A recipe from Southern Italian Cooking by Valentina Harris. There is no better vehicle to showcase purple sprouting broccoli, which is in season right now. You need top quality ingredients as they will shine in this simple dish. The sausages were Italian with fennel and the PSB our friends at McNally Family Farm.
Wine Suggestion: There’s a certain honest rusticity to this dish which we think suits Nebbiolo or similar, but not the heady heights of Barolo, look for a lesser known area. We went for the lesser known Freisa grape, also from Piedmont. A bottle of the Olim Bauda Freisa and it tasted of roses and raspberry’s with a decent whack of smooth, honest tannins; satisfying and generous alongside the food.
Salsicce con Broccoletti – serves 4
- 1 tbsp lard (we used a mix of olive oil and butter)
- 2 cloves of garlic, crushed
- 1 dried red chilli pepper
- 500g Italian sausages (you need top quality Italian sausages which have a much coarser texture than regular butchers sausages)
- 750g purple sprouting broccoli, rinsed and trimmed
A large shallow casserole dish works well for this. Melt the lard and fry the garlic and chilli pepper over a gentle heat for 5 minutes. Add the sausages and brown all over (you might want to do this in a frying pan so you don’t burn the garlic, if you do, make sure that the tip all the oil that comes out of the sausages back into the pan).
Once browned all over, turn the heat down and cook the sausages gently for 5 minutes. Add the broccoli and season with a little salt. Stir everything to coat in the fat.
Cover the pan and simmer for 20 minutes, a splash of water will help steam the broccoli and stop the dish drying out.
(Original recipe from Southern Italian Cooking by Valentina Harris, Pavilion Books Limited, 1993.)
Jono & Jules do food & wine 