Are Most Grilling Sausages Fully Cooked?

June 17, 2017 4:37 PM

I got me some of these sausages and cooked them until they were burnt on the outside but, internal temp was only like 130/140. They were in freezer forever before that. I'm paranoid about food poisoning. That is pretty rare from prepacked food right?
posted by mamamia88 to Food & Drink (9 answers total)

It's very rare. That said, if you want to make sure the temps in the center are where you want them to be you can do a few things

- boil first and then grill to charred on the outside (bratwurst style)
- slice in two for final grilling
- much lower temps for earlier in the grilling process

Serious Eats has a longer and better explanation of ways to do this better.
posted by jessamyn at 4:44 PM on June 17, 2017 [4 favorites]

I always give my Italian sausages a 20 minute steam in beer and/or water and onions before I grill them but those are fresh sausages filled with raw meat.

The FAQ for your sausages list a 150 day "sell by" date and a 30 day "use by" in addition to that so I'd guess they are fully cured and you could eat them right out of the package if you wanted.

There's a customer support number on that website as well, so you could always call them.
posted by bondcliff at 4:49 PM on June 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: They are in my stomach no point calling them. Hopefully I'm just being paranoid
posted by mamamia88 at 5:06 PM on June 17, 2017 [2 favorites]

Found a label that says 'cook before eating' for that particular brand, so they're probably cured in some way but not fully cooked.

The packaging also says 'remove casing before cooking', but the website linked in the OP also clearly shows sausages cooking in the casing. So who knows what you're supposed to do with these things.
posted by BrandonW at 5:23 PM on June 17, 2017 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: That's probably for chorizo. This is more of a sausage you eat on the grill. I know they are supposedly sold at soldier Field so don't really think they would risk poisoning 70k people are once but who knows?
posted by mamamia88 at 5:41 PM on June 17, 2017

Many hot dogs, sausages, kielbasa, etc are fully cooked, but it will always say so on the label. I believe most or all that aren't fully cooked will have safe cooking instructions on them instead.
posted by Room 641-A at 5:44 PM on June 17, 2017 [2 favorites]

It's unclear whether you thawed them before cooking, but if you didn't then the insides would stay undercooked much longer than it would take to char the outsides, because it takes a lot of energy to go from ice at freezing temp to water at freezing temp: [Liquid water requires about 4.2 Joules per milliliter per degree Celsius to raise or lower its temperature. However, the Latent Heat of Vaporization (Lf) of water (the energy required to be added or removed to evaporate water at the boiling point or solidify it at the freezing point) is 334 Joules per milliliter.]

Which doesn't answer the food poisoning question of course, but I'd eat them and not worry.
posted by anadem at 6:25 PM on June 17, 2017

I've had mixed results using an instant read thermometer on small pieces of meat. The side away from the heat cools quickly from whatever the peak temperature was.

But if it looked cooked when cut, it was cooked.
posted by SemiSalt at 6:40 AM on June 18, 2017

Wifey and I eat bratwursts quite a bit, and I'll admit, I do the naughty thing of judging cookedness by internal color instead of temperature. We have yet to die, nor even be remotely ill, from undercooked unprecooked brats. Unless it was pink and 'gooey' inside you're probably fine.
posted by AzraelBrown at 9:39 AM on June 19, 2017