recipe
Post-democracy sausage
Sausages are a great leveller, a food of the people. Some varieties have been developed as rations during times of conflict and most as a necessity for protein preservation without refrigeration. Now sausages are commonly seen being consumed in a slice of cheap white bread outside polling booths on election day or hardware and garden centre chains on any given weekend.
The humble sausage most commonly appears in a recipe. You will often see mention of andouille, cotechino, lap cheong, chorizo, boudin noir or sopressa as an ingredient, but rarely do we see a recipe for the sausage itself. I love sausages and I have made them in professional kitchens many times but have only just started to dabble in making them at home. Don’t overcomplicate things: a simple hand-cranked benchtop mincer is plenty for home quantities and I find a manual sausage stuffer to be the easiest to use.
This recipe is a riff on boudin sausages. The most common variety is boudin noir, which is made with blood as a major component, but I have kept this “blanc”. I first used this style of sausage for a large-scale art event, with the brief for the sausage to be a complete meal in a casing. Troy from Melbourne’s Meatsmith specialty butchers made the most incredible batch and I have been making variations of it ever since.
With sausages, the major battle is getting the balance of fat and lean meat right. I find pork belly is right for making small batches of sausage at home, because it has enough fat but also the connective tissue to make it bind. When working with larger batches of various cuts, it is common to add diced pork fat to the mix. This is also the gateway to much more complex methods. Like most things in cooking, it leads down a long path!
Time: 1.5 hours preparation + 12 hours refrigeration + 10 minutes cooking
Serves 10 or makes about 30 sausages
2kg pork belly
40g salt
200g sliced onion
4 cloves garlic
30ml olive oil
200g chicken livers
ground allspice
white pepper
200g spinach
300g collard greens (or broccoli leaf etc)
200g cooked medium-grain rice
5m of natural sausage casing
- Take the skin off the pork, then simmer the skin in a pot of salted water for 15 minutes. Remove from the water, dice roughly and place in a bowl.
- Dice the belly into three-centimetre cubes and add to the bowl. Season with the salt.
- Place the sliced onion, garlic and olive oil in a heavy-based pot and sweat them off for a few minutes before turning up the heat to high. Add the livers and their sauce for a quick minute before tipping all of this into the bowl with the pork and skin. Season with the allspice and the white pepper.
- Blanch the greens in boiling water and, once they are cool enough, squeeze any excess liquid from them. Add the greens to the bowl, along with the cooked rice, and toss everything together.
- Run this mixture through a mincer using a reasonably fine but not “commercial beef mince fine” blade to get more of a mousse or hotdog texture. With this style of sausage I try to not agitate it too much so it stays nice and short, or a little bit crumbly.
- Add this mix to the sausage stuffer then feed the sausage casing onto the fitting. Pipe the sausage into one length then tie it off at both ends before twisting it into sizes appropriate for single servings. I hang these sausages refrigerated for 12 hours and would commonly blanch them briefly in simmering water for two minutes. This helps with ease of storage.
- After cooking, serve with your favourite sausage accompaniments.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 7, 2025 as "Perfectly stuffed".
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