Rolling a sausage in 24ct real gold leaf
Recipe
Ingredients
16 good chipolata sausages
8 leaves parchment or loose-leaf 24ct gold (available form good art shops)
Potatoes for mash
Method
I suggest that you just gild one sausage for each person to serve with some ungilded ones otherwise you’ll be there all day. Use good sausages that aren’t overly thick – chipolatas are best. I won’t waste time with the recipes for mash and gravy – I’m sure you’ve got your favourites.
Heat your oven to 160ºC/325ºF/Gas Mark 3. Slowly roast rather than fry your sausages (this seems to keep the shape better) for anything up to an hour, and whilst they are cooking make your mash and perhaps a red onion gravy. When they are nicely done, let the sausages cool a little and as soon as you can handle them easily take the ones that are least curly – one for each person – and dab as much of the fat off with kitchen roll as you can. Don’t skip this bit otherwise the fat will go straight through the gold and fasten it to the parchment.
Turn the oven off and put the rest of the sausages in to keep warm. Shut all doors and windows and set yourself up on the kitchen table with all your tools and an aura of calm. Having put all the time and effort into preparing yourself for this moment, it should now only take you about 10 minutes to gild the sausages, if you have all of the tools assembled. Take one leaf of transfer gold and lay it on the chopping board. Then simply roll your sausage across the gold leaf and it will pick up the gold as you roll. The leaf will probably not be long enough to entirely cover the sausage so either cover one end fully and bury the other into the mash for serving or use two leaves per banger. You may need to use a dry paintbrush (not the oily one) to dab the leaf onto the sausage if it hasn’t stuck, and then carefully pull the parchment away, if it hasn’t come away already. It probably won’t be that neat, and you may have left some gaps, but it’s best not to worry too much.
Put a neat pile of mash on each plate and stick the plain sausages into the mash in the classic Desperate Dan style. Pick up the (admittedly slightly colder) gold one – you should be able to use your fingers without destroying them. Serve, without drawing any attention to the golde. Luxuriate in the warmth of your fellow man.
From Gastronaut book
Golden sausages
A collection of recipes from books and TV shows I’ve made.
Golden sausages
From Gastronaut and Gastronuts
In the pantheon of unnecessary, over-elaborate and time-consuming recipes, there’s surely no greater waste of time and money, no more pointless and recklessly prodigal a task than cooking with gold. Let’s give it a go.
Gold has traditionally been used to decorate namby-pamby fancy foods such as chocolates, gingerbread and cakes. So we’re going to make bangers and mash with gold sausages, fish and chips with golden chips, and gilded Wotsits.
Why bother cooking with gold? It’s tasteless, odourless, infuriating to handle, entirely devoid of nutrients and cripplingly expensive. But that’s precisely why it’s so exciting. It’s an alchemical elevation of food from fuel to wonder, an escape from reality, a way of being decadent. And it’s all the more decadent if, like me, you can’t actually afford it. Like going shopping to ease the misery of your overdraft, or eating chocolate to forget how overweight you are. In fact, if you’re rich, cooking with gold is no fun at all, naff even. A bit like putting a big sign in front of your mansion saying, ‘I’m rich’.
There’s an interesting, if slight, history to gilded food. It was very popular in medieval Britain, especially amongst the clergy. Elizabeth Grey’s 1653 Secrets in Physick and Chyrugery explains how to gild candied flowers, the 15th-century Ordinance of Pottage shows how to gild walnuts, and in 1769 Elizabeth Raffald wrote a recipe for gilded fish in jelly. Bols still make Gold Wasser de Danzig, which they claim dates back to Louis XIV’s time and features flocculent shavings of gold skimming the bottom – so flocculent, in fact, that it looks like there’s been a fault with the bottling machine, but it’s a nice idea. In India and Pakistan it’s used on special occasions for handmade sweets and occasionally mixed, with a glorious sense of abandon, with rice. Unsurprisingly, it’s also reputed to have aphrodisiac qualities. These days it’s pretty much confined to the odd dusting on a bourgeois chocolate truffle, and the EC lists it as food colouring E175 (silver is E174 and aluminium E173), which takes away the romance.
Once you have decided to throw caution to the wind, you must procure some gold. Unless you are a complete squandermaniac, the only reasonable approach is to buy gold leaf, often available from art shops. At this point, you may be tempted to try cooking with silver leaf, which does indeed behave in a similar way but is infinitely cheaper. Or perhaps the appallingly named LusterDust and Gold Luster Dust aerosol have caught your eye. Don’t even think about it. You’d only be cheating yourself. If you’re going to celebrate life by doing something truly pointless and unnecessary, you have to throw your lot in. It’s got to be real gold or nothing at all.
There are three main types of gold that you can use for food: gold leaf, gold ribbon and gold powder. By far the most cost-effective is gold leaf, but it is a tricky substance to deal with – it’s been beaten so thinly that it floats off and breaks very easily.
Two of the leading gilding specialists are E. Ploton, with a shop in north London, and Habberley Meadows, who boast ‘By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen’ no less and are based in Birmingham. I visited Ploton’s, and spoke to an affecting young scallywag by the name of James, who was wonderfully helpful and patient. He had once tried gilding some profiteroles, a confession that surprised and pleased me, coming from a young man of the grunge-rock persuasion.
Ploton’s advise that only 24 ct gold (i.e. 100% pure) is edible, though other sources say that 22 ct is OK. Anything below 24 ct is mixed with copper and nickel, so the choice is yours. Gold leaf is sold by the book of 25 leaves, each mere molecules thick, which makes it a flighty, extremely delicate substance to handle. It tears easily and if you pick it up with your fingers it will stick and probably disintegrate. You can buy it as ‘transfer’ leaf, which sits conveniently on a piece of parchment, or ‘loose’, which is great for non-flat surfaces but a swine to control.
So how much does it cost? In 2009 a book containing 25 leaves of 24 ct transfer gold 8 cm x 8 cm was £14.50, which is pretty good value for a book of dreams. It cost £14.45 loose, whilst the 22 ct was £10.70 loose or £12.30 for transfer. If you want to go crazy, gold powder would cost about £56 for 2 grams. (All prices fluctuate, often on a daily basis, as the price of gold shifts.) Most of it seems to be made in Germany or Italy. It’s also a good idea to buy some inedible faux gold leaf for practising with before you use the real stuff. Try some No. 2_ Schlag loose leaf at £2.95 for a larger 14 cm x 14 cm book, but bear in mind that it’s still thicker than real gold. If you’re feeling flush, you might also want to invest in a special gilding brush made from squirrel hair, [3_ inches – metric] wide and £11.15 to you, squire.
When you buy the gold, a warm feeling sweeps through you. Enjoy it – that’s the decadence setting in. It feels rather sparkling and splendid to own sheets of pure gold, albeit not very much. Once you get home, find a couple of artist’s paintbrushes (if you didn’t buy the squirrel version), a pair of tweezers, some sharp scissors and a good smooth chopping board. Close the windows – any breeze at all is likely to destroy wafer-thin gold – and pour a small amount of vegetable oil into a bowl. Have a go with the faux gold first – try gilding a few Wotsits and you’ll see how delicate and tricky it is. You’ll need to coat the Wotsit with a thin layer of oil to make the leaf stick, then roll it across the gold, pressing it down with the brush. You’ll make a hash of the first few, but then you should get the hang of it.
Before you start, clean and dry your hands. If at any stage a gold leaf floats free, don’t try to catch it as it may break and probably stick disastrously to your fingers. Let it settle wherever it wants to then pick it up very gently with tweezers or with a paintbrush dabbed with the lightest amount of oil. When you’re ready to do the real thing, make sure you have a little bowl ready to keep all of the gold shavings that you muck up or don’t use. These can be used later to scatter on top of cappuccinos or a nifty gin and tonic.
I thoroughly recommend that you try this. Cooking with gold lends you a gentle magical aura that lasts for a couple of days afterwards – similar to that blessed feeling of waking up with no hangover when by rights you should be enduring waves of alcoholic nausea and nihilism. And just so’s you know, your guests are likely to ask you the following questions:
‘Will the gold hurt my fillings in the way that a stray piece of foil will? The answer is ‘no’.
‘Is it bad for you? Again, ‘no’.
‘Will I have gold poo in the morning? Well, you may find some flecks, if you’re lucky and observative, but in my own investigations, none have been found.
‘And someone is bound to ask, ‘Will I be able to lay golden eggs?’ Of course you will.
You should be feeling slightly mucky from all this decadence by now. I suggest you pick up the phone and call Oxfam and make a donation. It might not solve your problem, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.
From Gastronaut book
TM