Another giant step for mankind is imminent and Works Well readers will be informed before anyone else. The new technology resolves a problem British sausage-eaters have wrestled with for decades – the moment when the object of their desires ceases to be a cylinder and opts to become a banana.There are no doubt good reasons why a sausage, sensing the heat of the frying pan, curls up as if returning to the womb. But for once the physics doesn’t interest me. I am concerned only with the irritating necessity of rotating an assymetrical body through three 90-deg. steps to ensure equally distributed browning (as evidence of having been cooked).
And yes I know such browning can be achieved by baking or roasting the sausages tightly fitted into a small tray with a raised rim. Mrs B. has often done this and I like the result. But such sausages differ from those fried; for one thing the skin is hardened, for another some of the juice dries up.
My solution is hardly revolutionary. Imagine the business end of a small garden fork without the handle. Six 6-in. long x 3 mm wide tines, just over 1 in. apart. The circular cross-section tines, welded up from stainless steel, are inserted longitudinally into the sausages providing an inflexible “backbone” to each. Rotation becomes a simple finger job. I called Downey Engineering of Pontrilas (Tel: 01981-240427) and asked if they were interested. They said they were “provided we get one the sausages”. Watch this space.
3 comments:
Do keep us posted on whether this works - our Cumberlands curl like sheep wool in rain!
The curling sausage seems to be one of those problems, which we have lived with for so long that we have come to accept it like wet Sundays and traffic jams. But have sausages become less fat? Fat like greed can be good. If you pierced you sausages end to end, I wonder whether much of the fat would drain away, leaving a straight but less succulent sausage.
Natural casings curl because of how the gut grows, all twisty and loopy along a central seam of collagen, which reacts to applied heat rather violently...in terms of sausages, that is. One could slit or score the seam along the length of the sausage, but probably would encounter the same problem Joe mentioned - loss of delicious juices.
A culinary conundrum.
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