Lac Brome Duck Sausages with Grilled Zucchini and a Dilemma

I’d originally decided not to write about these. Lac Brome sells its duck products throughout Quebec – in fact, the company is the country’s leading specialist in Peking Duck. They sell whole duck, legs, breasts, legs cooked confit, ground meat, and thinly sliced duck for fondue chinoise. Now, they’ve added sausages to the list.

The thing is, I don’t eat pork, so I only accepted the sausages from the company to review because they’re 100% duck – except it turns out that they’re 100% duck wrapped in pork casings.

I also noticed that there are a couple preservatives in the sausages, which means you can keep them fresh in the refrigerator without having to freeze them for awhile. But why would I buy these when I could buy nitrite-free, inexpensive, and also gluten-free sausages at William J. Walter? Well, all those have pork in the sausages themselves. So if I’m buying sausages, it’s the turkey ones or spicy 100% lamb (merguez) ones at Boucherie de Tours in Atwater Market, because they’re gluten free, pork free and preservative free.

But I wasn’t going to waste the sausages, so I pulled the casings off and grilled them anyway. And they were really tasty. So I figured I should write about it and let readers know that if you don’t have a fresh sausage maker near your house and you really want a duck sausage, this is a pretty good option.

The ingredients are:

Duck meat, potato starch, sea salt, spices, natural flavour, vinegar, cane sugar, dehydrated garlic, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrite and natural pork casing

The cranberry-orange flavour was a bit sweeter than the plain Italian. There’s also a sun-dried tomato and garlic version and a pepper and garlic version.

Then, because I was already grilling, I grilled some zucchini, too. So, happy grilling to you. Just be careful with your nitrite-intake, and anything you can’t pronounce. Because life needs a little pleasure sometimes, which sometimes comes as a duck sausage – or pork, tempeh or seitan – but it probably needs less sausage if you want more years of pleasure.

Ah, balance.