Cooking At Home: Cooking perfect moist sausages on the stove

Cooking the perfect moist sausages can be done on the stove! Actually, in my experience the sausages that I cook on the stove tend to be more juicy and flavorful than the ones I cook on the grill outside, weird I know.  The first thing to tackle when your ambitions are to cook the perfect moist flavorful sausages is to get the right sausages.  Let's face the facts here, if you don't have the proper food with the proper yummy ingredients you're not going to be making delicious anything no matter how well you cook.

I recently gave a sausage party (sounds totally perverse) but it literally was a sausage party; I was serving sausages and sides for dinner.  My favorite sausages are Trader Joe's Bratzwurst (5 in a pack), I found that I could fit 2 packs (a total of 10 sausages) in my largest pan (which is great in terms of throwing a sausage party, less batches of cooking to do).

My idea of perfectly cooked sausages are browned on the outside, maybe a couple of tears here and there and juicy and moist on the inside.  After cooking sausages stove-top for a few years now I've got cooking the perfect stove-top sausages down.

Directions to cooking the perfect stove-top sausages:

1)  I like to take my sausages out of the refrigerator 30-45 minutes before cooking time and allow them to come to room temperature- I'm not all too sure if this is an important step but since this is the way I've always done it and my sausages come out so nice I'm not going to mess with the usual process.

2)  Heat up a large pan (or a pan with enough room for all the sausages you are going to cook) on med-high heat, no oil is needed in the pan since the sausages will give off enough fat and juices to coat the pan.

3)  When the pan is heated thoroughly add the sausages (you should hear the sizzle of the sausages on the pan).  Brown all sides of the sausages (and when I say "brown" I mean really brown, not slightly brown or tan but brown brown), the browning of the outer layer will help to keep most of the juices trapped in the sausages during the next step, slow cooking.  And when I say "all sides" this could be 3-4 sides (since the sausages are round and like to curl slightly its hard to get all sides as they like to roll from side to side, if I'm lucky I'll get 4 sides browned but 3 is good enough).

4)  After all sides of the sausages are browned, turn the heat down to low and cover the pan with a lid, allow the sausages to slow-cook in the pan on low heat for about 15-20 minutes, turn the sausages occasionally.  Take note that the longer the sausages take to cook during this process the drier the sausages will become, my usual 15-20 minutes results in pretty good juicy sausages though.

Now you have to do is serve those babies up with some potatoes and salad!