It's the fennel seed that makes it. Italian sausage, that is. Fennel provides the single most distinctive flavor in Italian sausage and it's often described as anise-like. Perhaps so, but I don't taste that component. The vegetable tastes like anise, but to me the seeds have a sharp, prickly flavor with slight sour notes and a hint of musk. In pork sausage it brings out the sweetness inherent in the meat and the addition of red pepper works as a complement to the sweet.A few years back I ran across a recipe for sausage ragu that used Italian sausage.and fell in love with it. And what's not to like? Sausage, onions, bell peppers, and tomatoes are simmered slowly until the whole house smells like a villa on a hillside in Tuscany. You can almost see a gray-haired woman, gnocchi-shaped, and dressed in a shapeless black dress standing in the kitchen over a steaming pot.
Sausage Ragu
1 lb Italian sausage -- cut into 3/8" rounds
2 tbsp olive oil
1/2 ea lg green bell pepper -- cut into 1" square pieces
1/2 ea red bell pepper (or any ripe bell) -- cut into 1" square pieces
1/2 ea lg yellow onion -- cut into 1" square pieces
3 cloves garlic -- chopped
1 can diced tomatoes, 15oz
1 c red wine
chicken stock
1 tbsp minced fresh rosemary
2 tbsp minced fresh oregano
1 ea bay leaf
salt
In a large pot, brown sausage in olive oil over medium high heat. Remove sausage from pot with a slotted spoon, reduce heat to medium, add onion, and cook, stirring occasionally, for about three minutes. Add bell peppers and continue cooking for five minutes. Add garlic and cook one minute more until you can smell garlic.
Add wine, deglaze pot, and simmer until liquid is reduced by half. Return sausage to pot, add tomatoes with juice, herbs, and enough chicken stock to just barely come up to top of meat. Add about 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Partially cover pot, reduce heat to medium low, and simmer gently for about an hour.
Serve on pasta or polenta. Serves 4.
Kevin Weeks is also a Gather food correspondent (Paisano), personal chef, cooking teacher, and writer in Knoxville, Tennessee who spends too many hours on his feet, cooking. "Paisano" is a column focused on peasant dishes from around the world. To read more of Kevin's writings or connect to him click here. His blog, Seriously Good, is read by 50,000 cooks a month.
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Comments: 15
It's a great choice for a Super Bowl gathering.
Kathleen,
Lisa,
Thank you.
Another recipe for my To Try file
I love that part of this article. It is wonderful how a smell can transport us into our memories.
Thanks.
Kristina,
Yes it is, and how words can evoke a scent.
Use canned tomatoes -- they work as well in a stew. But you do need both sweet (ripe) and bitter (green) peppers to make this dish properly. Sorry.
I'm not a plant person, but traveling with my mother I've been treated to wild thyme she found growing beside a road in Italy and marjarom found in a cemetary in Greece.
I have no idea what ginger looks like above the root.