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.
As a general rule, you do want to precook meats that you are topping pizza with, unless they are cured products like pepperoni. By precooking the sausage, you can also ensure that the grease is blotted from the product before placing on the pizza.
Types of Sausage You Can Use For Pizza Toppings
Sausage comes in all shapes and sizes, complete with countless flavorings and spice levels to construct the perfect pizza for your preferences. Here are the most popular types of sausage for pizza toppings — try some for your next homemade pizza night:
- Hot: If you like sprinkling red pepper flakes on your pizza, you’ll love using slices or crumbles of hot Italian sausage to top off your pie.
- Sweet: On the other hand, if you enjoy balancing out your salty ingredients with a touch of sweetness, adding sweet Italian sausage to your pizza will make your taste buds sing.
- Mild: For those who don’t like their meat too spicy or overly sweet, mild Italian sausage is the perfect pizza topping compromise.
- Patties: Hot or sweet Italian sausage patties can be broken apart in a skillet like sausage crumbles or kept in larger pieces to act like mouth-watering meatballs atop your pie.
- Links: Breakfast pizza, anyone? Breakfast sausage links and a runny egg are the perfect toppings for a savory brunch delight.
- Ground meat: Ground sausage is great for when you’re in a pinch and need a quick-cooking solution. Save yourself some time by skipping the slicing or de-casing and just dumping some sweet or hot Italian ground sausage into a skillet.
- Chicken sausage: Not a fan of red meat? You can still pack your pizza with protein and flavor by making chicken sausage your go-to topping.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Recipe: Easy Sausage Pizza
FAQ
Should you cook sausage before adding it to pizza?
Can you put raw sausage on pizza in oven?
Should you pre cook sausages?
Do you cook sausage before putting on pizza reddit?
Should you cook Sausage before making a pizza?
By precooking the sausage, you ensure that the meat is safe to eat. Texture and flavor: Cooking the sausage beforehand allows for a better texture and enhanced flavor on the pizza. The seared outer layer of the sausage can give the pizza an extra layer of taste and texture.
Is sausage casing healthier option to eat?
Cellulose casings and some natural casings are perfectly fine to eat. Sausage casings are used to hold and shape filling inside so that it can be cooked. There are natural sausage casings and synthetic varieties, and most of them are edible. The healthiest way to cook them is by boiling or baking. Sausages provide high levels of vitamin B12 and iron, both of which are essential for healthy red blood cells and hemoglobin production.
How to cook raw sausage on pizza?
The temperature of the pizza plays a crucial role in cooking raw sausage on pizza. Since the sausage is not pre-cooked, it can take a longer time to cook properly on the pizza. To ensure that the sausage is fully cooked, the pizza needs to be cooked at a higher temperature, usually around 425-450°F, for a longer period.
Can you eat undercooked sausage on a pizza?
Since most pizzas have a short cooking time, if you don’t precook your sausage toppings before placing your pizza in the oven, your meat will be undercooked. Consuming raw or undercooked meat can cause a variety of illnesses in people and should thus be avoided at all costs.