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Ingredient

sausage

Also known as: Banger Sausages, Hot Sausage, Saprosetta Sausage, smokey Sausage (cooked, sliced (see notes))

Ground meat, most commonly pork, mixed with fat and seasoning and often stuffed into a casing; styles range from mild breakfast sausage to spicy Italian to smoked links. Fresh sausage is raw and must be cooked through, while some styles -- many smoked sausages, for instance -- are sold fully cooked and only need reheating, so the two require different handling.

Buying guidance

Check whether the package says fresh/raw or fully cooked -- treating a raw sausage as ready-to-eat is a food-safety problem, not just a texture one. Fresh sausage should feel cold and firm and be used soon after purchase, since it's highly perishable.

Substitutions

  • Ground pork or beef, seasoned to taste -- fennel, garlic, and chile flakes for an Italian-style profile, or sage and black pepper for breakfast-style; more work, but avoids the casing and lets you control the fat level.
  • Plant-based sausage -- similar shape and seasoning and cooks faster since there's no raw-meat safety concern, but browns and renders fat differently.

Tips & common mistakes

Piercing sausage casings before cooking to keep them from bursting is a common habit, but it also lets out juices that would otherwise keep the inside moist -- cooking over moderate rather than high heat, and turning the links a bit more often, prevents splitting just as well without drying them out.

Storage

Fresh sausage is more perishable than a whole cut of meat, because grinding and mixing expose far more surface area to air and bacteria -- refrigerate it and plan to cook within a day or two, or freeze it right away. It freezes and reheats well, since the fat and seasoning already mixed through it disguise the slight texture change that plain ground meat shows after thawing.

More specific

Used in 12 recipes