National Sausage Month

Mariuszjbie [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)]

October is National Sausage Month in the United States.

The sausage is, normally, a meat product (there are vegetarian options) made from ground meat with spices and other flavourings. For meat-based sausages, pork, beef and poultry are all common choices. Filler ingredients such as breadcrumbs may also be added. These are then stuffed into a skin, traditionally made from intestine although there are other variants.

There are many different regional variations when it comes to sausages. Some of these are raw, and are cooked with different methods such as broiling, grilling, pan-frying and barbecuing. Other sausages are precooked or preserved by curing, drying and smoking, which in some cases means the sausage can be stored without being refrigerated. Sausages are one of the oldest preserved foods, as they were created by using the scraps left over from butchering an animal. Modern sausages are more likely to be deliberately created as an end product, rather than being a way to use up all the scraps.

With all the different regional varieties of sausage, from salamis to hot dogs to bratwursts and more, there are a host of different methods for classifying them as to type and recipes for creating them.