I’m pleased to report that the ones I made before do freeze okay and don’t do something weird and clump or anything like that - they defrosted fine and are still a weird sloppy non-sausage that explodes because it’s too much water in it.

But the exciting news is that if they freeze, we don’t have to be careful so I can indulge myself and follow the itch!

Pretty much on a whim to give myself something to do between work, I decided to go again and make something drier!

Today’s mix is yellow split peas, crushed end of the bag of tofu sheets, cannellini beans, mushrooms and gluten.

The mushrooms were dry fried under a heavy weight to get as much water as possible although I did put the mushroom water back in to the bowl of everything else where I was letting things at the frozen defrost onto the tofu sheets to rehydrate them.

I banged a good bit of the Lincolnshire flavour industrial rusk mix I bought from the butchers as well (so it’s just rusk, i.e wheat, and spices) for flavour texture and soaking up more water.

Extra flavouring was some leek, garlic, salt, tomato paste, and some ground black cardamom where I ground the pods as well as the seeds because they’re the part that get smoked, and my generic umami mix which is mostly soy sauce, let’s be honest.

This got left to defrost where appropriate, then I blended the mixture. I started off by putting it in a bag to twist and squeeze and get some of the liquid out… Very quickly moved to put it on the floor and standing on it to hurry up the process

Then banged in some gluten flour to stick it together!

It looks and smells amazing but I’m still learning about how gluten hardening does make hand machining it a little exhausting 😁 banged quite a lot of oil in as well for taste but also lubricating the process.

Not cooked yet and giving them a couple of hours… After 8 sausages, I decided to just make meatballs out the rest which I really am looking forward to using later

My predictions for this batch is that it’s going to be a little dry and maybe skating towards bready - often a danger with gluten in my experience but then I usually hand make it and not buy the flour pre-made - we’ll see!

What I definitely think won’t happen this time around is any explosion ❤️