It’s official, we are going to make it. The current record for the World’s most expensive sausage stands at 20 pound sterling. It’s quite a difficult task to put luxury ingredients into a sausage without overpowering the flavours or losing textures. We have found three ingredients we can use and a method for getting the best out of all of them, but that’s going to be our secret until launch day. The first batch of sausages will be produced by the third week of June 2011.

The real challenge is whether we keep the ingredients to all British or use the finest foods the world has to offer. We want to go for the all British option, but may have a couple of sourcing issues with just one of the ingredients, we shall have to wait and see.

A final challenge is to come up with a good name for the World’s most expensive sausage. Any ideas?

Officially this was an ordinary hot sausage sold by the United Nations Development Office in Sweden. The asking price? $130. The most expensive luxury sausage was £20, more of a fair game we we think. This was made in the UK and contained champagne and truffle amongst the ingredients. If you get the regular six sausages to a pound, that’s £120 per pack.

The key would be to make a sausage from luxury ingredients and to make them all sing together as a creation of worth. Expensive sandwiches have been made using sour dough bread, truffles, foie gras and kobe beef. Would flavours get lost or overwhelm even?

Another challenge is to get this done with local ingredients or even from what we would have commonly had to hand in times gone by. Imagine the Victorian Era, before two World Wars ravaged British food. At that time we had a great period of decadence and some very fine ingredients. With modern access to such fantastic ingredients, the options are fairly unlimited.

The Worlds most luxurious sausage or sausage range … watch this space

After a process that has taken close to two and a half years, the Cumberland sausage has finally been granted Protected Geographical Indication by the EU on the 22nd March 2011. This means that the term “Traditional Cumberland sausage” can only be use by producers in the area set out in the application. This looks like it stretches from the tradtional northern country of Cumberland to the whole of the newer merged county of Cumbria which also includes the old county of Westmorland and some bits of Lancashire which got stranded on the opposite shore of Morecambe bay.

In the same month, an application was put forward to gain the same status for Scottish Wild Salmon. We wish them good luck. This shows a real re-emergence of pride over the great local food that Britain produces.

I was born in Westmorland, which is the southern county of the merged Cumbria. To the north, just over Dunmail Raise lies the other county of Cumberland. Then there are bits of inherited Lancashire across the bay from Morecambe, but today is about Cumberland. A lot of traditional food comes with some proper history behind it. The Cornish pasty has the rim on it so that it can be handled but gets thrown away without poisoning the diner with mine deposits. Scouse (or Lobby in the Potteries) comes from lobscouse a dish cooked by the Norwegian canalmen who journeyed inland from Liverpool and past Stoke on Trent.

So is the same with the Cumberland sausage. Before we commence, this is not the linked sausages found in supermarket fridges but the traditional coiled sausage made in Cumberland.  The story goes that in the 16th century, parts of Cumberland were home to many German migrant miners. These homesick Germans wanted a sausage that was closer to their own taste. So a thicker sausage, made in a single coil, from coarse ground meat and quite often good quantities of pepper was created.

This has gone full circle as “traditional Cumberland sausage” is seeking protected name status from the EU. The standard states that the sausage must be made from at least 80% pork, no gristle, no skin, no offal and be prepared as a coil and not linked.

One real treat is seeing a full Cumberland sausage in a pan on an Aga in a friend’s guest house in Ambleside. If the sausage can be made to this premium level of quality, it is an amazing product.

After watching popular BBC show on 7th October 2010, two teams competing to learn, make and sell their own sausages, we had to put the story straight. As some of you know we make our own sausages, charcuterie and smoked meats, so this was now personal. One team went for the pile it high, sell it cheap model. They went for cheap meat, maximum non-meat and, well you can guess the rest. One classic moment was when they chucked all the ingredients into the mixer and then hoped they had a working recipe. Try that with a cake recipe and Jane Asher will be round your house with a cricket bat So the rusk clumped, the moisture went everywhere and they produced cheap errrm slurry in a skin. The other team went for a premium sausage with a quality take, I won’t knock anyone going down that route as they still had a steep learning curve ahead.

OK, let us look at the difference between a good sausage and the wretched insult to the poor piggy that team “bloke” produced.

Meat content:
Pork sausage needs to contain 42% meat by EU regulation. By the time you take in allowable fat and connective tissue, the recognisable lean meat content is 19% of the sausage. A good sausage has a higher meat content, at least greater than 80% of which most is lean meat with some fat. Fat is flavour, adds moisture and helps to bind and hold the sausage. Not too much fat though, too much of a good thing and all that.

Rusk:
This is the part where the boys really buggered up. Rusk, dried breadcrumbs, biscuit or cous cous can be used to help with moisture retention in the meat, but need to be soaked first to plump them up. If not, you have hard lump bits in the sausage that are useless at balancing moisture once they are in the casing. Rusk also helps to cling to the fat and the meat, binding. Presoaked rusk holds the sausage texture together, regulates fluid and gives an extra anchor or other flavours. If you get a build up of leaking fluids in a cooking sausage, it boils, turns to steam and then the casing explodes. These little eruptions are what give the sausage the nickname, banger.

The rusk and added fluids should not be much more than 10% of the sausage. To complete the 100%, there are a couple of legit natural chemicals, extra ingredients and the casing. Herbs, cheese, fruit and spices are the private recipes that few sausage makers will impart. The casing is a matter of preference but something edible after cooking is very desirable.

Bangers is a Great, British term that has history and meaning, much like going for a Burton. More on that one another day…

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 contain a minimum of 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.