I love sausages and grilling them has to be one of the best ways to cook them, but too often I’ve been to a barbecue party and found it to be an absolute culinary disaster that borders on a health hazard.
Let’s get one thing straight before we go any further and that’s just because you’re barbecuing, it doesn’t mean you have to serve poor quality sausage. So many times I’ve heard friends say “I’ve bought cheap sausages because we’re just going to burn them anyway.” Do not accept the inevitability of it, if you buy poor quality, they will be full of fat that will spit and cause outbreaks that will end in a holocaust. There is an alternative way.
Accept the challenge, cooking a good tasty chorizo on a grill is possible and to make it easy for yourself you should start with a good quality chorizo. Certainly one of the fundamentals of any sausage is fat and the cooking process is to effectively boil off the fat content so there will always be some splattered fat but your job is to manage this.
What makes a well cooked sausage? For me it is:-
- A crunchy texture to the skin
- Light caramelization to sweeten the flavor of the meat.
- Succulent moist meat inside
One cooking method I’ve heard of is precooking the sausage in water first to help disperse the fat so there’s less fat to spit out (and burn the sausage) when grilling, but I don’t like this because it means less time on grill for the crispy caramelized skin that adds much of the flavor. Maybe if you’re a newbie it’s worth a try, but here’s my guide on how to cook the best sausage.
If you use charcoal, be patient. You need grey/white coals that are well seated. If there is any sign of black in the carbon, you will be susceptible to breakouts. If you’re going to be cooking multiple things, put the sausages in last when everything starts to turn off. If you have a gas grill, the sausages should be cooked over low heat, in fact a low light under the browning plate is a great way.
Don’t pierce the sausage. The general idea is that the meat cooks in the fat and if you puncture the sausage the fat just comes off and the meat dries out, not to mention the fact that you are inviting the fat to the fire and encouraging more opportunity for it to ignite. . ups and holocausts.
Cook the sausages in individual units, this makes them easier to handle and you can be sure that they are cooked on all sides. It may seem easier to use a basket so you can flip more sausages at once, but I prefer not to because you can only cook the sausage “top and bottom” and I think you lose the opportunity for crispy skin. and it’s also easier to serve a sausage that appears well-done on the surface but is undercooked on the inside.
To avoid an undercooked sausage you can of course use a temperature probe, you are usually looking for an internal temperature of 165°F to consider the sausage cooked.
Do not continually flip the sausages. Give them change so that they cook, take on color and caramelize on each side. Even though a sausage has a round cross section, I usually see a sausage as having four sides and cook it accordingly. However, it is sometimes difficult to cook on “all four” sides because the sausage is particularly bent. The best way to straighten a sausage is to use heat, so place the sausage on the grill with the outer curve directly over the heat first, the skin and meat on this side of the sausage will contract and straighten.
I heard a gentleman talk about frying a sausage and recommend that you place the sausage in the pan over very low heat and cook slowly for two hours. While I’m not recommending this time frame for grilling, I hope it drives home the point that the way to go is low and slow.
