Barbecue - Sausages
Who hasn't had the horrendous experience of being handed a sausage that is charred on the outside and bitter and raw on the inside? Most of us have childhood memories of at least one such occasion and you don't want to inflict that on your nearest and dearest, do you?
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The other problem is that when a sausage cooks it leaks juices that can cause flare-ups and add to the burning problem that chars the skin. To eliminate burning and flare-ups you need to keep the fire low, which increases cooking time, but lets the sausage cook gently and hold in its flavour. Some people will tell you to puncture the skin, but this will just let the juices out to start more fires. Keep the sausage casing intact. Alternative cooking methods are: Poach the sausages for thirty minutes - using a mixture of beer and water to really boost their flavour - and then barbecue on residual heat for five to ten minutes. Because the sausages will be already cooked, all the barbecue is doing is heating them, adding colour and a smoky barbecue taste. Poaching sausages is unusual in the UK but fairly common in Europe and the USA, where meat content often has to be higher by law than here, where quite a lot of cereal is added to the meat and this becomes heavy and waterlogged during poaching. Chipolatas can be threaded onto a metal skewer or a wooden skewer that has been soaked in salted water for an hour or so. Because they are thin and the skewer drives the heat to the heart of the sausage, they will cook over a low to medium heat before they can begin to char outside. Barbecue sausages photograph by Tony Austin, used under a creative commons attribution licence.
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