Indiana · Main
Indiana Corn and Sausage Skillet
- Easy
- 40 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, wood-smoke running underneath, lifted green at the very end.
Ingredients
- 500g smoked sausage, sliced
- 6 ears corn, kernels cut off
- 2 tbsp butter
- 1 onion, diced
- 1 red pepper, diced
- 2 potatoes, diced small
- 120ml cream
- 1 tsp thyme
- Salt, pepper, and parsley
Equipment
Skillet
The skills inside
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs outKnife cuts: dice, julienne, bias
Allergen screen
Found: dairy
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Brown the sausage in a large skillet; lift out and reserve.
- Cook the diced potato in the rendered fat until tender and browned, 10 min. 10 min
- Add the onion and pepper and cook 5 min, then the corn and cook 3 min over high heat. 5 min
- Return the sausage, add the cream and thyme, and simmer 3 min until it thickens slightly. 3 min
- Season and finish with parsley. Serve straight from the skillet.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out 73 recipes
- It started cold or low and came up slowly: fat that met a hot pan seizes and scorches before the inside can melt, and there is no recovering it.
- The fat in the pan is clear and clean-smelling, pale to golden, with no dark sediment on the floor and nothing acrid in the steam.
- What is left behind is crisp and deep gold with no soft pale fat still clinging to it and no black burnt edges.
- There is a real volume of it: enough to film the pan floor and be poured off and kept, not a dry smear that never ran.
- Whatever cooks in it browns in it and takes its flavour, rather than sitting in a greasy pool that never gets hot enough to colour anything.
Where it goes wrong The heat was raised to hurry it along, so the outside seized and browned before the interior fat could melt; very little runs out, and the solids come out burnt on the outside and rubbery within.
Knife cuts: dice, julienne, bias 150 recipes
- Take any three pieces from anywhere in the pile: they match closely enough in every dimension that you would have to measure them to argue otherwise.
- The cut faces are flat and clean rather than ragged or crushed; leaves and herbs are cut through, not bruised, and the board carries no dark smear where they were.
- The stated size is the actual size, held against a rule or a known reference rather than called about right.
- Everything in the pile is the shape that was asked for: no wedges, no half pieces, and no offcuts swept in to avoid waste.
- They cook evenly, which is the entire point: at the end of cooking nothing is still raw and nothing has collapsed.
Where it goes wrong The knife was dull, or the vegetable was never squared off first, so the pieces vary: the small ones are mush by the time the large ones are cooked, and the dish has two textures where it wanted one.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.