How to indicate that something is in the shape of 'finger'?

Question

For example

Kofta can be made in ball shape and finger shape as the shape of regular sausage.

Is the 'finger' shape correct here?

Answer 1

As it happens, the usual English expression for something shaped like a link sausuage is sausage-shaped. Princeton Wordnet defines it tautologically as "shaped like a sausage," and under the entry sausage, this shape is given as "cyclindrical."

Naturally, this is unhelpful when comparing different shapes of meat. Some dictionaries describe sausage as tube-shaped meat. Hot dog-shaped (or frankfurter-shaped) is another alternative.

While finger-shaped is a possible analogy, fingers carries connotations of something short and slender; consider that okra and a type of baked sweet are known as lady fingers. For something round but tapered at the ends, cigar-shaped is common, though less often with food than with, for example, unidentified flying objects.

Yet another possibility is the shape of a stick. This is somewhat less satisfactory as it invites confusion with kebabs or various kinds of stick meat and meat sticks, but it would be understood if the phrasing were explicit enough:

Kofta can be shaped into meatballs or into sticks.

Kofta can be made into ball-shaped or tube-shaped lumps.

Kofta can be shaped into round or cylindrical pieces.

Kofta can be made in the shape of a golf ball or in the shape of a cigar.