Download the Sausage Balls Recipe HERE: https://downloads-accent-explorer.pages.dev/recipes/SausageBalls_Recipe_TAE.pdf This week on The Accent Explorer, Sergio and Mimsy head into the heart of the American South, right into Ms. Sallie’s kitchen! They roll up their sleeves (and sausage balls) to make a beloved dish that’s been shared and savored for nearly 40 years. And trust us, this recipe is as easy as 1…2…3! “There’s nothing like some good old sausage balls. Nothing like it.” Step into a kitchen filled with savory smells, sizzling sausage, and the warm, buttery promise of something homemade. This episode serves up Southern hospitality one cheesy bite at a time…greasy fingers, golden edges, and big smiles included.
Download the Sausage Balls Recipe HERE!
This week on The Accent Explorer, Sergio and Mimsy head into the heart of the American South, right into Ms. Sallie’s kitchen! They roll up their sleeves (and sausage balls) to make a beloved dish that’s been shared and savored for nearly 40 years. And trust us, this recipe is as easy as 1…2…3!
“There’s nothing like some good old sausage balls. Nothing like it.”
Step into a kitchen filled with savory smells, sizzling sausage, and the warm, buttery promise of something homemade. This episode serves up Southern hospitality one cheesy bite at a time…greasy fingers, golden edges, and big smiles included.
SERGIO: Hi there. It’s me, Sergio. The Accent Explorer. I hope you’ve been practicing using your ears and stretching your curiosity, because today, all your senses are back in action…especially your taste buds!
It’s time for another delicious cooking episode! On our last adventure, my good friend from the American South, Ms Sallie, invited Mimsy and me into her kitchen to cook a good ole’ Southern recipe. Ready for a clue about today's dish? They’re round, cheesy, and full of flavor. She calls them: “Sawsage Bawls Y’all!” Can you say it like a true Southerner? “Sawsage Bawls, Y’all!” (pause) Good job. Well, today’s the day we roll up our sleeves and finally find out why this dish makes so many tummies rumble!
Ms. Sallie grew up in a small town called Wilson, in North Carolina. It wasn’t a big city with tall buildings and honking horns. Wilson was the kind of place where you might see a tractor on the road next to cars… or even a horse! Kids rode bikes until dinnertime, neighbors swapped stories in grocery store aisles, and everyone knew your name… and your cooking. And Ms. Sallie? Well, if you were lucky, you might smell those famous sausage balls from two porches over.
Sausage Balls have long been her specialty. Every time Ms. Sallie brought them to a party, people would run over to her as fast as they possibly could to grab one before they were gone. They were the best sausage balls in town! Want to know how she learned to make them? Let’s find out.
MS SALLIE: This very recipe was given to me when I was about to get married. All my friends from college gave me what is called a pounding. They bring you a pound of everything. A pound of biscuit mix, a pound of stuff, whatever pound of sugar. And I got this recipe from my roommate. I have tweaked it a little bit over the years. And just been making 'em ever since.
SERGIO: Okay, my tummy is growling hearing about all those delicious ingredients. I can’t wait another second. Let’s get cooking! Take it away, Ms Sallie and the best sous chef in all of Green Ridge… Mimsy!
MS SALLIE: All right. We're gonna wash our hands because we are going to make something today called sausage balls. But you know what you have to do? You have to use your hands to mix 'em up. Isn't that funny? So we have to make sure all the dirt and all the mess are all off of our hands, and they're very, very clean before we handle food.
SERGIO: That’s great advice, actually. Not just for cooking sausage balls, but for cooking anything! Can you show me how you wash your hands at home? (Pause with sink sound effect) Great job!
MS SALLIE: You ready? Okay. This is the recipe.Sausage balls. And do you know what? It only has three ingredients. Have you ever heard that saying it's as easy as 1, 2, 3? Well, that's what this is. It's as easy as one pound of sharp cheese, one pound of sausage, and then we have one and a half cups of this bisquick.
SERGIO: Wow! That really IS EASY! Who would have thought that some sharp cheese, sausage and bisquick would be all you need…but I guess delicious doesn’t need to be difficult! Now that we’ve got all our ingredients ready, Ms Sallie is pre-heating the oven to 400 degrees, so it will be nice and hot by the time we’re done mixing. Let’s get started!
MS SALLIE: Let's get our bowl over here and our grater, let me grab the grater for you. -So the recipe calls for grated cheese, okay? When I was a little girl, you couldn't get the grated cheese like this in a bag. So you had to use your grater and grate the cheese like this.
That’s how we would grate it. Would you like to try it? Yes. Okay. You're gonna hold it and then push, push down. That's right. And it takes a little while to do it, doesn't it? Yeah. But nowadays we can just go to the grocery store and buy a bag of cheese. And that’s how we get to that!
SERGIO: Oh, boy. Grating cheese is a real workout! But trust me, it’s fun! And your taste buds will thank you for it! But, if you don’t have time to grate all that cheese, a packet of pre-grated cheese works just fine too!
MS SALLIE: So we're gonna bring this bowl over here now, and we're gonna start by adding sausage. Okay. This is pork sausage. Do you remember what pork comes from? A cow or a pig? Let's see. Uh, pig. You're right. It comes from a pig.
So now we're gonna measure some of the bisquick. Okay. Looks like we've measured pretty well here. We're gonna put this cup, pour it in on top of the sausage. Could you do that for me? Do you mean I'm gonna pour it on? Mm-hmm. Yep. You just dumped it in there. Ah, there it goes.
So that was one cup. Yeah. Now we're gonna do two thirds of a cup. So you wanna hold that again? Yeah. All right. Well pour that end. Is that the same thing? Yep. We're gonna do the very same thing so we get enough of this biscuit mix.
SERGIO: So we mixed the sausage and the bisquick in the bowl. But wait…we’re missing one magical ingredient… the cheese! Remember that mountain of cheese we grated earlier? We’ll add it next, but even now… Mmmm, take a whiff! Smell that? It’s the kind of smell that puts a smile on your face before you even take a bite!
MS SALLIE: It smells good. It does smell good and it tastes even better. I wonder how many sausage balls there will be. A lot of sausage balls? There're gonna be a lot. Yeah. I wonder how many? Maybe 1 million. A million? Um, I'm betting, how about if we guessed around 50? Yeah, maybe 50.
SERGIO: Haha one million sausage balls? I love that guess! Next, we’ll grab a small handful of the sausage mix, roll it into a ball, place it on a cooking sheet, and do it all again! And again!. Some people like to make their balls reeeally big…like a baseball…, but Ms Sallie? She likes to make hers about the size of a scuppernong grape—that’s a fancy southern grape. That way, you can make more, share more, and keep the fun going even longer.
MS SALLIE: It's kind of food Play-Doh, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Play-Doh is really weird to eat. Yeah. Well, yeah, if there were like Play-Doh in it, it would taste really weird. It would. I bet so too.
This is fun making. Do you like it? Yeah, that's great. That's great. Can we eat all of the sausage balls? Oh, if you wanna tummy ache. Do you wanna tummy ache? Yeah, we can eat some of the sauce. Are you sweets? Huh? Aren't they a little sweets? Nope. They're not sweet. They're just gonna be real filling.
SERGIO: Okay, so now that our cooking sheet is filled up with delicious sausage balls, into the oven they go! We’ll bake them for about 10 minutes, or until they’re crispy and golden brown. Oh and if you’re going to do this at home, remind your grown up to use a jelly roll pan for baking. That’s a cooking sheet with a little edge to catch the extra grease. Because trust me…sausage balls like to sizzle!
And now…we wait! (dramatic sign) Boy, this might be the looooongest ten minutes of my life. But it’ll be worth it. My mouth is watering already!
MS SALLIE: There’s nothing like some good old sausage balls. Nothing like it. I can't wait to have one. You can't wait. I can't wait for you to taste it.
SERGIO: You know what? Why don’t we just fast-forward to the best part…EATING!
[FAST FORWARD CHIPMUNK NOISE]
[DING SFX]
SERGIO: Okay! Time to pull these golden beauties out of the oven!
SALLIE: You wanna take 'em off and always put 'em on a paper towel with a rack underneath and just let the extra grease kind of absorb some. But of course, you still wanna have a little bit of that on your fingers when you, when you get done having one. That's what makes them pretty, pretty good and pretty southern.
SERGIO: Mmmm...that crispy edge, the soft, warm, savory center...and just the right amount of finger lickin' grease. And that, my friend, is how you make real-deal Southern sausage balls. Try making it at home, and when you do, have your grown-ups let us know how it went. I’d love to hear how it turned out.
So Mimsy, now that you’re an expert in cooking Southern sausage balls, what did you think of the taste?
MIMSY: They were really good. They had biscuits and cheese in them.
SERGIO: It really was a delicious dish. No sauce required…just pure Southern deliciousness! And guess what? You can find Ms Sallie’s recipe for her famous sausage balls in the episode description. Just click on the link and “POP” – there it is, ready to cook along!.
Hey Mimsy, did you know that there are only 13 weeks left until I leave for Australia! Not that I’m counting or anything. (whisper) I totally am. But before I pack my bags, did I ever tell you about how I first learned about Australia? It wasn’t through a map or a TV show, it was through a very small Australian artifact that made my tummy tickle with excitement. Any guesses what it could be?
MIMSY: No. What was it?
SERGIO: Oh, I can’t give it away just yet. I’ll tell you and our explorer friend here next week. Until then, keep exploring!