The Plaw Hatch sausage
Jayne Duveen
Each week the Plaw Hatch butchery switches on an intimidating looking mincer (there’s no messing with this mincer!) and into it we heave at least 60 kilos of mainly pork, lamb and beef to make the 720 sausages that will go into the shop. Using a simple calculation, we could be providing as many as 120 families with their weekly bangers.
In the early days of my butchery career, I was fortunate enough to meet Ray Smith who was the butcher for Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (the English celebrity chef who has done so much for British traditional farmers and producers). I was fortunate because he gave me his recipes for his best-selling sausages. Most butchers hold their recipes very close to their chest, so to be given this knowledge was a real honour (he also gave me the recipe for his bacon which I’ll talk about another time!)
I have been using his recipes now for over ten years and I haven’t strayed much from what he taught me. What I love most about Ray’s recipes is that he never uses preservatives, colourings or commercial sausage mixes. All the sausages made for Plaw Hatch are simply meat, salt, pepper. To add a little variance, I might add Plaw Hatch leeks or Brambletye apples when they’re in season. In the summer months you might even spot sausages with Plaw Hatch cherry tomatoes and basil. To add a little spice to the range we make a merguez sausage which is another recipe passed on by Ray and is red in colour and contains cumin, chilli, fennel, caraway, garlic and nigella seeds.
For the venison and red wine, beef and ale, and the pork and apple sausages, we add breadcrumbs to soak up the liquid. We painstakingly make our own breadcrumbs using gluten free bread. This ensures that all our sausages are gluten free.
Each and every one of the 720 sausages that go into the shop each week are lovingly made by hand using a small, tabletop sausage filler, and we enjoy the therapeutic job of hand tying each sausage and then carefully hanging the strings in the chiller. Here they will stay for 24 hours to air dry before packaging ready to fill the shelves in the shop.
