On 12/11/2019 at 8:01 AM, MelissaH said:I'm curious if this is related to Kenji's trick of parcooking sweet potatoes to convert the starches to sugars, so they taste sweeter and brown better. It's basically the sweet potato equivalent of the beer brewer's mashing grain. https://www.seriouseats.com/2014/11/food-lab-sweet-potatoes-mashed-science-not-sugar-thanksgiving.html
Good question. The length of boiling here is much shorter than Kenji recommends for maximum sweetness but it could still be playing that role.
@gfweb's posted about the Roasted Grapes, Brussels Sprouts and Sausage from Deep Run Roots p 541 a couple of times, here and and tweaked here.
I decided to start with the recipe pretty much as written, except that I couldn't nicely slice the raw Italian sausages (a mix of hot & sweet) so I went with pieces that approximated the recipe's slices. Of course, no muscadines, so I used regular red grapes. I cut some in half and left others whole:
I could have pulled this out earlier but wanted to get some nice browning on the sausage. This was 25 min @ 425°F on convection.
I ate that pan full with some crusty bread, washed down with a glass of red wine for lunch and I'm not complaining about it. The flavors work very well together.
Obviously, the grapes were pretty much disintegrated, though it's not really a bad thing that they pretty much turned into a glaze. The sprouts could have had a little more bite left, too, so I"ll give it another try with smaller sausage crumbles and a shorter baking time.
