Once cooked, you drain it and use it in your recipe or dish - it's pretty classic.
What about the cooking water?
Well, it's not just water any more: during the cooking process, there's been an exchange between the water and the sausage, and you now have a cooking broth, more or less spicy depending on the number and type of sausages you've cooked in it.It's even more fragrant if you've cooked a smoked sausage, like a Morteau sausage (the best sausage in the world, let's not forget ;-) its smoky taste will make your broth even better.
As with vegetable stock, it would be a shame to throw it away, when you can use it to great advantage in other cooking techniques.
Cooking with sausage stock
Sausage broth can be used in any type of cooking that is normally done in salted water. Here are a few ideas:- Rice: Excellent choice, but you'll need to cook it pilaf or in a rice cooker, where you add just the right amount of liquid. Your rice will be absolutely delicious.
- Potatoes: Also very effective, but you'll need to cook them without the skin.
- Vegetables in general: In all "English-style" cooking, you can replace the water with stock.
- Pasta: Here's the counter-example: it's possible, of course, but it gives pasta little or no flavor.
- Seafood: Fish fillets, shrimps, etc. Perfect for a combination of land and sea
The same applies to sausage broth as to vegetable broth: if you use it again as a broth (cooking vegetables, for example), there's no end to it, and it can be reused as often as you like, topping up with water.
Best of all, each time you cook it, it gets a little tougher, and there's nothing to stop you cooking another sausage in it.
To sum up: keep the water you use to cook your sausages. It's a cooking broth that can be reused for other purposes.
