I think that the 12 spices to spice up your sausages blog is just a little bit on the snarky side. Or, maybe I am biased. I have been cooking professionally for 30 years and have been doing it in my own kitchen for longer than that. So I am probably not supposed to be so critical of our fellow cooks.
But then again, if someone wants to write a blog about spices needed for sausages, they are going to be snarky. They are not going to be writing a blog about using a particular food processor or a particular tomato paste. Those things might be important, but they aren’t what spices are meant for.
Sausages are made from meat or sometimes from fish or vegetables, and they have a huge range of different flavors depending on what you put in them and how you cook them. You can make your own sausage by grinding the meat yourself, but there is nothing wrong with buying it ready-made in the first place. And there is nothing wrong with buying commercial sausages from Leiden’s Snack Stop: they have been making sausages since 1922, so I would assume that their sausages have been perfected over the years by people who know what they are doing.
This is a guest post from young food lover. He likes spices and he loves sausages. He also has a blog about his passion for both. His blog gives you 12 different spices to spice up your sausage.
He writes:
Some of the spices can be found in your kitchen cupboard, while others need to be ordered online. I’ve listed them in their most basic form, with their quantity per 1kg of meat and the measurements required for 1kg of meat.
Onions – 10g
Black peppercorns – 3g
Garlic – 5g
Allspice berries – 5g
Cayenne pepper – 5g
Whole cloves – 15g
Chilli powder/ red pepper flakes – 20g
Bay leaves – 2-4 (depending on your taste)
Truffle oil – 4ml (per 1kg raw meat)
The first four spices to spice up your sausages are pepper, mustard, ginger and chili. These four alone can create the perfect sausage. On top of that you can add any other spices your heart desires. This may sound crazy but this is a fact.
The next five spices needed to spice up your sausage are:
1) salt (to make the meat more juicy)
2) garlic (to taste great)
3) paprika (to taste more pronounced)
4) black pepper (to taste more intense)
5) dried herbs (for flavor enhancement)
Spices are important to good cooking. But most of us don’t know how to use them in interesting ways. It’s hard to get spice-lovers to buy bland sausages, so I’ve compiled this list of spices for sausages.
Ingredients:
1kg pork belly or mince
2 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1 tbsp allspice
1 bunch thyme (leaves only)
Method:
Mix the meat with the salt and sugar, then add all the spices. Divide into six portions and mix well before adding each portion to a saucepan of water that just covers the meat. Bring to a simmer and cook until cooked through but not falling apart. Serve with freshly cooked chips. If you want more sauce, add some brown sauce (ketchup works well) or some beer mustard. Extra points if you serve it with a twee green salad dressed with basil oil (basil infused olive oil).
Sausages are a great example of the way spices are used to make something taste better. By themselves, sausages aren’t very tasty, and each of the ingredients is important in its own way. But too much of any one spice can overpower the others. A good sausage needs just enough of each ingredient to make it delicious.
In the recipe at left I’ve tried to specify just enough spice for each kind of sausage, so you can add a dash of cinnamon or a pinch of cumin if you want your sausage extra spicy, but not so much that you’re overwhelmed by all those spices and can’t taste the meat.
“But how will I know how much of each spice I should use?”
Easy: just use your tastebuds as a guide. If you add too much cinnamon or cumin, it will taste way too sweet for most people; if no one can taste them at all, you’re probably using too little.
If you have trouble doing that, check out http://www.spiceamuse.com/spices_recipe_guide__the_secret_to_great_sausage___a_recipe_from_graham_farrel/.
If you don’t know how spices were used in the past, you can’t know how to use them now. But if you do know, it is a lot easier to get the flavor you want.
Spices are the flavor delivery system of choice for sausages. They provide not only flavor, but texture and moisture, which is especially important when the sausage is being made from meat that has been dried out. Smoked sausage is an example: it needs to have a certain amount of water to get good texture.
There are three basic kinds of spice: hot, sweet, and bitter. These categories overlap somewhat; sweet spices also release water and sometimes bitterness. But they are still useful categories.
Hot spices are stimulating, whether due to their taste or their active heat, so they give heat as well as flavor. Examples include chili peppers and black peppercorns – which are not native to Europe but came here with the Spanish conquistadors – as well as cayenne pepper and cinnamon bark.
Sweet spices provide sweetness, sometimes more than they release water, while adding no heat at all (though there is usually a little bit of both). The classic example is vanilla.
And then there are spices that provide both heat and sweetness – which
Spices were introduced to Europe with the Arabs, who brought them south from the spice islands of Indonesia. With the arrival of the Spanish, they became an important ingredient in European cooking.
The word “spice” comes from the Latin “speculum,” a mirror. When you saw what was coming at you in that bowl, you would wonder whether it was a man or a horse. The first spices to arrive in Europe were pepper, cardamom, and ginger, all from India; saffron and turmeric from Persia; cinnamon and nutmeg from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka); mace from Africa; and cloves from Ethiopia.
Of course spices could be used as medicine as well as seasoning: pepper for toothache and indigestion; turmeric for burns; ginger for stomach ache or toothache; and cinnamon for everything else. In the sixteenth century, when Europeans began chewing tobacco, ginger was one of the ingredients used to flavor it.
The power of spices stems not only from their taste but also from their shape and color: they look exotic on the plate and add an element of surprise. But they also have a more practical side: they are savory (tasty) rather than sweet, which is why they