How do you properly sear a sausage?

Question

I'm a huge fan of sausages, bratwurst especially. It always says to brown all of the sides, but I always find that they roll around quite a bit while I'm searing them. This makes for an odd assortment of cooking, and I sometimes lose the juices into the brine.

How can I properly sear my sausages on all sides?

Answer 1

If you are frying sausages on a hot pan then it's very hard to brown them on all sides for a couple of reasons:

• the curved shape will cause it to flop along the curve, they are hard to stand up
• if you do get them stood up only the small area touching the pan will get color

So you are frying on a flat pan you can spend a lot of time messing around trying to get color on the sausages, I personally don't think it's worth the effort and just fry them on the sides they rest on. However, I rarely cook sausages this way, I usually use my broiler/grill. The advantages to this are that the sausages get more evenly browned and that the wire rack I makes it easier to stand the sausages up or down as opposed to side to side.

If you do plan to use a frying pan you could get one with ribs in it which will help position the sausages.

Answer 2

Because of their shape (usually shaped like a banana), searing a sausage on all sides can be difficult.

If the sausages roll around in your pan, maybe your cooking surface is not level ?

There are usually two ways to cook sausages

You can boil or not your sausages before grilling them.

• hot and quick (and a lot of splatter): you need to stay near your pan to move them around and not let them burn (better technique when using a BBQ grill IMO)

• less hot and slow (less splatter).(my preferred way) in a pan with a little bit of water, slowly cook them, when all the water has evaporated, the sausages will start getting some colors.