Sausagefest 2 - Now with Potatoes!

After last weekend's sausage success, we swung back to The Meat Hook for a second round. This week's stars: merguez, red wine rosemary, chorizo, garlic, and boermors. If there's any regret I had with last week's adventure, it was the unused fat that fell to the bottom of the drip-tray after broiling the sausages. To improve on our sausage tasting we hit up the Union Square farmer's market on the way home to pick up some root vegetables. It being the lean time of year for local produce, we snagged a beautiful bag of potatoes.

I decided to do a little trick shown to me by Nick Fauchald, editor of The Tasting Table. If you don't have a wire rack for roasting meats, use some root vegetables instead! As the fat renders out of your protiens, it bathes the starchy veggies in a coating of delicious.. Wanting to keep the integrity of the flavors of each sausage, I made little aluminum foil boats for each link, filling the bottoms with quartered purple and gold potatoes.

Just like the brussels sprouts last week, I didn't salt or pepper the veggies. I let the sausages impart their unique flavors to the potatoes while roasting in a 450 degree oven. Halfway through roasting I flipped the sausages.

We followed a better tasting order this time, starting with the milder links. The red wine rosemary and garlic sausages were nice, but a bit milder than I'd like. (After last week's revelations my bar has gotten quite a bit higher.) Neither of these sausages rendered near as much fat as the merguez or the chorizo. The big surprise this week was the boermors. Imagine a sausage that tastes like a meaty glass of scotch. Seriously, it tasted of pork and beef, with smoke at the start and oak at the finish. Delicious! After the boermors we finished with the chorizo and merguez for dessert. The chorizo was nicely balanced, not too much heat, not too much spice with lots of complex flavor. They imparted a nice flavor to the potatoes they were roasted with, but the winner this week was the merguez. The merguez potatoes were fantastic! All in all, a great sausagefest.