Roasted Italian Sausages with Grapes, Fennel & Cipollini

Taste

Sausages roasted with grapes is a harvest-time dish from Italian wine country, and it works for the same reason here as it does there: the grapes shrink and split in the heat, and their juice runs into the sausage fat to make a sweet-sour sauce on the tray. Warner’s Farm’s Sovereign Coronation grapes are small, dark, and intensely grapey, and they arrive at the market just as the first fennel bulbs and cipollini do. The fennel roasts soft and mild, the cipollini — flat Italian onions — caramelise whole, and a spoonful of balsamic lifts everything scraped up from the tray at the end.

Instructions

1. Heat the oven. Heat the oven to 220 °C (425 °F) with a rack in the upper-middle position. Use your largest rimmed baking sheet, about 33 × 46 cm (13 × 18 inches) — if everything is crowded it steams instead of browning.

2. Peel the cipollini. Put the cipollini in a heatproof bowl, cover with boiling water, and leave for 2 minutes. Drain, trim the root ends, and the skins will slip off between your fingers. Leave them whole; halve any larger than a walnut. ⏱︎ 2 min

3. Start the vegetables. Toss the fennel wedges, cipollini, and garlic on the baking sheet with 2 tablespoons of the olive oil and a good pinch of salt and pepper. Spread them out with the fennel cut-side down and roast for 15 minutes, until the fennel is starting to colour at the edges. ⏱︎ 15 min

4. Add the sausages and grapes. Toss the grape clusters with the remaining tablespoon of oil. Take the tray out, turn the fennel, and nestle the sausages in among the vegetables. Scatter the grapes and rosemary sprigs over the top. Leave the sausages whole — pricking them lets out the juices you want in the sauce.

5. Roast. Return the tray to the oven for 25 minutes, turning the sausages halfway, until they are browned all over and read 71 °C (160 °F) in the centre. The grapes should be split and slumped, and the fennel tender when poked with a knife. ⏱︎ 25 min

6. Make the pan sauce. Move the sausages, vegetables, and grapes to a warm platter, leaving the garlic behind. Squeeze the soft garlic out of its skins onto the tray, add the balsamic vinegar and 3 tablespoons of water, and scrape up the browned bits with a wooden spoon, mashing in a few of the stray grapes. The tray is hot enough to do this without returning it to the heat. Pour the sauce over the platter, crumble the crisp rosemary leaves over the top, and serve with crusty bread for the juices.

Tips

• Thawing: Lufa’s Italian sausages arrive frozen. Move them to the fridge the night before; in a hurry, submerge the sealed pack in cold water for about an hour.
• Other grapes: Any firm, sweet grape works. Canadice (red) and Himrod (green), from the same Ontario farm, are both at the market now, though blue grapes give the pan juices the deepest colour. Seeded varieties roast just as well — just warn whoever’s eating.
• More heat: Swap one pack for spicy Italian sausages, or add a pinch of chilli flakes with the balsamic.
• Instead of bread: Serve over soft polenta or buttered orzo to catch the sauce.
• Leftovers: Slice any leftover sausages and toss with pasta, the remaining grapes and fennel, and a splash of the pasta water.