Grilled Turkey Sausage with Fennel Salad

Grilled Turkey Sausage with Fennel Salad

Why this Recipe Works: Supermarket turkey sausage is a great choice for a summer dinner: It’s  inexpensive, easy to find, cooks up quickly, and tastes great hot off the grill. Plus, it comes in a variety of different styles, with numerous flavoring and seasoning combinations. For this recipe, we like mild, Italian style turkey sausage, since its flavors pair well with the fennel salad. But any fresh, uncooked sausage will work, so fell free to be creative. The salad is a study of familiar yet contracting textures are flavors: apples and oranges, fennel and olives, scallions and cider vinegar. We use a sparse amount of oil cured olives, chopped up, to get a subtle but recognizable hit of intense briny flavor in each bite. If you’re using another, less assertive variety of olive, up the amount form ¼ cup to 1/3 cup. We recommend using a mandoline to slice the fennel into thin, even ribbons. The thinner the slices, the more tender the fennel becomes and the easier it is to eat. While the mandoline is out, go ahead and use it to slice the apple – there’s no better way to cut even, thin slices quickly. And don’t peel the apple; the green flashes of peel add visual interest to the dish. The sweetness of the orange is key to the flavor profile of this particular salad, so be sure to remove all of this particular salad, so be sure to remove all of the bitter, white pith from the orange segments. If you don’t the oranges less pleasing bitter qualities will carry over into the salad.

Ingredient: 4 serves

2 fennel bulbs, cores removed and sliced very thin on mandoline

1 granny smith apple, cored and sliced thin

2 oranges, peel cut away and segments removed

2 tablespoons cider vinegar

¼ cup olive oil

4 scallions, sliced thin

¼ cup oil cured olives, chopped salt and pepper

1 ½ pounds turkey sausage

Procedures:

1. Toss fennel, apple, oranges, vinegar, oil, scallions, and olives together until combined. Season with salt and pepper
2. grill sausages over hot fire until golden brown and cooked through, about 12 minutes. Transfer to platter. Serve with fennel salad.

Quick prep tip SHAVING FENNEL

Because of its awkward bulbous base and feathery foliage, working with fennel can be tricky. Here’s how we handle this oddly shaped vegetable in the test kitchen. We cut off the stems and the feathery fronds on top and then trim a very thin slice from the base of the bulb. Next, we slice the bulb in half lengthwise from top to bottom before cutting out the tough, triangular – shaped piece of the core located on the bottom of each half. Finally, we carefully run the fennel, cut side down, down the length of the mandolin. Since the blade of the mandoline is very sharp, many mandolins come equipped with a safety device that elevates your hand away from the blade.