Healey recommended a low and slow cook. It would take at least 15 minutes for the sausages to hit an ideal internal temperature of around 81C. They would be ready when they had a “firm bounce” and I should, under no circumstances, stab them with a fork while they were cooking.
“You’ll lose all the juiciness out of the middle,” Healey said.
Did he mean the fat?
“We call it the juiciness,” said the expert, who also recommended resting the sausage for five minutes before consumption and then pouring any residual “juice” back over the banger.
(This is a sausage designed to be eaten before dangerous levels of whipped cream and pudding. Start as you mean to go on, I guess).
Sugar! Fudge! Etc!
My sausages were burning. The casings had split and Christmas was exploding all over the stove. I scraped scalding hot cubes of escaped apple from the pan and turned down the element. Mapari’s yuletide creation was now leaning suburban cremation, but it did smell good.
According to Healey, there’s a growing appetite for gourmet sausages from the country’s craft butchery scene.
“Back in the day, sausages used to feed a family cheaply and so everybody had them. Then it became a bit of a thing for butchers to try and make the best sausage.”
In October, Mapari Meats picked up seven gold and two silver medals at the Great New Zealand Sausage Competition, earning acclaim for the likes of its pāua and pork salami and a “Pepsi pork” sausage.
“It’s surprisingly good,” Healey insists. “We sort of entered it for a bit of a laugh and it medalled. I think it’s something different that people don’t expect in a sausage.”
The wins were the impetus Mapari needed, says Healey, to invent the limited edition Christmas sausage that he is calling both a seasonal first and the “flavour gift” nobody knew they needed.
“People were talking about putting lamb and turkey together, pork and prawn . . . ”
The butchery made six iterations of its ham and turkey mix before settling on the recipe it turned into “a couple of hundred kilos” or roughly 1800-2000 individual sausages that will sell for $26 a kilogram.
“Originally we used cranberry jelly, and then we went to dried cranberries,” said Healey. “The kicker was soaking the cranberries in brandy with a bit of orange zest.”
It was 9.30am on a Saturday when I burned my Christmas sausages and I was absolutely ready for a brandy. The first bite was mostly salt, but palate quickly adjusted because this is how sausages, generally, work. On some level you are aware they contain fat and sodium, but with every mouthful, your concerns dissipate.
The next bite was all sage and little cubes of apple and it was really good. I couldn’t do this as a mid-week main with mashed spuds and peas, but it’s a definite contender for a Christmas breakfast or Boxing Day barbecue.
The texture was relatively coarse (the sausage would also be really good squeezed out of its casing and used in a stuffing) and I could, weirdly and specifically, taste both the pig and the poultry.
At its heart, this is a sausage made from minced free range pork meat and turkey breast. The ham component is, apparently, chopped. You can taste it’s there, but the pieces were not immediately visible. There is also, says Healey, a little extra pork fat. “For juiciness.”
Meat within meat is, in some countries, a Christmas tradition. Americans, for example, stuff a turkey with a duck stuffed with a chicken and call it turducken. British chef Heston Blumenthal once cemented pork, goose, chicken and lamb meat together with protein glue and called it a television show.
Frankly, both of those dishes sound like a lot of work. I thought of the Mapari Christmas sausage as a less labour-intensive turducken et al; a number-eight-wire approach that (almost) anyone could cook. Australia might have claimed shrimps on the barbie as a national dish – but New Zealand’s new summer Christmas classic could, literally, be a banger.
Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016 and is a senior journalist on its lifestyle desk. She has a Master’s in Gastronomy and would argue (with appropriate citations) that anybody can burn a sausage.
