Last night I wanted to whip up a simple and quick dinner. For some reason I was in the mood for that delicious and classic combination: sausage with peppers and onions. In the past, however, I’ve had bad luck cooking fresh sausages. It’s really easy cooking up those sausages that are already fully cooked because, well… they’re already fully cooked. When I’ve tried to use my trusty grill pan on the fresh sausages, however, I’ve ended up with uncooked centers and blackened sausage skins. This isn’t a great combination, especially when it’s a chicken sausage, unless of course you enjoy food poisoning.
In order to avoid another undercooked sausage I turned to the place where all good chefs turn with questions — their mom.
I recalled that my mom had a particular method for cooking fresh sausage, but couldn’t remember what it was. Here’s the trick: simmer the sausage in a pan with water (reaching about halfway up the sausages) for 8-10 minutes, turning the sausages half way through the cooking time. Make sure that you prick some holes into the casing so that some of the fat can leak out as they poach. Then, drain the fat and water from the pan and sear the outsides of the sausage to your desired brownness.
I tried this method out last night, and let me tell you, it worked perfectly. My sausages were perfectly cooked and a good amount of the fat was removed too. They were probably still jam packed with fat, but at least I felt like I was doing something good for myself. I sliced up those puppies and enjoyed them with sauteed onions and peppers over a bed of quinoa. Delicious.
Am I the only one who had a problem with fresh sausage in the past? Is this a well known technique that I just wasn’t privy to?
Clacked by Bob Degon
on Jul 15, 2009 @ 13:00 EST5EDT
I’ve used this technique lots of times with plain old hot dogs so no surprise that it works great for fresh sausages. The fresh sausages you get here in Portugal are typically much thinner than the ones in the pic so undercooking isn’t usually a problem.
I’m having problems making breakfast sausage to orders, my chef says to microwave i cant stand this method of cooking, so i tried sauteeing, they turned black, plus i even tried the microwave and it was still cold in the middle and hard on the outside, ill have to figure out how to hold my sausages in a baine marie, and just super poach them for oil order.