If you want to start a heated debate, ask people to describe their perfect sausage. Almost everyone has an opinion on what kind of sausages they like best, their taste, their texture and the best way to cook them. But British and Irish sausage-eating habits do tend to have one thing in common. Our palate seems to prefer a softer, less meaty, more open-textured sausage than the bouncier, meatier Italian or French type, but one that is still considerably firmer than the spongier German frankfurter or knackwurst.
It is possible to make almost any sausage taste quite appealing, at least initially, by loading it up with flavourings and heaps of salt. This type of sausage is easily spotted if you check the ingredient listing. Go for those with a short list and avoid ones with long lists of obscure ingredients and additives that you do not recognize from home cooking.
Sausages are as variable as all the different companies and butchers that make them. Recipes differ radically, as do the types of meat (pork, beef, lamb, chicken, venison) and other ingredients used. There are still plenty of cheap and nasty bangers around that consist of factory-farmed meat, padded out with excessive salt and additives, but there is also an ever-growing number of better quality, more natural sausages, made with higher-welfare meat. More upmarket sausages should have a subtler, but satisfying taste that comes mainly from the meat and simple seasonings.
Don’t prick sausages before cooking as this makes them less succulent. They are best gently fried – anything from twenty minutes to half an hour – so that they have nicely caramelized extremities, or grilled. Good-quality sausages should exude no water or white liquid when cooking, a sign that they contain excess water and polyphosphates. They should leave very little fat in the frying pan or grill tray either.
Things to do with sausages
• Ring the changes by serving sausages with a mash of beans (butter beans, cannellini or flageolets) flavoured with softly sweated onion and herbs, rather than the ubiquitous potato mash.
• Hot, well-browned chipolatas go well with chilled oysters served on the shell.
• For an easy cassoulet, make a tomato and bean stew, add slices of fried sausages and lardons of fatty bacon. Top this mixture with breadcrumbs, drizzle them with olive oil and bake until the breadcrumbs are crunchy and the juices bubble up from below.
• Sausages, both smoked and unsmoked, go well with warm sauerkraut, steamed or boiled waxy potatoes and mustard.
• Cold cooked sausages, along with lentils dressed with olive oil, lemon juice and chopped green herbs or baby leaf spinach, make a satisfying packed lunch.
Are sausages good for me?
Sausages have an unhealthy image. Sometimes this is deserved, sometimes it isn’t. It is argued that because sausages make use of fatty cuts, they are automatically bad for you, but there is no good evidence to support the idea that saturated fat is harmful. There is, on the other hand, a growing body of research to suggest that natural saturated fats have many benefits, such as enhancing the immune system, strengthening bones by helping us absorb calcium and stiffening cell membrane.
The healthiness or otherwise of a meal using sausages depends on how you use them. A main course consisting of a pile of cheap, low-meat-content sausages with heaps of stodgy mashed potatoes and liberal squirts of sugary ketchup, or the classic British toad in the hole where sausages are baked in a white flour batter, doesn’t have a lot to commend it in nutritional terms. However, a main course where a couple of sausages with a high meat content are flanked by a generous quantity of salads, cooked vegetables or beans and lentils, has quite a lot going for it.
Cheaper sausages often have excessive levels of salt to compensate for their low meat content, the high amount of rusk they contain and the all-round lack of character of their factory-farmed meat. Excessive salt is easily spotted in sausages: they leave you gasping with thirst. Over-salting is rarely a problem with the better, meat-rich sausages.
How are sausages made?
In its simplest, purest form, a sausage is just finely minced meat and fat, combined with seasonings and something that will bind the mixture, piped into a casing. High-quality sausage-makers use the traditional sort of casing made from the intestines of animals that have been cleaned, bleached and preserved in salt. Most industrial manufacturers use collagen casings that have been made from animal skin or cellulose from plant fibre.
Sausages can be made on a small-scale basis – in a butcher’s shop, say – or on a mass-production scale in a factory. Pork is the most commonly used meat for sausage-making followed by beef, but in recent years sausages made from meats such as lamb, venison and wild boar have become more available.
At the top end of the market, there are ‘premium’ sausages. Often, but not always, these superior sausages come from more expensive organic, free-range, or higher-welfare British or Irish meat. But you can’t take this for granted. Most sausages are still made from intensively farmed meat where the pigs have been reared indoors. Many manufacturers use even cheaper, lower-welfare, factory-farmed meat, usually pork imported from Holland and Denmark. Confusingly, sausages can be sold as ‘product of UK’ even if the meat was imported. So, if you want to be sure that yours were made in the UK using British or Irish pork, only buy sausages that state that fact clearly on the label.
The term ‘sausage’ is best thought of as a fairly indiscriminate catch-all term that covers very different qualities of product. As a rule of thumb, the single most helpful indicator of how a sausage has been produced is its meat content.
The meat content of sausages varies considerably. A high-quality sausage should contain 85–90 per cent meat and a middle-market sausage around 65 per cent.
The minimum legal amount of pork in a product labelled as a pork sausage is 42 per cent. Anything labelled as a ‘sausage’, ‘breakfast sausage’ or ‘chipolata’ must have 32 per cent. For a product labelled as a beef, lamb or venison sausage, the minimum legal amount of meat is 30 per cent. The lowest meat sausage is anything labelled as a poultry sausage: 26 per cent.
When it is used in a sausage, by law, meat can include fat and connective tissue, what’s known in the butcher’s trade as ‘broke’ – bits of meat left over from normal butchery such as skin, jowl, ligaments, tendons and gristle. In a pork sausage, for instance, the meat element can be made up of 30 per cent fat and 25 per cent connective tissue, while in a beef or lamb sausage it can be up to 25 per cent fat and 25 per cent connective tissue.
It used to be perfectly legal to use mechanically recovered meat (MRM) – a low-grade meat sludge sprayed and sucked off already butchered carcasses – without declaring it on the label. Now MRM must be listed as a separate ingredient, ‘recovered meat’, and cannot be included in the meat content. The same goes for organs such as heart or tongue.
Sausages with a high meat content do not usually contain connective tissue; instead the meat is a mixture of lean and fat cuts of meat. In a pork sausage, for instance, a mixture of belly and shoulder is used.
Irrespective of the proportion of meat they contain, all sausages contain either breadcrumbs or more usually rusk (dried, crushed, yeast-free bread made from wheat flour, salt, bicarbonate of soda and water). This is added with anything from one to two times the amount of water to bind the sausage together and make it succulent. If a sausage was made just from meat, it would be too dry. In poorer-quality sausages, however, much larger amounts of rusk and water are used as bulking agents to pad out the product. Up to 10 per cent of a sausage can be water without listing water as an ingredient on the label. A really good-quality sausage should contain no more than 10 per cent rusk.
Almost all sausages, unless they are home-made, also contain a nitrate preservative, because without one they would have a shelf life of just two or three days. Some sausage-makers do sell preservative-free sausages that need to be cooked within a day or so, or frozen.
Sausages of all qualities are seasoned with salt. Good-quality sausages also contain herbs and sometimes spices, specially mixed for each recipe.
In addition, lower grade sausages also contain a long list of other ingredients and chemical additives, all well worth avoiding. These are extra fat (to fill out the sausage), sausage stabilizer (a mixture of lactose (milk sugar) and vegetable protein that gives a sweet and meaty flavour), sugars and caramel (to add flavour and give the mixture a brown colour), polyphosphates (to bind water and fat and increase weight), soya (to bulk out the sausage and retain fat), extra nitrate preservatives (to extend shelf life and give a pink colourant), antioxidants (to extend shelf life), colourings (to give a rosy hue to the grey meat), synthetic flavourings (including the controversial monosodium glutamate), natural flavourings (such as yeast extract, soy sauce, onion and garlic powder) and gum arabic or guar gum (to bind the mixture).
A MUCH RESPECTED NATIONAL DELICACY
Oh, how the British love their sausages or ‘bangers’ – the name they acquired during the Second World War because when they were fried they tended to explode with a bang.
Tales – apocryphal or otherwise – abound that in the past, British sausages have been seen by our butchers as a good way of getting rid of excess fat and parts of the animal that most view as less palatable. From the late 1980s, public anxiety that meat from cows infected with BSE (mad cow disease) was finding its way into processed meat products made many people deeply suspicious of what went into their sausages.
Now the public relations profile of the British sausage has bounced back with a vengeance. Bangers have been reinvented and are no longer seen as some potentially dodgy, cheap meat product, but a much respected national delicacy.
Are sausages a green choice?
In recent years, chefs and environmentalists have highlighted the amount of food that is wasted and been critical of the relatively modern tendency to seek out prime lean cuts of meat and discard other parts of the carcase, however edible. Sausages are one good way of using up wholesome, but neglected cuts.
Buying sausages from local farmers and butchers using local meat cuts down on the unnecessary food miles a sausage travels. The UK and Ireland have many high-quality, small-scale sausage-makers.
Where should I buy sausages?
The worst-quality sausages – those with little meat, lots of fat and additives – are commonly found in economy ranges in supermarkets and frozen food shops. Although there are exceptions, independent butchers do not tend to use the gamut of cheap ingredients, such as recovered meat and additives, that you find in the mass-produced, industrial sort. One of the best places to buy sausages is at farmers’ markets, which generally have a better range of sausages made from different kinds of meat, such as venison, wild boar and rare-breed pork, and offer a wider selection of sausages made to interesting recipes than supermarkets.
Will sausages break the bank?
That old maxim, ‘You get what you pay for’ was never truer than when applied to a sausage. Buying cheap sausages means you will get low-grade specimens that represent rotten value for money. Top-quality sausages cost considerably more, but they still make for a relatively low-cost meal.