There are certain things we tend to take for granted: the seasons, electricity, our mothers, fresh sausages.
Yes, few things are as accommodating as the humble snag and yet earn so little appreciation in this country where they are disparaged with tag of “mystery bags”. Oh, shame on you Australia!
The snag will wordlessly help you raise money for the local kindergarten at the sausage sizzle or fill up little kids cheaply and with little fuss.
It will happily spill its guts so you can splodge it on a pizza or toss its meaty filling in a tomato sauce for pasta such as lazy man’s meatballs.
Yet behind this humble exterior lurks a nobility, a nobility that is inherent in the prime flesh from whence it came and that is enhanced by trappings that steak could never have. The sausage comes adorned in spices like a debutante princess dressed in the family’s best jewels.
So with this in mind, I set a charming and rather demure food team member the task of researching the perfect way to cook sausages. “There’s a sort of a secret society of sausage sizzlers talking online about how they fry, grill, bake, poach (really), barbecue and casserole snags. We’re talking bath temperatures, fat-to-meat ratios and core temperature, all with varying degrees of OCD,” she told me later.
“I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a single female voice among the discussions. It felt a bit like intruding on ‘secret men’s business’. And this must be men’s business because I’m sure there is not a woman on Earth who would spend 45 minutes watching a sausage fry slowly on low heat.”
So “blokes”, let’s assess four different ways of cooking your humble snag perfectly.
Poaching
Poaching your sausage is a more common than you may think. There are two schools of thought here.
One way is to gently poach sausages in a small amount of water to cook them through before browning them in a pan or on the barbecue.
To do this, place sausages in a pan with about half a centimetre of water and bring it to the boil. Before the water boils away completely, turn the sausages to evenly cook them, then allow them to continue cooking in the pan to brown the skin. This makes for a nicely cooked sausage, but there’s no fat-reducing benefits to this method of poaching.
The second way to poach them is to submerge the sausage in a cold water bath over medium heat.
Hold it there for as long as it takes to bring the internal temperature of the sausage to 65.6C. Then sear the snags in a hot pan to brown the outside.
The danger here is that to get a good colour on the snags you risk overcooking the sausages in the pan as you do it. But I’m not a fan.
Frying
The main thing here is to avoid rapid cooking or a too-hot pan, which can lead to a burnt sausage with a raw centre or, worse still, exploding the sausage when the moisture in the snag turns to steam and bursts the skin.
The secret of frying is to cook the sausages slowly over a low to medium heat, until just cooked through, while getting a nice brown on the outside.
For a fat snag this may take up to 45 minutes.
Baking
Baking sausages is often seen as the easiest way to cook them, especially when there is a large number to cook.
It is also the most energy-efficient way to do so.
The danger here is that baking sausages can dry them out, but popping them in a baking dish with some chopped vegetables and tinned tomatoes to make a one-pot meal is a neat solution.
Barbecue
For me, the barbecue has the greatest affinity with the snag.
The barbecue has a number of heat zones perfect for evenly cooking snags, both big and small. Also, any fat rendered out of the snag drips away rather than heading to your waistline. Note, however, that fat can cause flare-ups that can burn your snags.
The skinny on cooking snags on the barbecue is first to take the sausages out of the fridge about 30 minutes before cooking. This allows the internal temperature to rise and will result in more evenly cooked-through snags. It also reduces the cooking time.
Next, turn the outside burner on the barbecue to high and the one inside it on to low to create a hot and a cool side.
Now separate the sausages from their links and lightly oil them. Start cooking the snags over the hot burner to seal them. Leave them there until they are a nice medium-brown, but keep them away from random flames and flare-ups.
At this point, move thick snags between the low burner (and a switched off burner next to it) so they can continue cooking without burning.
Thin sausages can be moved directly over to the low burner to finish cooking.
To reduce the cooking time of thicker sausages, you can always try poaching them for four to five minutes first in a pan and then searing them on the grill. But don’t limit yourself to water however, why not try red wine, beer, stock or even miso soup as the poaching liquid to add extra flavour. After all the research, one glaring question remains when it comes to snag cookery. All the websites talk about using a calibrated meat thermometer or termo-probe to tell when the sausage has reached the desired internal temperature of 65.6C, but they also all agree that under no circ*mstances should you pierce the skin of a cooking sausage.
Now that’s a real snag!
The shining
Cleaning and oiling equipment is one of the great joys about a shed and there’s no reason why you can’t do the same thing in the kitchen.
Every year I go through the drawers and box up any utensils or kit that I haven’t used. I label the box and put it out of the way on the top shelf, just in case I need that zucchini corer or prawn deveiner.
Also, take the time to clean and oil – with cooking oil – mechanical kit such as tin openers.
Powder power
Old Grandma Matt used to love to share her kitchen wisdom over a cup of Russian Caravan and an Embassy Extra Mild.
“Old baking powder is the enemy of good cakes” was one of her favourite sayings. You see, just like husbands, as baking powder ages it loses its potency. It loses its ability to provide the bubbly gaseous lift that baking requires. To see if your baking powder still has what it takes, dump a teaspoon of it into hot water – if it fizzes use it. If it doesn’t, buy some more.
- Follow Matt Preston on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mattscravat
Information in this article is correct as of 21 May 2013.
Matt Preston writes for the taste section, available every Tuesday in The Courier Mail, The Daily Telegraph, and Herald Sun, every Wednesday in The Advertiser and in Perth’s Sunday Times.
RELATED VIDEO:
