Sausages with Squash and Kale
Steven Lamb
MORE RECIPES
Roasted squash with chestnuts, sausage and sage; Pruney sausage rolls; Pear and celeriac stuffing
SOURCING
gazegillorganics.co.uk, graigfarm.co.uk, rhug.co.uk and wellhungmeat.com (for fresh sausages); capreolusfinefoods.co.uk and good-game.co.uk (for British charcuterie)
Sausages are one of the oldest known forms of processed food. Dating back thousands of years, they were made by countless civilisations, including the Ancient Egyptians.
Sadly, in more recent years, this product has veered far away from its classic form, and many sausages on sale are a blend of cheap ingredients and additives, overly processed in large factories. Commerciality needn’t mean the end of quality but, as a general rule, the further away you go from sausages made by a skilled butcher or producer and towards products made on an industrial scale, the more likely that quality will plummet.
A sausage is, or should be, a simple combination of minced raw meat and fat, seasoned with herbs, spices and salt, mixed with a small amount of rusk or breadcrumb to hold the fat in the sausage, then encased in a skin. The percentage of meat should not drop too far below 70 per cent. In my view, not only must the ingredients be of the highest quality, there should not be too many of them. Always check the label.
Sausages come in different skins. Natural casings are made from the intestines of sheep, pigs and cows, while synthetic casings are spun from collagen. Synthetic skins are the industry norm as they are cheaper but they often feel like a barrier – as though the sausage is still in the wrapper – whereas natural casings feel like a more integral part of the product.
There’s a fashion now for ‘gourmet’ sausages: pork and leek or beef and Stilton, and such like. At best, these flavoured sausages can be outstanding. At worst, the meat and the flavouring are paired up in a bid to mask the inferiority of both.
It’s the meat that really dictates overall quality. A sausage should not be a vessel for flesh of such dubious provenance that it would not otherwise make it on to your plate. Some cheap British bangers still include ‘mechanically separated meat’, for instance – a fine mince formed by removing vestigial scraps of meat, sinew and membrane from bones in a machine. It’s not allowed to be counted as part of the meat content – though in some cases, by means of creative labelling, it still is.
Since good quality, high-welfare meat naturally costs more, any sausages labelled ‘value’ or ‘basic’ should give you pause for thought. And a sausage that is only, say 40 per cent pork (as with some of the ‘catering’ or ‘economy’ sausages out there) obviously begs some questions about what else is filling the skins.
The welfare of the animals that produce the meat has a huge impact on the quality of a sausage. The meat should be at least free-range, if not organic. See Higher Welfare Pork for other higher welfare indicators you might find on pork sausages. If you buy unlabelled sausages at the butchers, ask about their provenance.
Other kinds of sausage
As well as fresh sausages of the breakfast banger type, there are cured sausages, which don’t require cooking. This group includes salami, which undergoes a process of fermentation and air-drying, as well as classic Continental sausages such as Bologna, frankfurter and mortadella, which contain enough salt to cure them but are then either smoked to help preserve them further or poached to cook them through before being eaten hot or cold.
It is often even harder to be sure of the provenance of sausages like these, since the majority of them are imported. But this is an exciting area because British charcuterie is very much on the rise. You can buy great, ethically produced British salamis now, for instance.
The best way to make sure that the ingredients of a sausage satisfy your standards is to make it yourself: something that can easily be done with a small amount of kit (i.e. a mincer and a sausage-stuffer). Home-made bangers are both pleasurable to make and delicious to eat. There’s lots of advice and detailed instructions on home sausage-making in River Cottage’s Curing & Smoking and Pigs & Pork handbooks, not to mention The River Cottage Cookbook, but here are a few salient points:
Sausages can be made with any meat but there must always be some form of fat in the mix so that the sausage is moist and tender when cooked. You can either use a cut of meat with a nice marbling of fat already inherent in it, such as pork shoulder, or combine a lean meat, such as venison, with something fatty, like pork belly. In salami, small cubes of pure back fat are mosaic-ed through meat to give a soft texture.
Sausages can take lots of seasoning, and there is no end to the variety of additions you can make. In pork sausages, I like to combine mace and white pepper with a hit of garam masala, while my beef sausages tend to be laced with hot spices such as cayenne and chilli.
If you are using breadcrumbs in your sausage mix, make sure that all the residual active yeast has been ‘baked out’ of them, by putting them in a low oven for about 10 minutes, then cooling them completely. Residual yeast in breadcrumbs sometimes has a souring effect on sausage meat, particularly pork.
Home-made or shop-bought, fresh sausages can be poached, smoked, roasted, grilled or fried. I cook mine by placing them in a cold pan with a splash of oil and cooking over a medium heat, shaking the pan every now and then, until the sausages are cooked all the way through with a nice colour and even caramelisation. This can take a good 20 minutes. If you want to avoid the classic barbecue offering – blackened on the outside and still semi-raw within – then the cooking of sausages cannot be rushed. Slow-cooking also stops the sausage from splitting and exploding in the pan – they’re not called bangers for nothing.
A fantastic, one-pot supper, this is hearty but not heavy. You can use any type of good, fresh sausage, and any variety of squash. Serves 4
1 tbsp rapeseed oil
8 sausages
1 large onion, thinly sliced
2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
4 bay leaves
2–3 sprigs of rosemary
1 small or ½ larger squash, such as a butternut or Crown Prince (about 500g)
350ml chicken, veg or pork stock
150g kale
Sea salt and black pepper
Place a large flameproof casserole over a medium heat. Add the oil, followed by the sausages. Brown them well all over – 6–8 minutes should do it – then remove them to a plate. Add the onion, garlic, bay and rosemary to the casserole and cook gently for 8–10 minutes until the onion is soft and just beginning to colour.
Meanwhile, peel and deseed the squash, then cut into large bite-sized chunks. Add to the casserole, along with the sausages and stock. Bring to a simmer, put the lid and cook gently over a low heat for 20–30 minutes or until the squash is almost tender.
In the meantime, remove the stalks from the kale and roughly shred the leaves. Add the kale to the casserole, stir and replace the lid. Cook for a further 10 minutes or so. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Serve with some good bread for mopping up the juices.