At Ethical Farmers one of our core values is transparency. With BBQ season in full swing, it feels like the right time to start a conversation about snags. What goes in them, what makes a good one, and which ones you want to avoid if health and meat provenance are important to you.
Our sausages are made from 70/30 muscle & trim to fat ratio from our grass-fed beef or lamb and pastured animals like pork and chicken. By muscle we generally refer to the leg of the animal which we currently don't utilise for cuts such as topside and silverside. By trim, we mean the offcuts from our butchering when we cut, for example, steaks.
To flavour our sausages we use organic herbs and spices and rice flour to help bind. Our sausages are gluten free and we have a 100% grain free sausage available without rice flour. Most sausages (not ours!) are made from a packet mix called 'sausage meal'.
The 'meal' is a premix of flour, flavours and well...a quick google and you can see for yourself what's in 'traditional beef sausage meal': Flour rice, Salt, Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein, Mineral Salt (451), Preservative (223), Colour (150c,160c), Vegetable Oil, Spice Extract, Vitamin E (derived from soy) (307b), Herb Extract Contains sulphite greater/equal to 10mg/kg.
No thanks to the sausage meal above—shop the real deal with the Ethical Farmers.
Cooking the perfect snag
- Take sausages out of the fridge 30 minutes before you plan to cook to allow the internal temperature to rise, this will give you a more even cook.
- The secret to cooking sausages on a BBQ or in a frypan is to cook over medium heat slowly. Too much and you burn or burst the snag.
- Don't pierce your sausage with a fork as it cooks, fat will find it's exit from the sausage without the extra holes which have the potential to dry your sausage out.
- If you're impatient and have really thick snags you can poach them for 5 minutes in water, red wine or stock (beer?) to reduce the on pan/grill cooking time.
- You can cut or squeeze the meat out of a good quality sausage and use it as a homemade pizza topping or add to a quick tomato sauce for pasta or veggies.