Team würstel or team sausage?
Würstel or sausage, which ‘team’ are you on? Apart from individual tastes, these 2 sausages have important differences, including nutritional ones, that need to be known in order to make an informed choice.
Würstel belong to the family of cooked sausages. Arriving in Italy from central Europe, they are now also widespread in our country where they have many admirers. Small in size, usually ‘single-serving’, würstel, perhaps a mistranslation of würstchen (which means sausage in German), is made from a mixture of meat, pork lard, flavourings and finely ground spices. The mixture is then left to rest before being stuffed, smoked, cooked and cooled. The colour, external and internal, is usually pink, while the flavour of individual varieties can be customised by the addition of flavourings, such as red onion, salt, pepper, oregano and sometimes sugar. Eaten raw or cooked, it has quickly become part of modern Italian gastronomy. They are particularly popular in South Tyrol and Trentino, where one can also find numerous butchers’ shops offering high-quality handmade sausages.
Sausage, on the other hand, is a raw meat sausage that is widespread in Italy where, depending on the ingredients and production areas, it takes on various names in the different regions. One of the most famous is Salsiccia di Calabria, which has a PDO. It is made by filling the natural pork casing with a mixture of lean (e.g. shoulder) and fatty (e.g. bacon) parts diced (or minced) and mixed with salt and other flavourings. Wine (mostly red) and other spices, such as pepper, chilli, coriander, fennel, nutmeg, even sugar (dextrose, sucrose) are usually added to the resulting mixture. Sausages can be eaten fresh, raw or cooked, or cured (dried).
Below is a table comparing the nutritional values of the 2 products, both raw and cooked.
