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The first and most important thing to know about making sausages is that it’s impossible to do so without sniggering. Despite how serious your intentions, as soon as that salty pink meat starts oozing out of that spout and you feel its weight and girth fill your fist, for at least a minute the whole thing basically becomes a Carry On film. Luckily, by that point you’ll have done most of the hard work, so you’re within your rights to titter at the sheer phallic-ness of the situation.
At Cookery School on Little Portland Street, I learn that the key to crafting a brilliant banger is fat. Not vitamins, not anti-oxidants, not organic fairtrade gluten-free quinoa – good old fashioned fat. The school’s three-hour class involves tackling five varieties, each requiring a different amount of added fat; loads for super-lean turkey, none for flabilicious pork belly, and somewhere in-between for spicy beef, merguez, and boerewors.
From here it’s a case of shoving the meat through a mincer, combining with seasoning and that all-important fat, then mincing again to form a thick, evenly mixed paste. Next, a small patty is formed from each mixture and quickly cooked and tasted to check seasoning. After adjusting, it’s time to load up the KitchenAid and force the lot into casings (made from sheep intestines), controlling the pace of the casings with one hand to achieve the correct width, and supporting the resulting meat-wang with the other.
While the class takes a moment to chill with a glass of wine, the sausages are cooked and dished up with mash, onion gravy and kale, (the class’s one concession to healthiness) and we all agree we’ve done a brilliant job. Sure, it’s not a particularly challenging class (or, between the oodles of fat and knob jokes, the most twenty-first-century), but true sausage appreciators will get plenty of banger for their buck.
Find other weird and wonderful hobbies to try in London.