Seeking Sausage Substitutes

I confess to being a creature of habit.  Breakfast, to me, means sausage, fried eggs and potatoes.  For forty years or so, my go-to sausage at home was Hormel Little Sizzlers - until they were discontinued in 2019.  After testing out Jimmy Dean and Bob Evans as substitutes, I finally settled on Swaggerty pork sausage patties as my regular brand.

For breakfast here in Cairo, that presents a problem.  Not with the Hormel or Swaggerty brands but with pork.

For three months of the year while we are in Egypt, I buy a local beef kofta intended for kabobs as my breakfast meat.  Spiced up appropriately, it makes a passable substitute.  In the past, I bought the kofta at Ragab Sons, a medium-sized supermarket just a quarter-mile up the street.  They even had beef bacon for the bacon lovers.  But Ragab Sons has fallen on hard times.  Our first visit to the store this year dismayed us with empty shelves except for a small section of canned goods and cooking oil.

We set out on a search last Friday for a market bigger than the small convenience stores that are very nearby but not as distant as the real supermarkets like Spinneys and Carrefour.

Not far past our often visited SmartMart vegetable market, we found this shop.  The signs above the doors looked promising.

 

The freezer section had multiple brands of kofta including this one which I have purchased before.

 

 

The packaging shows that the manufacturer, Halwani Brothers, is located in nearby 10th of Ramadan City - recall that I photographed that town on the flight into Cairo airport.

  

I'm not sure what the preparation instructions say, but I suspect it is more or less, "heat it however you can - but be sure to keep it frozen until then."  (-18C is approximately zero F)

 

This little market is equipped with a barcode scanner to help with the checkout.  Only a few of the small markets have these.  For barcode fans, note that the package is labeled with the 13 digit European Article Number (EAN) rather than the 12 digit UPC familiar at home.

The store appears to be a keeper as it was tidy, well-stocked for its size, the staff were very pleasant, and the cooler appears to keep frozen stuff frozen, I hope.