Sausage Basics: Fresh Sausage

When you think of the word “sausage,” your mind usually conjures up a single type—most likely the default local variety. For me it’s the sage-infused pork sausage sold in plastic tubes, off of which my grandma would cut thick coins for frying. That’s sausage—everything else has a proper name.

That pork sausage was a fresh sausage, the first of three varieties which we will discuss today. A fresh sausage has had no curing, smoking, or cooking done to it at all. It is comprised of completely raw meat ground along with spices and pushed into its casing. ^*

Fresh sausage must be refrigerated as soon as it is prepared, then cooked fully before eating, to prevent, you know, death. It also happens to be terribly easy to make, especially if you don’t choose to put it in casing, since it is simply ground up meat mixed with spices.

Examples of fresh sausage include the South African Boerewors (”farmer’s sausage”) made from beef, coriander, black pepper, nutmeg, cloves, and allspice; classic Italian sausage made from pork, fennel, and (often) anise; the traditional British “banger” (so named because they’ll explode if you don’t cook them properly) made from pork, veal (or lamb), various peppers, nutmeg, mace, thyme, marjoram, sage, onion, coriander and lemon—as well as breadcrumbs, suet, and egg, just to keep it all stuck together.

There are also a variety of smoked fresh sausages like the German (and South Australian) Mettwurst [pictured right], which are made using smoked meat. Some smoked fresh sausages still need to be refrigerated and cooked, while others (like Mettwurst) can be eaten as-is. (Mettwurst is usually smeared on bread or crackers.)

Many smoked fresh sausage are shelf stable, meaning they do not need to be cooked before being eaten. You could easily put them into a category of their own, but for simplicity’s sake I’ve lumped them in with the non-smoked variety which always needs to be refrigerated.

^{* “Casings” were originally always intestines, but are commonly synthetic or made from collagen, these days.}