Glamorgan Sausage

As tradition built it

First recorded in the 1850s; working proportions, not a preserved historic recipe. Wales.com (Welsh Government) serves it as four portions, eight sausages: about 50 minutes, plus 30 minutes optional chilling.

Ingredients

• 2 medium leeks, finely sliced
• 40g butter, for sweating the leeks
• 200g Caerphilly cheese, grated
• 100g breadcrumbs, plus extra for coating
• a spoonful mustard powder
• a little thyme
• 2 whole eggs
• 1 extra egg yolk (white reserved for coating)
• to taste salt and pepper

Method

1. Finely slice the leeks and sweat them gently in butter until soft without taking on colour, then cool.
2. Mix the Caerphilly cheese, breadcrumbs, mustard powder and thyme in a bowl.
3. Beat the two whole eggs and the extra yolk with salt and pepper, reserving the egg white for coating, and fold through the cheese mixture.
4. Fold in the cooled leeks last, the egg binding the whole mixture.
5. Shape into sausages, roll in breadcrumbs bound with the reserved egg white, and fry until golden.

Notes

No historically fixed weights survive in any source found for this chapter; the ratios above are the working proportions this chapter tested, not a preserved historic recipe, and should be read as such.

Originally made with the now-extinct Glamorgan cattle's own cheese; Caerphilly, its direct descendant, has stood in since.

What a modern chef changes

Bound with potato starch, poached sous vide, finished with a leek ash

Rung 5

Method

1. Bind the mixture with a small proportion of activated potato starch alongside the egg, which lets the sausage hold together at a lower cooking temperature and prevents the cheese inside from splitting into an oily mess before the outside colours.
2. Poach the shaped sausages sous vide at 62°C for twenty minutes to set them gently through.
3. Coat and fry only briefly, for colour and crunch rather than to cook the filling.
4. Make a pickled leek ash: dehydrate the green leek tops, burn and grind to a fine seasoning powder.
5. Dust the leek ash over the plate rather than folding it into the mixture, for a genuine leek note that reads as aroma rather than texture.