Can I have smoked sausage?
Image by Matthieu Joannon By Dr Catriona Walsh This excellent question was asked in a group that I moderate. I love it because it's actually not all that straight forward to answer. Essentially, I would say it depends on a lot of variables. Anyway, here are my thoughts on it. Smoked sausage is actually a traditional food, which has a long history of consumption throughout recorded human history. Traditional cultures around the globe have found ways to grind up bits of leftover meat, herbs, spices, some filler, like rusks, oats or corn, and preserve them in casings, which were often just lengths of cleaned out intestines and bladder. Sometimes blood or offal is added as well. They may have used salt and added probiotic cultures to cure the meat as it dried, in order to reduce the risk of pathogenic microbes growing. Alternatively, smoking the sausage was another way to reduce the risk of the meat being contaminated with bacteria which would spoil it. In this way, whatever ...