Yes, there's plenty of ways to cook sausage. Including the wrong ways. Trust us,
you'll want to keep watching to get clued into the mistakes you might be making.
Really, who wants to eat bland sausage with no flavor?
It shouldn't need saying, but here it is: Not all sausages are the same, and so you shouldn't
treat them like they're the same. The Spruce Eats breaks sausages down into four main categories:
fresh sausage, pre-cooked sausage, smoked sausage, and cured sausage.
Fresh sausages, like breakfast links and Italian sausage, are made from ground,
uncooked meat and must be kept refrigerated and then cooked until done. They're great pan-fried
or grilled. You can also remove the casing and use the interiors as a sausage crumble.
Pre-cooked sausages, like hot dogs, are completely cooked and just need to be heated before eating;
you can cook them the same way. Smoked sausages, like andouille and kielbasa,
are smoked until done and can be used cold, heated, however you prefer.
Cured sausage, like coppa and salami, meanwhile, reach "done" status by being salted and dried,
and they're generally served without further cooking.
We've all heard about soaking your brats in beer before grilling them,
but is marinating sausages like this even really worthwhile? No — and here's why.
As the good people of Reddit point out, marinating sausages doesn't do much good.
The sausage casing isn't porous enough to really allow in much extra flavor. If you
do want any particular marinades in your sausage, you might want to just inject them straight into
the casing, though that's a process that can be time-consuming for the average home cook.
So why all the hype around soaking brats in beer? If you're not familiar with the process,
it's important to know that most home cooks aren't just soaking their brats
in beer before grilling. Instead, they're cooking brats in beer.
The pre-grill simmer cooks the brat interior, while the grill just adds on some extra
caramelization and texture. Conversely, as The Memphis Flyer reports, you can let your brats
or sausages spend their resting period after cooking in a beer bath, for more moisture.
"You know what, I mean, this may be the sausage talking. But you're okay."
"Right back atcha, man!"
We get it. You're hungry. You want breakfast. Soon, you're in the kitchen reaching for eggs
and sausage links. You grab the pan and wait for the sizzle to start. However, you might want to
show a little patience the next time you're cooking any type of sausage any type of way.
According to Premio Foods, manufacturer of a range of sausages,
it's vital that you bring your sausages to room temperature before you start cooking.
This means if your sausages are refrigerated,
you should leave them on the counter for a few minutes to bring them up to room temperature.
If your sausages are frozen, you'll want to let them thaw out in the fridge overnight and then
let them come up to room temp further on the counter right before cooking.
Why is this so important? The rule actually applies to any cut of meat,
as Bon Appetit explains. The longer the middle of your meat takes to cook,
the more time the exterior of your meat has to overcook, as well as lose moisture.
So if you bring your sausages to room temperature before you start cooking, the interior will cook
more quickly, resulting in the perfect doneness both inside and out, as well as a juicier sausage.
Refrain from tearing, poking or cutting your sausage casings,
as that can allow all those delicious juices to seep out of the sausage and
into your grill or pan — and you don't want that. To avoid pricking, use a pair of tongs
to move your sausages as needed during the cooking process, rather than a fork.
But, what if you're trying to avoid fat? Won't pricking the sausage casings help to
remove a little bit of your favorite food's fat content? Sure, but, as Good Food Australia notes,
sausages are naturally fatty, and the fat accounts for a lot of a sausage's flavor.
Yes, we know, sometimes those casings burst on their own,
even if you were extra-careful not to poke, prod, or cut. If you often struggle with burst casings,
however, it's a sign that you're cooking your sausages at too high a temperature.
If you start cooking your sausage at too high a temperature,
you run the risk of burning or splitting the exterior while leaving your interior
uncooked. And though there are certain cuts of meat that you can easily sear
and then finish off in the oven – steak, for example – sausage is not one of them.
You want to start with low heat and then move on up to high heat. When you sear a
steak and finish it off in the oven, you're cooking the exterior before the interior;
with sausage, you want to cook the interior before the exterior.
That's why our preferred method of sausage cooking on this list is via simmering and then sautéing.
The inside is finished while the outside is crisped up and caramelized. You get a fully-done,
totally-safe-to-eat sausage that's moist on the inside, with a nice bite on the outside.
But this method doesn't only apply to the stovetop. Even if you cook
your sausages on the grill, you want to start out on low, indirect heat,
and get those sausages cooked through before you add on a little extra flame-grilled color.
Baking is a popular pick for a lot of types of meat, and for good reason.
Baking is just easier. You throw your cut of meat in a casserole dish,
toss it in the oven, and wait for it to be done. There's no babysitting at the
stove or grill required. However, you may want to leave the baking for your chicken.
Baking sausage requires you to walk a delicate line between undercooked and overcooked. As Home
Kitchen Talk details, since it's difficult to get the temperature and the cooking time just right
for your individual sausages, you'll likely have to use a meat thermometer to check your
sausages' doneness or have to cut straight into them to visually check for blood or any pink.
We know that we just mentioned how the fat in the sausage is the good stuff — and it
is. All that fatty content adds flavor and moisture that makes a sausage,
well, a sausage. However, there's no reason to add even more fat content to your favorite
link via deep-frying, especially when there are easier methods of cooking.
Typically, when you deep-fry a sausage,
you'll bread it beforehand and then fully immerse the sausage in your oil of choice.
However, as Healthline notes, doing this results in a significant increase in fat and calories.
Additionally, deep-frying may increase your risk of carcinogen exposure, according to the British
Journal of Cancer and Environmental Science and Pollution Research. So, if you're going
to cook sausage, avoid deep-frying, especially if you're watching your fat or calorie intake.
Sure, some will tell you that your sausages have enough natural fat that they can cook in a pan
all on their own, no problem. But if you're cooking your sausages in their own fat,
that means the fat is leaking out from somewhere, which you don't want. So instead, add fat or water
or both to your pan for a moisture-locking fry – without heading into deep-frying territory.
Bon Appetit recommends a two-step, simmer-and-sear process. All you have to do is place your sausages
in just enough water to cover them and then cook them until the water simmers.
Once they're cooked entirely through, you'll add them to a pan with a sheen of hot oil to crisp up
the exteriors until they're just as golden-brown as you like. This easy process results in
sausages that are reliably cooked through, moist, and never overcooked on the exterior.
When cooking sausage, or really anything in a pan on the stovetop,
you don't want to crowd things. Here's why it's so important, according to Real Simple:
When you have too many items in a pan, the heat gets stuck beneath all your food.
The moisture from the food escapes upward, creating steam, but the bulk of the heat remains
on the bottom of your pan. So your food will cook, but it won't necessarily be cooked to perfection.
Think dry, unevenly cooked, and overall sad sausages. For peak caramelization,
moisture, and flavor, you want to leave your pan uncrowded so all the heat from
the bottom of the pan can rise upward, circulating in the air around your food.
The secret to a perfect sausage is all in the details, and while simmering and
then sautéing your sausage will yield excellent results, simply boiling your
sausage in water and then doing nothing else will result in a very lackluster experience.
Just imagine it. That sausage is going to have no char, no color,
nothing. It's a bland, sad piece of meat; frankly, that's not good enough.
If you really do want to boil your sausages, you can add extra flavor by following Bon Appetit's
recommendation to boil emulsified sausages – which include bratwurst, hot dogs, and similar sausages
– in herbs and something other than water, such as stock, beer, wine, or tomato sauce.
"I burnt my sausage casserole."
It's all too easy to overcook a sausage. For your best chances at avoiding this, you'll want
to do a few things, says Johnsonville, arguably America's most well-known brat and sausage brand.
First, whether you simmer your sausages before you sauté them or you send them straight to the grill,
make sure you keep things at low heat. Turning things up too high can result in overcooked
sausages that are crispy on the outside long before they ever get cooked through on
the inside. Additionally, if you're grilling, opt to cook your sausages over indirect heat.
Once you're done with the actual cooking process, though, you're still not done.
You'll want to account for carryover cooking, in which the heat inside the
sausages will cause them to continue to cook even after you've taken them off the heat.
That's because the internal temperature of a cooked item rises for a certain amount
of time before it plateaus and then decreases. So if you've cooked your
sausages to the perfect internal temperature before removing them from your heat source,
you could end up with overcooked sausages.
To combat this, Johnsonville recommends you remove your sausages from the heat
source once they've reached about 5 degrees below your desired temperature.
As we've mentioned, grilling is one of the most popular ways to cook sausages,
especially options like bratwursts or hot dogs.
But don't just assume that you can throw some sausages on the grill and walk away.
If you're going to opt for grilling sausage, you need to go the extra mile to ensure you
do it the right way. Defrosting your meat thoroughly, grilling at a low temperature
or on indirect heat, not piercing your sausages, and not crowding the grill.
You'll also want to take a few extra precautions with your grill, by cleaning
it ahead of time and using high-quality grilling tools that can handle your sausages.
There's also a special detail that you can take advantage of when grilling. According
to Johnsonville, while you should never cut or poke a fresh sausage, if you have smoked brats,
you can give it a fresh-grilled flavor by giving it the butterfly treatment.
And, lastly, another staple rule for cooking any meat: Allowing it — sausage or otherwise — to rest
before serving is an important part of the process. Yes, even for those grilled brats.
While you may be tempted to dig in as soon as the brat hits the plate, Men's Health advises
to let your sausages rest for four to five minutes before you cut or bite into them.
When you cook meat, the liquid in the meat moves toward the exterior, trying to escape. However,
if you allow the meat to cool just a bit off of the heat, that gives the
moisture and liquid enough time to redistribute throughout the entirety of your cut or link,
leaving you with a perfectly moist sausage rather than a sausage that's sitting in a
pool of its own juices, which have all leaked out because you couldn't wait.
"Well, let's not just sit here with our tummies rumbling. Everybody dig in!"
"Don't mind if I do, Lillian."
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