added or reworded, except where Gray revised his own words in review.
Nobody knows this beef better than we do. On food safety we leave it to USDA FSIS and FoodSafety.gov, and we have linked their pages above. Reviewed 3 October 2026.
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