Say it With Sausage

Adventures in sausage-making: a peak behind the counter at our award-winning butcher (I made my husband a surprise snag and I thought you'd want the deets).

Ever wondered what to get the love of your life for that milestone birthday? Does ‘special sausage’ sound like your kind of love language? Allow me to explain…

Call me an old romantic, but I still really love a surprise birthday treat, especially when it’s a special birthday, as it was for my husband last week. The big FOUR ZERO felt like an occasion I wanted to go all out to mark, and making him his very own unique sausage is what I somehow landed on as a fitting tribute. Make of that what you will. But really, it came from the fact that I was planning a celebratory barbecue for him; Jamie really loves a good sausage (if there’s a way of writing that which doesn’t sound like a double entendre I’m yet to find it), and is always enthusiastic about the limited edition sausages our brilliant butcher Lizzy Douglas at The Black Pig makes.

Few things hit the spot better than a really delicious, top quality sausage, hence why they are so often the most-popular offering of any traditional butcher worth their salt, but The Black Pig’s sausages are the stuff of legend: often featuring interesting flavour combinations and foraged, hyper-seasonal ingredients like wild garlic, wild beach fennel and rose chives. I’ve long been curious to understand how Lizzy goes about making her sausages at the shop, and when I contacted her about my meat order for the party, I also asked her - half thinking she simply wouldn’t have the time/energy/inclination to accommodate such a frankly ‘out there’ request - what she thought of my idea to collaboratively rustle up a special snag in tribute to Jamie. Happily, she was up for it. As well as supplying me with local, free range grass fed meat for work and pleasure for years, Lizzy has become something of a friend over the years, and she is hugely generous, open to collaboration and full of fun ideas, though I realise not everyone is so lucky with their local butcher. I honestly didn’t think at the time that I would end up writing about this for Substack, but the process and results were so fascinating and delicious, I just had to share it here with you guys.

So I snuck off to the butcher one afternoon last week under the pretence of running some errand or other, and spent an insightful few hours with Lizzy and her butcher Josh, working on Jamie’s special creation. I’d mentioned to Lizzy that I wanted it to be a lamb sausage, as the barbecue was vaguely Turkish/Eastern Mediterranean leaning (in tribute to our favourite Ocakbasi, Testi, and the fact we just got back from Crete), so lamb felt like the way to go, and she talked to me about Sheftalia - a rustic Cypriot sausage made with coarsely ground lamb and pork mixed with lots of onion, black pepper and parsley, cased in caul fat (rather than sausage casing) and grilled over coals. I was sold.

We both loved the simplicity of this idea of ground meat, parsley and an almost equal parts onion-to-meat ratio, which results in a really light, juicy sausage, and decided to use it as a starting point: though our version would be in sheeps’ sausage casings, not caul fat. We began by peeling and discarding some of the hard, white fat from the lamb trim, which is what Lizzy uses for her lamb sausage (that’s good butchery, guys), and putting the chunks of meat into a big metal tray along with peeling and chopping lots and lots of onions. Then I chopped a massive bunch of wonderfully vivid flat leaf parsley and put that into the tray, before mincing the whole lot through the coarse setting of the mincer.

Doing this felt counter-intuitive, danger-wise, but Lizzy assured me the mincing of my arm was impossible, and I’ve still got fingers to prove it.

Once the meat, parsley and onion had gone through the mincer, it was time to add the seasonings. I suggested we add in some toasted cumin, because I love how it marries with lamb, and so we toasted a good few teaspoons of cumin to release those fragrant oils, ground half and kept half whole, and added that in. along with plenty of salt and several capfuls of ground black pepper - another revelation as I’d usually call on red chilli flakes or pul biber pepper flakes, but there’s something so lovely about the distinct hum of black pepper here, and this is one peppery sausage. The final addition was the zest of an unwaxed lemon - not a traditional component of Sheftalia - but we’d gone off on a tangent by now and isn’t that how some of the best creations come into being? Lemon zest is a flavouring I love to work with when I’m making meat patties with lamb and or pork, and it felt right here to add a little zippy lift.

Once we’d added in the seasoning, I mixed everything together by hand (hugely satisfying), and we then minced the whole lot again to thoroughly combine. Now for the tasting! We fried off little patties to taste them, realising after the first mouthful that they needed a little more cooking to make sure the onion was cooked through. Once we got that right, and re-tasted them, we were in agreement that the mixture was absolutely delicious: the onion gave the mixture a wonderful sweetness and lightness that made it really delicate, while also being robustly flavoured with the pepper, parsley and cumin, with that subtle hit of lemon cutting through the richness of the lamb. I was super happy that Jamie would love them too, so we set about filling the casings with the mixture.

Having watched, and lolled at my own father hilariously wrestle with his sausage making machine (yes, the sausage appreciation runs deep) many many years ago, I knew this part of the process would be the most difficult, as it’s a very delicate balance of getting the right pressure and speed when filling the casings. So I left this to Lizzy, who’s obviously a dab hand at the tricksy, intricate process, as I didn’t want to waste a scrap, and she skilfully filled the chipolata-style sheep casings with the vivid green sausage mix in no time. Her and Josh then attempted to show me how to twist and loop the sausages into their individual pieces, but while it might be second nature to them thanks to muscle memory, I struggled to catch the rhythm. It’s the sort of task you need to repeatedly do for it to click I think, a bit like knitting or knotting, neither of which I ever really mastered.

Once tied, the sausages looked magnificently green and glossy, but needed hanging for the juices from the onion to drip out a bit as they were quite wet, so I left them at the shop to drip overnight, before picking them up the next day and test-driving the cook. We were concerned that, due to the moisture levels and fragility of the sausage (thanks to that high onion content) they might be better off being gently roasted and then flashed on the barbecue, rather than immediately introduced to a sizzling hot grate, so I experimented with oven temperatures and found the perfect cook for them for 30 minutes at 160 - enough time to gently roast them, cook the onion thoroughly and render a bit (but not too much) of the fat. I do realise that isn’t particularly relevant as you’re most probably not going to be able to get hold of this sausage, but I do think - if you like the sounds of this sausage - you could try to recreate the meat patties without the casings, using a mix of minced lamb (aim for about 30% fat), a bunch of finely chopped parsley, plenty of grated onion and the seasonings mentioned. It may or may not need egg to bind, depending on the fat content, and you could pan fry to create a crust and then finish them in the oven, in which case, this oven temperature should work wonders. I may even end up road testing a version of this for paid subscribers at a later date, they are definitely something I’m keep to recreate at home.

Suffice to say, Jamie was truly touched and utterly delighted by his surprise sausage, and they went down an absolute storm at the barbecue too (along with a certain brined, butter basted chicken).

I hope you’ve enjoyed this sneak peak behind the scenes of serious sausage making, and please drop me a comment below to let me know what your favourite sausages are, where you get them and whether you like the sound of this one.

Written by Rosie Birkett