East Africa and the Islands · Volume 18, The Indian Ocean Islands
Rougail saucisses, with zembrocal
Réunion
Illustration
- Time
- 1 hour
- Researched
- Researched from 225 sources in the brief
Smoked pork sausage, desalted, then simmered with diced tomato, sliced onion and chilli, and, depending on the household, ginger, garlic, thyme and turmeric. Served with zembrocal, rice cooked with turmeric and red beans, peas or butter beans, and a separate raw chilli rougail. Two things to be honest about. The sausage is not ancestral: it was a long-keeping preserved meat brought by French settlers and adopted by the islanders, and desalting it first is a real step, not a nicety. And the sources themselves flag that this preparation is not always spiced and varies household by household, so anybody who tells you there is one correct rougail saucisses is selling something.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 1 hour, plus desalting.
Ingredients
- 800 g smoked pork sausage, or chicken sausage in the Indo-Mauritian register
- 2 onions, sliced
- 5 ripe tomatoes, diced
- 2 chillies
- 2 cloves garlic, and 20 g ginger, optional by household
- 2 sprigs thyme, optional by household
- 2 tbsp neutral oil
Method
- Desalt the sausage. Prick it, cover with cold water, bring to a boil, drain, and repeat if it is heavily cured. Then slice into thick rounds.
- Brown the sausage rounds in the oil, then lift them out.
- Roussir the onion in that fat until genuinely amber.
- Add the tomato, chilli and any thyme, garlic or ginger your household uses. No turmeric. Turmeric would make it a cari.
- Return the sausage and simmer until the sauce is thick and the fat is coming clear.
- Serve with zembrocal, and a raw chilli rougail on the side.
What a modern chef changes
The desalt measured, the sauce reduced separately, and the turmeric relocated
Rungs 1, 4 and 2
Method
- Taste the desalting water and stop when it stops being salty. Cooks over-salt this dish at the end because they guessed at the beginning.
- Build the rougail as its own reduction and only then return the sausage. Rung 4. Thirty minutes minimum on the tomato before the meat goes back, so the glutamate concentrates and the green aldehydes are gone. Built around the sausage from the start it is watery.
- Keep the turmeric out of the rougail and put it where it belongs. Rung 2 applied by omission and then by placement: bloom it in fat at the start of the zembrocal instead, 60 seconds before the rice and beans go in. The plate gets its yellow, the grammar stays intact, and the curcumin is in solution rather than dusting the rice.
- Make the side rougail 30 minutes ahead and drain it. Chop tomato, onion and chilli, salt, leave. It will weep. Pour off that liquid, reduce it by half, cool it and stir it back: concentrated flavour that does not flood the plate, and acid arriving where the eater controls it.