Ooooooo…scrumptious! And the sausage looks pretty good, too.
At street fairs in NYC, the Italian sausage carts are ubiquitous. They sell you a length of grilled Italian sausage (pork seasoned with hot pepper, garlic, and fennel seed) on a sawed-off length of Italian bread, heaped with grilled red peppers and onions.
These are never as good as the ones you make at home, where you can control the quality of the bread and the sausage and toss the vegetables around in good olive oil instead of whatever subnormal crap the vendors use.
The Southern Hemisphere version looks pretty similar, except you use beef sausage and maybe no grilled peppers.
Another popular thing out here are fund raising car washes. Usually at a church or high school parking lot. Also with the pretty girls drawing in the marks. Not Cinemax channel style, mind you, but enough to slow down traffic.
Brick-and-mortar sausage places seem regional to me. There are loads of places to buy sausage sandwiches in New Orleans, several in Seattle (including catering trucks – they’re too yup-scale to be called ‘roach coaches’), and I’m sure other places where sausage sandwiches are popular.
This is where I usually see sausages being cooked and served. Often businesses such as hardware stores or supermarkets will have a ‘sausage sizzle’ (The local Home Depot has a ‘permanent’ hot dog vendor, though that’s not the same thing.) I go to air shows every chance I get, and there are always grilled sausage stands (with very long lines). Fairs, as Jeff Lichtman says, community events and fundraisers, and sporting events commonly sell grilled sausages. Also burgers.
But this is the first time I’ve heard them called ‘sausage sizzles’. We don’t really have a name for them. It’s more like ‘Hey, want a sausage?’ [walk to where the sausages are being grilled] or ‘I’ll meet you at the sausage tent,’ or something like that. ‘Sausage sizzle’ is a nice handle.
Italian sausage heroes with onions and peppers are easily available at every pizza joint in the Tri-state (NY-NJ-Conn) area. They’ll even melt fresh mozz into them, add a little marinara sauce, and call them “parmesan” for an extra buck.
I’ve never seen a hot dog cart up here, but there are plenty of food trucks in Seattle that sell hot dogs. They’ll usually line up one after another in the alley next to the stadium/s on game days.
The local innovation, “Seattle-style”, is to serve them with brown mustard, grilled onions, hot peppers, and a slice of cream cheese.
When our office was in Belltown I had a hard time finding a damned hot dog. There’s a place in Westlake Center that makes good grilled dogs, but the catering trucks and places in/near Pike Place Market seem to specialise in ‘haut dogs’. Everyone has to be ‘gourmet’!
As far as sausage sandwiches go, I tend not to get brats. I prefer andouille or boudin or ‘hot Italian’ ones. I’ve had sandwiches made with bangers, but I prefer to have bangers with mashed potatoes, brown gravy, and peas.
if you’re talking about the dish, then it doesn’t look much different than anyone having a cookout where there’s grilled brats or kielbasa. Apart from the type of bread; we typically stick to rolls or hot dog buns.
if you’re talking about “sausage sizzle” the event then no, I’ve not encountered any. Cookouts (whether personal or for a fund-raising activity) tend to be geared more towards “barbecue,” where you’ll have stuff like grilled chicken, pulled pork, and usually one or two kinds of sausages.
Hit any street fair in the States and you’ll find a couple of stands doing Italian sausages or brats. Always with the options of peppers, onions and sometimes sauce.
In this area, all the local Lion’s Clubs do barbeques in store parking lots to fund raise. Typical schedule is one weekend a month, always in the same place so you know where to find them. Fare includes hot dogs, brats, burgers, pork steaks, and sides suck as beans, potato salad, cole slaw, and chips. The nicer ones will also offer baked goods like cookies, brownies, rice crispy treats, etc. Word gets around as to which groups/communities do the best of whatever. When it’s good it’s really really good, but when it’s bad…eccch.
While a fair or the like will almost certainly have some booth set up selling sausages, there will also be plenty of other booths selling other things: Fresh French fries, deep-fried everything else, cotton candy, hot pretzels, cold sandwiches, soft-serve ice cream, etc. And the vendors at a fair might be fundraisers, but they’re just as likely to be professionals.
More like the second, but they’re pretty different to bratwurst. They are either ground beef or ground pork with seasoning all in a light casing (much lighter than the casing you would find in a bratwurst for instance)
Sorry Acsenray, but in Oz ‘barbecued’ meat is indeed just grilled meat (on an outdoor grill). While we are aware of what American’s mean when they say Barbecue and in the last ten or so years there has been a proliferation of American style restaurants serving barbecue, if your average Aussie invites you to a barby (barbecue) there will be grilled meat cooked outdoors, on a barby. (somewhat confusing to a non-native I suppose)
I was going to mention this in my earlier post but that sounds not too far removed from the American tradition of tailgating. Hot dogs (i.e., grilled sausages served in bread) are a big part of tailgating as are hamburgers, BBQ pork, and various foods that are popular in specific regions of the US (e.g., at tailgates–or boatgates–in Seattle, you can often find grilled salmon). Has tailgating spread to Australia because it seems like a natural extension of sausage sizzles?
Just to make it clear for any Aussies and other posters, antipodean or not, the usage is pretty broad in the US as well.
Barbecue can mean anything from “proper barbecue” (slow cooked, smoked meats) to grilled meats to meat that is doused in barbecue sauce (which, for many/most people in the US, is a tomato-based sauce–hell, let’s say ketchup-based–with a bit more herbs and spices, often a bit of molasses or brown sugar to balance the acidity of the vinegar, but usually containing “liquid smoke.” Now, for those who make proper smoked barbecue, liquid smoke is anathema because, why the hell did you spend all that time properly smoking that meat to douse it in concentrated smoke flavor, but, hey, it is what it is.) And the usage is definitely regional, too. Like, if someone here in Chicago invites me over for “a barbecue,” I assume grilled food. If someone invites me for “barbecue” (notice lack of indefinite pronoun), then I’m going to assume that actual slow-cooked, smoked barbecue is most likely what is meant. If I see “barbecue pork sandwich” on a menu, then it can mean any-fucking-thing, depending on the restaurant, from a pork sandwich doused in barbecue sauce to proper pulled pork. But that is specific to the Chicago/Midwest area. Other parts of the US, I think you’d have your ass kicked to where you came from if you tried to pass off heavily sauced pork as “barbecue.”