Italian sausage is a pork sausage with a mild to hot flavor and fennel seeds. It is popular in sandwiches and a variety of dishes. It is important to fully cook the sausage before serving and the mild version is sweeter with an aniseed flavor. It is high in fat but can be used sparingly in sauces to reduce overall fat content.
Italy is known for many different types of sausages, but in the United States, we tend to refer to one type of sausage only as Italian sausage. This is a pork sausage that can have a mild to hot flavor and gets its distinctive flavor from the addition of fennel seeds. Usually if Italian sausage is labeled hot or spicy, it also has red pepper flakes to provide extra heat.
The ingredients for Italian sausage are quite simple: finely chopped pork, some pork fat, salt and pepper, usually nitrates, and fennel. Sausages of this type are about 3-4 inches (7.62-10.16 cm) long and about 1.27-2.08 inches in diameter. The ingredients are packaged in casings, so they stay together while the sausage cooks.
Italian sausage is popular served on its own in sandwiches, perhaps accompanied by grilled peppers and onions. There are numerous uses for this sausage in a variety of dishes. For example, you can lightly cook the sausage and add it to marinara sauce, for a great, tangy gravy, or you can eat it as a breakfast sausage with traditional eggs and hash browns – figure about one or two sausages per person for breakfast.
Although many people like the spicy sausage, loaded with red pepper flakes, some prefer the relatively milder versions. In fact, the mild version is quite sweet and sweet, best known for its distinctive aniseed flavor. You may want to choose mild Italian sausages if you plan on serving them to a large gathering of people, as some people don’t mind the extra heat of the spicy version, and it may be difficult to tell the two types apart when cooked through.
Cooking Italian sausage is vitally important. Most versions are sold completely raw and must be fully cooked before serving. If you’re concerned about making sure the insides of these sausages are fully cooked through, you can boil them for about ten minutes before grilling or frying them. If you plan to use sliced Italian sausages, you should definitely pre-cook them. Once you start cutting into the casing of a raw sausage, the inside tends to fall apart if the pre-cooking doesn’t solidify it.
Since these sausages contain additional pork fat, they aren’t exactly low cholesterol offerings. They tend to be high in fat and are not the perfect diet dish. On the other hand, they impart so much flavor, that you can typically get away with adding just a couple of slices to a sauce meant to serve a large number of people. Some Italian cooks add both sausage and ground beef to Italian red meat sauces. If you use lean meats like ground chicken or turkey and add two to three sausages, you’ll reduce the overall fat content of your red sauce without skipping the delicious Italian sausage flavor.
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