L'Authentique Lamb Merguez product reviews

"North African" is not a flavour profile I am very familiar with, so I was keen to give these a try if for no other reason than I was curious to see if the flavour was going to be more in line with "Moroccan" - with it's complex, smoother flavours, or "Middle Eastern" - with the richer, sharper flavours such as capsicum and chilli. Turns out, it was somewhere between the two, with hints of French thrown in... not surprising since it was produced by some, in their own words, "imported Frenchmen".

Cooking the sausages was simple, but I had to take great care not to overcook them - they are slim so cook quickly, and lamb is a delicate meat and can be very unforgiving of extra cooking time past the ideal point. I found the YouTube clip on "How to Cook your L'Authentique Sausages" to be a wonderful (if a little hard to understand at times) guide. I especially liked the tip about bringing the sausages out of the fridge half an hour before hand, to allow the meat to come to room temp and relax. This ensured that the sausages cooked evenly, instead of carbon shell with raw meat in the middle.

I decided to serve these with some fresh capsicum, sliced and fried in garlic butter, and a couple of fried eggs - they gave a lovely mix of smoothness and sharpness to offset the "warm tones" of the sausages. They were very well spiced, but not overly piquant (spicy-hot) so they proved to be quite versatile I think. I could easily imagine these served with roast veges with a cheese sauce, or a plain mash - kumara would be an ideal one to serve with these. For me however, I loved the combination of warm, mellow spices with the silkiness of the egg yolk and the slightly-sweet crispness of the fried capsicum. It made for a wonderful interplay of flavours and textures.

Overall, these are NOT cheap... in any sense of the word. However, they are also not packed with rubbish and fillers - things that allow butchers to keep the price down by keeping the quantity of costly ingredients - eg. actual meat - to the legal bare minimums. You certainly get what you pay for and I would happily pay for these again! Normally, a pack would serve 2, maybe even 3 adults comfortably with suitable side-dishes to complement them.