Online editor’s recipe of the week: pork sausages with fennel and butter bean apple mash

For the husband’s birthday last year, I bought a mincer-and-sausage maker. Luke is notoriously impossible to buy gifts for, so I’ve taken a tactical approach to gift-giving: buy items that will largely be to my benefit, too.

Granted, said machine has been gathering dust after its initial debut (insert excuse about a six-month-old here), but this weekend it got hauled out of the cupboard and put to good use. Luke’s recipe this weekend was simple: deboned pork leg, brined casings and a selection of freshly picked herbs that were briefly dried in the oven. There was a bit of disappointment that we forgot to get caraway seeds but, as I (possibly silently) pointed out, I’m fairly certain he wasn’t aware of caraway seeds’ existence before researching Sunday’s recipe. But I digress.

Come Monday, we found ourself with an oversupply of sausage and so, bangers and mash it was for dinner.

I’m not a massive fan of mashed potato (I know, I know), so stumbling across this butter bean apple mash recipe in the April issue of TASTE magazine was a happy coincidence. Again, it ticked the right boxes for a quick midweek meal:
- Minimal prep: really, all you need to do is cut fennel and apples into wedges. Two apples require simmering in stock for 10 minutes, which was done before the bed, bath and bottle extravaganza.
- Quick cooking time: The tray went into the oven just before putting Max to sleep, and was ready to eat once he was down for the night. All we needed to do was mash the mash, and eat.

We only had one can of butter beans so, to bulk up it up, I added diced sweet potato to the apples simmering in stock. The mash wasn’t as sweet as anticipated (the stock takes the edge off) and the apple and fennel is a happy pairing with the sausages. A definite one-up on your standard bangers and mash!

Give it a try this week and let us know how you enjoy it! You can find the pork sausages with fennel and butter bean apple mash recipe here.

Now, I’m certainly not suggesting that you make your own sausages from scratch. Any store-bought variety (as called for in the recipe) will work a treat. However, if making your own sausages is something that interests you, these are Luke’s tips for making home-made pork sausages:

- Ensure that roughly one third of your mixture is fat. Pork is a lean meat, and the inclusion of fat is necessary to make juicy sausages – otherwise they end up dry and crumbly. A leg typically has enough fat for this purpose.
- When you think you’ve added enough salt to your mixture, add more.
- When you think you’ve got enough fat, add a little more (the juicier, the better!)
- Add the herbs and salt to the unminced meat – that way, the flavours combine well into the mixture during the mincing process.
- Twist every second sausage in alternating directions to stop the entire lot from unravelling.

Watch: how to make homemade boerewors

Have you made your own sausages before? Share your tips in the comments below.

Discover more "recipes of the week" here.