Charcuterie_ The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing - Michael Ruhlman [52]
Roasting is the easiest way to cook sausages, but you lose the deep caramelization in the casing that you can achieve through sautéing. Still, if you’ve got a lot going on in the kitchen, this is an effortless way to cook sausages. Preheat your oven to 300 degrees F./150 degrees C. Heat an ovenproof sauté pan with a film of oil over medium-low heat, as you would for sautéing sausage. When the pan is hot, place your sausages in the pan and place the pan in the center of the hot oven until they’re done, about 10 minutes. If you have a probe thermometer with a timer, you can be alerted the instant the sausage hits 150 degrees F./65 degrees C. (or 160 degrees F./71 degrees C. for poultry sausage). This little device is not expensive and comes in handy for all kinds of roasting and cooking, and especially for smoking sausages.
Grilling is, of course, the most flavorful way of cooking sausage because sausages carry the flavor of smoke so well. To properly grill sausages, you need to be able to cook them over indirect heat—meaning next to but not directly above the coals—for at least part of the time. If your grill doesn’t offer this option, then you need to be able to maintain very low flames. The key to cooking all sausages is gentle heat, uniform ambient soft heat so that the interior cooks before the exterior overcooks or splits open. A few grilling strategies: Start the sausages over medium direct heat, just long enough to give them some color and smoke, then move them to the side, off the heat, and cover the grill, leaving the vents open, to smoke-roast them. If you’re concerned about overcooking sausages, they will still pick up some color from the smoke and heat within the covered grill. Or you can begin by cooking them through over indirect heat and then coloring over direct flames. It’s easy to cook sausages too fast, it’s almost impossible to cook them too slowly—but generally they should take at least 10 to 15 minutes on the grill.
From a temperature standpoint, poaching is the gentlest way to cook sausage. If you place a sausage in water that’s between 160 and 180 degrees F./71 and 82 degrees C., too hot to touch but not yet simmering—gentle, uniform, consistent—it will cook very uniformly. Unfortunately, poaching is the one form of cooking that doesn’t add any flavor to the sausage. So poaching should not be used for fresh sausages, but rather for those that already have exterior color and flavor—namely, smoked sausages, sausages that are already cooked, such as hot dogs. It should also be used for sausages that require very delicate heat for their stability, emulsified sausages such as weisswurst, which can be sautéed for color after being poached and chilled.
RULES TO LIVE BY WHEN MAKING SAUSAGE: A CONCISE PRIMER
1. Be sure your sausage includes at least 25 to 30 percent fat.
2. Use the right amount of salt: 1⁄3 ounce per pound, or 10 grams per 450 grams of meat and fat.
3. Chill your meat in the freezer before grinding and mixing: the colder the better, just short of freezing (this is especially important when making sausage in a warm environment).
4. Always grind your meat into a bowl that is set in ice.
5. Mix the ground meat well to create a good, cohesive, not crumbly texture.