Superior Suasages - Sunday Magazine

Superior Sausages – Sunday Magazine

Sam Mannering is a new food writer for the Sunday Magazine. This little magazine arrives with the Sunday Star Times newspaper each weekend. The magazine has a distinctly girlie feel, and I generally flip through it pretty quickly. However I do look at the recipes and this week there was a page titled Superior Sausages. Sam Mannering has good taste - he identifies Salumeria Fontana from Wellsford, Grey Lynn Butchers, Westmere Butchers, Moore Wilsons in Wellington, and in Christchurch he names Peter Timbs and Ellesmere Butchery as places where you can buy superior snarlers. I consider that both Park Avenue Quality Meats and Island Bay Butchers should also be on his list. If Sam wants to give the aura of a serious writer about snarlers, he should be able to identify the top butcher’s shops in Wellington. But hey, this a magazine that has an Auckland focus.

 

Sweet and Spicy Italian Sausage

 

Sam poses the often asked question: What is your favourite sausage? Or what is the best sausage? This is a poorly worded question. It is similar to asking an oenophile what is their favourite or best wine. There are a myriad of great sausages out there. And out of the many great sausages, some rise to the champion level. Over the last few decades the quality of sausages you can source has improved immensely. And if you go by my motto – life to too short to eat bad sausages - you can derive great pleasure from eating some beauties.

 

 

Mexican Chorizo

Sam Mannering provides a recipe for superior sausages. I liked this simple and easy recipe. Use 1.5kg of tomatoes, 500g of snarlers, add some cannelloni beans, roughly chopped garlic, a bit of balsamic vinegar, and some rosemary, oregano and thyme. Bake and serve. Easy to prepare and quick to cook.

I made two dishes with some Cameron Harrison sweet and spicy Italian sausages, and Heritage Meat Company Mexican chorizo. When they came out of the oven, Sausage Boy (who is now taller than his mother and catching up to me) said it smelled delicious. This is a wholesome autumnal treat. The tomatoes were great, we used larger and cherry tomatoes, the beans added a bit of mushiness to the texture and the balsamic added a slightly bitter tang. The whanau enjoyed the meal, they thought the aroma was better than the actual eating, however the proof is in the eating and it was agreed that I should cook this dish again.

For a review of the Mexican chorizo click here.

The sweet and spicy Italian sausages are good. They are a medium to coarse grind. They are a pork and beef sausage, there is the sweetness of the pork, accentuated by basil, coriander and oregano, there are elements of tartness that come from the red wine vinegar and then, as an aftertaste, elements of heat from chilli and smoked paprika kick in. I enjoyed this complex tasting sausage and would buy this again. Cost per kilo: $24.95

I purchased both sausages from Moore Wilsons.

Mexican Chorizo Sausages – Heritage Meat Company

Mexican Chorizo Sausages – Heritage Meat Company

On a pleasant warm summer’s day I went with a few work colleagues to another colleague’s place for lunch. He has five acres of land just north of Otaki. His whare is positioned on top of an old sand dune and he can survey his estate from this high ground. He also gets a great view of the Tararuas. In a piece of serendipitous irony another work mate said his father used to be a sharemilker on this particular piece of land and as a boy he would have clambered over the hill when it was a dairy farm.

I took cherries and snarlers for the lunch. The cherries were from Central Otago, the snarlers came from Palmerston North. We had a very enjoyable summer’s lunch in relaxing surroundings.

 

 

Heritage Meat Company make quality sausages. A range of these are sold at Moore Wilsons and my favourite variety is their Romanian sausage. Sadly Moore Wilsons have not stocked this for a number of years. When I enquired why they told me they did not sell enough of this variety. My taste is obviously different from the masses.

 

 

The Mexican Chorizo went down well and all the sausages disappeared quickly. This is coarsely ground sausage, a good sign. It has an initial slightly acidic taste on the palate, then the chilli and paprika kicks in. When I ate one the snarlers as it came out the pan, the heat of the sausage was at the top end of what I would enjoy. The following day as a cold sausage, the heat was not as pronounced. This is a pork snarler where the initial taste of the meat is soon dominated by the heat of the spices. These are a very good Mexican Chorizo that both I and my work mates enjoyed on warm sunny afternoon.

I would purchase these snarlers again.

Cost: $10.84 for six sausages