Italian Fennel Sausage Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is fennel sausage made of? ›

Description. Ground pork simply flavored with red pepper flakes, fennel seed and garlic! Perfect for adding to any recipe (especially Italian recipes) that call for sausage!

Heat a non-stick pan over a medium heat, then add the sausages. A little of the fat from the sausages will start to come out as they warm up; turn the sausages in the hot fat to coat them. Keep cooking for 15-20 mins, moving them around in the pan and turning them over regularly so they all cook evenly.

In North America, Italian sausage (Italian: salsiccia, Italian: [salˈsittʃa]) most often refers to a style of pork sausage. The sausage is often noted for being seasoned with fennel or anise as the primary seasoning.

Rinaldi Plain Italian Sausage is the perfect sausage for the masses. Mild garlic flavor with no fennel. Great for large gatherings with a universally accepted flavor profile.

A sausage is a type of meat product usually made from ground meat—often pork, beef, or poultry—along with salt, spices and other flavourings. Other ingredients, such as grains or breadcrumbs, may be included as fillers or extenders.

For example, Italians often eat fennel raw at the end of a meal, saying it helps with digestion and cleansing.

The main ingredients of a sausage are meat, fat, binding agents and water. There are three stages involved in preparing them: mincing the meat and fat, mixing the different ingredients together and filling. Filing is where the mixture is put into the casing.

Ground Herbs and Spices

Ground spices blend seamlessly into the sausage meat. Because ground herbs and spices are smaller, they distribute through the meat evenly. They are less noticeably visible in the meat; what they lose in visual aesthetic they make up for in all-over flavor.

It is a penicillin-based mold similar to the white mold you will find on a fine cheese like a French Brie or Camembert. It's a natural part of the fermentation process of producing artisanal salumi, and the salami mold has its own flavor and flora.

The main difference in Italian sausage when compared to other sausages is the seasoning. The particular ingredient that usually sets Italian sausage apart is fennel. This is a licorice scented herb that gives Italian sausage its unique taste that is different than other types of sausage.

What do Italians call Italian sausage? ›

Salsiccia is certainly the most ancient and best known of sausages. It is made from fresh meat, mostly pork, with scraps of pancetta and bits of pork neck. It is usually eaten fresh, but is also often grilled. In northern Italy, these sausages are flavored with pepper, cinnamon, white wine and garlic.

Every processed meat product has a traditional product characteristic. Traditionally, Italian sausage contains fennel and black pepper. Typically the black pepper used in Italian sausage is a coarser particle size than you find in fresh pork sausage. Fennel is the spice that gives Italian sausage its Italian flavor.

The red pepper flakes are what give the spicy varieties of Italian sausage their signature kick, while fennel is the hallmark flavor that makes it distinct from other kinds of sausage.

First of all, let's get one thing straight: wine sellers did not doctor their wine with fennel (finocchio in Italian) or fennel seeds in the Middle Ages or Renaissance.

Fennel is a member of the carrot family, though it's not a root vegetable. The base of its long stalks weave together to form a thick, crisp bulb that grows above ground. Above the bulb, at the tip of the stalks, it has light, feathery leaves that resemble dill.

Fennel has a very mild anise or licorice flavor that can be enhanced or sweetened depending on how it is cooked (or not cooked). When diced and sauteed with onions as one of the first steps when making a soup or stew, fennel becomes very sweet.

Additions to the basic sausage mix vary from classic seasonings such as onions, garlic, herbs and spices (parsley, fennel, allspice) to more luxurious flavourings such as truffle.

Sausage casing, also known as sausage skin or simply casing, is the material that encloses the filling of a sausage. Natural casings are made from animal intestines or skin; artificial casings, introduced in the early 20th century, are made of collagen and cellulose.