Orange-Hued Bangers Do Good By Your Heart

The noble sausage. Without it there would be no fried breakfast, no pepperoni pizza, no Spanish chorizo, no German bratwurst and no bangers and mash. It is a seriously versatile beast. In fact, one of the few things you never want to do with a sausage is think too hard about what’s in it, because the answer is usually too much fat. Fat that tastes good, makes you feel full faster and makes food look tastier. Plus it’s cheap. Plump for the sixpence bargain banger, and you get a mere 32% pork and a hefty 15.3% fat. Unfortunately, it also boosts the risk of obesity, cardiovascular disease and cancer.

The problem with taking out the fat is that you often take out the flavor, too. But luckily for sausage aficionados around the world, Maria Luisa Garcia, a nutritionist at the Complutense University in Madrid, and her colleagues discovered that this needn’t be the case. By adding orange peel to sausage meat, they produced a lower-fat banger that tastes just as delicious as the full-fat equivalent. Garcia’s citrus sausages also carry the health benefits of the fruit, whose fiber helps fight colon cancer and heart disease.

Garcia and her colleagues cooked up several batches of “experimental sausages.” They made low-fat and full-fat bangers with the fibers from three fruits: apple, orange and peach, at two different concentrations. They added all the usual flavorsome herbs and spices to the meat and grilled them to perfection. Then the team invited 15 lucky colleagues to the lab for a meaty tasting session. General consensus was that only the orange-laden sausage was comparable in taste to the sinful full-fat version. With just 15 grams of orange fiber per kilogram, the sausage boasted an impressive 30% fewer calories and still tasted just as good. The results were published online last week in The Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture. 

The orange fiber gave the meat a noticeable yellow tinge, but that’s a small price to pay for healthier food. And fruit goes well with meat. Just think of turkey with cranberry jelly, pork with applesauce, and Peking duck with plum sauce. Honey, mustard, rosemary, chili, coriander, apple, sage and pancetta are commonly found in a sausage, so a little bit of orange should really fit right in.

And because orange rind is a bit of a by-product itself, we can hope that these healthful sausages won’t be as pricey as organics or other low-fat bangers, which can cost upwards of £3 (nearly $6) per pack. The average British household spent just £23.79 ($47) on 8.4 kilograms of sausage in 2006, or around £1.30 ($2.50) per pack. That’s a lot of bad bargain bangers. So pork and orange sausages? With any luck, coming soon to a supermarket shelf near you.