What is it about summertime that makes us love sausages so?

Is it because they’re synonymous with grilling?

Or so simple to eat?

Or because that snap of a natural casing, enclosing spicy-sweet cured meat, accented by tangy mustard, is the perfect confluence of all the taste sensations: sweet, sour, salty and bitter?

Or maybe, just maybe, we love these tight little bundles of meaty goodness because there’s something elemental about eating the ground up innards of an animal stuffed inside the innards of that animal.

Whatever it is, we love a good tube steak. Or wurst, or salami, or merguez whatever your nationality wants to call its cased meat.

All we can call that house-made hot link at the top of the page is fantastic. A marvel of dry aged beef and Becker Lane pork, this beauty is served with two types of cooked cabbage — chopped sauerkraut and sweet-sour red — and a whole grain mustard that’s just the counterpoint to the meat’s knackwurst-like richness. Put it all together with some toasted pretzel rolls and you have the perfect, de-constructed/re-constructed, up-scaled plate of summer sausage goodness.

By contrast, here’s how they might serve such a dish in northern Germany (where they take their wurst very seriously):

…but Executive Chef Roy Ellamar is not content with anything so prosaic. He has given this traditional dish just the sort of American window dressing it needs to really sing.

Ellamar’s menu at Harvest by Roy Ellamar is full of winners, but wethinks he truly has a way with animal proteins of all kinds, as exemplified further by his out-of-this-world, molcajetes-mixed, Thai-spiced (fish sauce + lime + chilies + herbs), steak tartare: