99 Station Street

1 Meat.
Now this is the gory bit that gets people thinking about whether a sausage is a by product of butchery or the reason for it. What I mean by this is, is the sausage there to mop up the waste or not. By law, a pork sausage has to 42% meat, after allowable fat and connective tissue content, this leaves about 19% recognisable lean meat. A premium sausage will be at least 73% meat. Pure meat is not a good thing as you will have a burger in a skin which is not pleasant.

2 Fat.
Now I didn’t promise a totally healthy option here, this is a treat, but using the fat contained within the meat rather than adding meat is a bonus.

3 Rusk.
This is the other main texture in the sausage. It holds moisture and prevents the meat from becoming the all in one solid lump. Meat and rusk are two different products and don’t gloop together. In some sausages this is achieved by using bread crumbs.

4 Fluid.
Water, beer, wine or even fruit juices can be used to hydrate the rusk and give that delicious moistness that is essential in a good sausage. This is not about creating a slurry, far from it, this is a clear component and should be a sensual detection seperate from the meat and the rusk. The South African boerworst is a great example of this with a hefty glug of wine. From time to time, we use local beers as a flavour in their own right, a real celebration of Burton.

5 Casing.
This is the skin that hold the Great, British sausage together. Whether it is beef (tough), sheep (delicate), pork (in between) or collagen (all rounder), the casing creates the internal cooking environment of the sausage.

There are other ingredients such as spices and herbs which complete the flavour and texture of the sausage, but the real credit goes to the 5 above. All of these can be fantastic natural parts of the sausage jigsaw. A great sausage is just that, pride in ingredients and above all, British.

Tags: British food, home made, sausage

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 8:35 pm and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.