Everyone loves a pizza night, but if your family’s getting tired of having plain old cheese pizza each week, it may be time to switch things up. Incorporating more exciting toppings like sausage is the perfect way to spice up pizza night and keep your family coming back for slice after slice. Sprinkling some sausage on top of your pizza will also up its protein content — a nice bonus!
Before you sit down and enjoy a sweet and spicy bite of sausage pizza, there’s some work to do. Let’s look at some strategies and options to make your next pizza night unforgettable.
The sausage might fully cook in the oven, but cooking it in a pan first makes it brown and add extra flavor. You don’t have to cook it through on the stove, just enough to get some browning on it. Then put it on the pizza and bake.
According to Healthline, precooked sausages require only 10 minutes of boiling, but raw sausages take about 30 minutes. To broil raw sausages, which is to char them in an oven with direct heat, you only need to put them in for 10 minutes, flipping halfway through. Overall, raw meats like sausages are best added to the pizza dough after they have been cooked fully.
Tackling a homemade pizza can be intimidating: theres the dough, the sauce, the toppings, and the precise temperature control of the oven. The first few times you make pizza at home, youll most likely have varying results; after all, you probably dont have a pizza oven at home and your dough can be quite different from the one at your local pizza joint. But lets say you did accomplish the feat of having well made pizza dough, a robust tomato sauce, and high quality mozzarella. Still, when you add toppings into the mix, your pizza might come out unevenly cooked or burnt to a crisp.
Raw meats like sausage should always be cooked before theyre added to the pizza (via Kitchn). As mentioned earlier, most homemade pizza recipes call for very high temperatures of cooking, and a short cook time of around 10 to 12 minutes. This high temperature gives pizza dough its desired crispy outer layer, while cooking the inside of the dough rapidly. Raw meats, on the other hand, require much longer cooking times.
This rule really only applies to raw meats. Cured and smoked meats like salami are safe to eat right out of the package due to the fermentation and drying process, per Foodiosity. It can be easy to confuse salami and pepperoni for raw sausage given their similar reddish hue and pockets of fat, but they are quite different. In fact, its best to have a minimal cook time for cured meats because cooking will further dry them out. Make sure you know which toppings require cooking, which ones are better off without it, and also avoid making these common mistakes everyone makes with homemade pizza.
One reason for this is the way certain toppings are prepared — especially meats and hearty vegetables. Most people like to add pepperoni, ham, sausage, barbecue chicken, or even ground beef to their pizzas, while some add up to four types of meat for a meat lovers pie. But how are they preparing their toppings? Since most homemade pizza recipes call for a preheated oven ranging from 475 F to 500 F, you might find it intuitive to put your raw meat toppings in with your pizza dough. But will that yield the best results for your meat lovers pie?
How to Successfully Cook Sausage Links
While many people believe cooking sausage is a challenge, we think it’s quite the opposite. There are three popular ways to prepare your Premio sausage links, including on the stovetop, in the oven and on the grill. Whichever method you choose, cook your pork sausage to an internal temperature of 160 degrees Fahrenheit and your chicken sausage to 165 degrees Fahrenheit to ensure they’re safe to eat. Stick to the following steps to cook your Premio sausage properly:
- Heat a pan filled with 6 tablespoons of water on medium heat.
- Place sausage links in the skillet.
- Cover the pan and cook for 10 to 12 minutes.
- Rotate links often.
- Remove the top and continue cooking for another five to seven minutes.
- Enjoy!
- Place links on a foil-lined baking sheet.
- Put the sheet into a cold oven 7 to 9 inches below the heating element and turn the heat to the broil setting.
- Broil for 13 to 15 minutes on each side.
- Serve and enjoy.
- Preheat your grill with medium flames.
- Place links on racks and cook for 15 to 20 minutes.
- Turn sausage routinely for even browning.
- Serve as desired.
Recipe: Easy Sausage Pizza
FAQ
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