wheels wrote:Thanks TLP. Whilst rusk is great to reduce fat, the OP wants low-calorie; I'm not sure that rusk will be any better than meat from a calorie perspective.
Any ideas for sausage that use a lower calorie product as a filler?
Phil
My thoughts:
Basically the energy content of fat is close to 40,000 Joules per gram (9 'kitchen calories' in old money, which I'll refer to simply as calories) and carbohydrates close to 17,000 Joules per gram (4 calories) - replacing fat with rusk on a weight for weight basis will reduce the energy content as one ingredient has about half the energy of the other - but my guess is that during the cooking none of the carbohydrate energy will be lost, whereas some of the fat will render out...
So you'd need a low calorie 'padding'. Off the top of my head I can think of a few candidates, both natural and processed:
1) Onion - Raw onion contains 40 calories per 100gm - Sweat down in vast quantities and use as a binder in a similar fashion to some Spanish morcilla recipes.
2) Cooked pumpkin/squash - (as in the Spanish 'Chorizo de Calabaza') - I'd be tempted to dice the firmest squash that you can find, cut into small cubes, boil, spread out on a cloth over a rack and allow to cool so as to get rid of as much moisture as possible; or roast in the skin at a low/moderate temperature so as to cook out a lot of the moisture, without browning too much, before further preparation.
3) Konjac noodles (sold as 'water noodles' - an over-priced, virtually tasteless, almost zero calorie slimming aid) - if you bought the 'rice' noodles these have already been cut into fat-sized pieces. If you go down this route they should probably be treated as a totally inert ingredient having no affect on the bind of the farce. Note that these noodles do not absorb flavour, they just add bulk and appearance, and pass through the gut undigested (check them out the following day!). If you try this I'd be keen to know how they work out and see a picture of the cooked and uncooked result (but not a picture of the 'second day' sausage - yuk!) as I have no intention of trying it myself.
If I really wanted a low energy sausage I'd be tempted to buy Marianski's book on vegetarian sausages, find a low calorie one that I liked, then mix this with my preferred meat-sausage mix in the ratio 40:60 to 60:40 to taste.
What I would probably do in practice is to make a really good meat-sausage, packed full of flavour with a brilliant texture, and accept that I can only eat two of them for every three that I ate before.
Philip