Black Trumpet Sausage ‒ Mustatorvisienimakkara

Mustamakkara, literally "black sausage" is very likely the most famous speciality of my home city Tampere. It's basically a groat sausage which gets its Gothic colour from blood and is usually served with lingonberry sauce. For years I've had this weird urge to make a vegan version out of it (Hey why not? Edinbourgh is full of pubs serving vegan haggis.) but had absolutely no idea what I could use in it.

As I've mentioned before, there are several traditional Finnish sausage types with no meat in them. I was especially delighted to find a recipe for a mushroom sausage that is otherwise vegetarian but uses real intestines as mold. I wouldn't know how to get those even if I wanted to, but this gave me an idea of using black trumpets when mushrooms are called for. They should naturally make a black sausage, so this might be an idea in line with the name. My version is a bit different though, containing gluten flour for added firmness and fillingness.

I've never actually tasted the blood version so I did some questioning among my friends who had. Apparently some versions do taste like blood while others don't. That sounded like a relief. While you could easily add an effervescent tablet to bring the iron taste into this, it doesn't sound like something I'd really like my sausage to taste like. Especially when black trumpets have such a discreet taste on their own.

- 300 g salt-pickled black trumpets
- 5 dl water
- 4 dl gluten flour
- 2 dl oat cream
- 1.5 dl whole barley grains
- 100 g fresh soy cheese
- 3 garlic cloves
- 1 tbsp canola oil
- white pepper

Cook the barley in salted water. Mince the garlic. Rinse and drain the mushrooms couple of times, then cut them into smaller pieces. Mix all the ingredients except the gluten flour. Start kneading the flour into the rest by your hand, a small amount at a time, to get it evenly mixed with the rest of the sausage. If there seems to be too much of the dry stuff, add a dollop of water, but carefully, since you don't them to become too soggy.

Take a fistful of the mass and roll into a bar. Wrap into folio and roll some more. Repeat for the rest of the mass. I got myself six large sausages from this amount. Bake in a 175°C oven for an hour. Enjoy as a snack or on the dinner, preferably with lingonberry or cranberry sauce.

Nutritional values / 1 sausage / 242 g:
energy 308,5 kcal
fat 11,5 g
protein 29,3 g
carbohydrates 22,5 g
fiber 4,5 g