Don’t Pierce Sausages Before Cooking Them If You Want the Juices to Stay Inside

Poking sausages with a fork before they hit the heat can seem like a sensible way to help them cook. Those small holes, however, give the fat and juices trapped inside the casing somewhere to escape.

That can work against the result most people want: a browned casing with a moist center. The advice becomes even more useful when paired with a cooking method that requires no pan full of splattering oil.

Butchers at True Bites recommend cooking sausages in the oven rather than relying on a frying pan, a method tested by Express writer Angela Patrone. The oven surrounds each sausage with consistent heat, while leaving the casing intact helps keep more of what is inside from leaking onto the tray.

Keep the fork away from the casing

Piercing sausages before cooking has long been used as a way to release fat, yet that opening also releases juices. According to the cooking advice, this can result in a drier sausage rather than a juicier one.

Leave the casing intact and let the sausage cook without puncturing it. Lean sausages can get a small drizzle of oil before going into the oven, while sausages with enough fat may not need any added oil.

Skip the frying pan

Pan-frying puts the sausage against a concentrated heat source and requires turning to brown each side. It can also send grease across the stovetop. Oven cooking uses heat around the sausage and removes much of the hands-on work.

The tested method starts with an oven preheated to 180°C fan. Place the sausages on a lined baking tray, keeping enough room between them for heat to reach each one. Larger sausages used in the test took about 35 minutes.

Turn them once instead of standing over the stove

Put the tray in the oven and cook the sausages for around 25 to 35 minutes, depending on their size. At about the 15-minute point, turn each sausage so the opposite side has a chance to brown.

The result should be a golden-brown exterior with the sausage heated through. Larger sausages in Patrone's test reached that point after about 35 minutes.

There is another benefit waiting on the tray. Lining it with foil caught the rendered fat and kept the sausages from sticking, which meant there was no greasy frying pan or baked-on tray to scrub afterward.