Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Sausage & Cream Sauce
The humble sausage has always been a barbecue staple which everyone loves, especially kids. They come in such a huge variety of flavours and types that there is one for everybody. Buy a couple of kilos, invite a few mates around, crack open a robust red or simply a coldie and it's an instant party.
Having just had a Grand Final party we were suffering something of a sausage surfeit, an overload of snags. Despite everyone eating their fill on the day, there were a couple of meals worth of links still to be eaten and I don't know about anyone else, but two days in a row was quite enough for me; I was sausaged out.
So what to do with the half a dozen remaining? A sausage is a sausage, right? Well, no! A sausage is really just ground or minced up meat, that has been well seasoned and possibly flavoured, all contained in a casing of some kind. If you remove this casing, a sausage can be anything you want it to be. For a change, you could coat it with breadcrumbs, make it into hamburgers, turn it into a patty and surround with bacon, you can even use them to make a pasta sauce, which was exactly the kind of anti-sausage thing I needed.
Sausage & Cream Sauce
(serves 4)
25g butter
1 onion, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
6 sausages*, the fresh kind, skinned
250ml single or whipping cream
salt & fresh ground pepper
Melt the butter in a frypan and sweat the onions and garlic till soft, but not at all coloured. Turn up the heat and add the sausage meat. Use a potato masher to crumble the meat into small pieces while it's frying. When it has all changed colour, add the cream, stir in well, then season to taste, a couple of extra grinds of pepper gives it a real lift. Cook 500g dry pasta, preferably a shape that will hold the sauce to it, mix with the sauce and serve with grated parmesan.
*the type of sausage used has a bearing on the finished dish, quality fresh pork or beef sausages will work well here
Having just had a Grand Final party we were suffering something of a sausage surfeit, an overload of snags. Despite everyone eating their fill on the day, there were a couple of meals worth of links still to be eaten and I don't know about anyone else, but two days in a row was quite enough for me; I was sausaged out.
So what to do with the half a dozen remaining? A sausage is a sausage, right? Well, no! A sausage is really just ground or minced up meat, that has been well seasoned and possibly flavoured, all contained in a casing of some kind. If you remove this casing, a sausage can be anything you want it to be. For a change, you could coat it with breadcrumbs, make it into hamburgers, turn it into a patty and surround with bacon, you can even use them to make a pasta sauce, which was exactly the kind of anti-sausage thing I needed.
Sausage & Cream Sauce
(serves 4)
25g butter
1 onion, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
6 sausages*, the fresh kind, skinned
250ml single or whipping cream
salt & fresh ground pepper
Melt the butter in a frypan and sweat the onions and garlic till soft, but not at all coloured. Turn up the heat and add the sausage meat. Use a potato masher to crumble the meat into small pieces while it's frying. When it has all changed colour, add the cream, stir in well, then season to taste, a couple of extra grinds of pepper gives it a real lift. Cook 500g dry pasta, preferably a shape that will hold the sauce to it, mix with the sauce and serve with grated parmesan.
*the type of sausage used has a bearing on the finished dish, quality fresh pork or beef sausages will work well here
5 Comments:
Lordy yes indeed and sausage is chameleon like but I've never thought of it as humble.
My very favorite "pantry emergency meal" staple that I keep in the freezer is a hot Italian sausage that I get at Whole Foods. In Seattle it's made with chicken, in Dallas it's turkey. I use it in soups, on pizzas, in salads and it's always half the meat in my meat loaf. Of course it's good in pasta sauce as well. Now, about that patty surround with bacon . . . that's surely not humble.
Oh and of course there's always the sauerkraut and mustard but I guess maybe there we've gone humble.
My brain is fried tonight.
Very interesting but it won't work with supermarket sausages that are two-thirds sawdust and one third plaster of paris.
For those, curried sausages on rice are the go.
Hi tanna, I guess you're right, it's not always humble; sometimes I make boudin blancs with truffles, absolute extravagance. But whatever they are, they sure are versatile.
Hi kitchen hand, I sometimes wondered, in the old days, if butchers used to sweep up all the blood-soaked sawdust from their floors and put it straight into the sausages. I can't really knock supermarket snags though, every weekend they are used to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for charities and the like. But you're right, they won't make a good sauce.
I love a skinned sausage. So much you can do with it and it only takes a couple (of good ones) to really pad out a meal.
Hi dani, you would get on so well with my wife -- she skins every sausage before eating, even frankfurters.
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