Super cook and the mysterious case of the exploding sausages

fresh made sausages, lamb cutlets waiting for the BBQ gril

Cooking sometimes is also about trying and making mistakes.It’s been a while, my last BBQ with some French friends. It was a crazy Saturday and besides installing some home cinema equipment and some shopping we also tried to make some sausages for the BBQ that followed on the evening. My friend brought some artificial sausage casings from France, it’s those kind of casings that are already come in the form of a tube, so it’s easy to put them over the nozzle in order to stuff them. But in the aftermath we just did not know how to handle those casings properly. The only sad thing is that I was not able to draw any conclusions out of this problem yet so that we would be able to avoid the mistake in the future.

We encountered the following two problems. First we had a problem when twisting the casings to make single sausages. They just did not stay twisted but they constantly unwound and turned back to be just one big sausage. I don’t know yet why we have not been able to make single sausages. My thought of this problem is today that we did not water the casings in hot water before filling them with the meat, but I am not sure If that is the problem as the casings were artificial ones and my friend claimed that they do not need to be watered (fresh sausage casings always need a good watering before being filled).

The second problem was when we threw them on the grill in the same evening, the sausages just exploded out of their skin. The meat was still delicious, tasty, tender and juicy but I wish they could have been served as entire sausages instead. Today I think that we should have waited for one day to let the sausage cure, also I was discussing this and some people say that the sausage casings need to be poked so tiny little holes would be in the skin and through those holes the fat would be able to exit in order to release the pressure and then the skin would not explode.

I will still try to find what the real problem was. So if any of you sausage experts out there are reading this blog entry, I am appreciating your comments, which hopefully will help me to avoid the same issue next time and to be able to serve the perfect sausage, not only in taste but also in looks. Here in the picture you can see some of our Merguez, Cheese Sausage, Brats and some nice lamb waiting for the BBQ to get hot.