www.sausagemaking.org

Hello,

I run a restaurant in South Korea selling british style sausages in goumet style hot dogs with a variety of toppings. Currently we cook all our sausages (standard british style bangers) from fresh on a flat top grill. The problem we have is that they take around 10-12 mins to cook fully through and we need to speed up the cooking time so that we can get the hot dogs out within 3-5 mins.

At the moment to lower the waiting time down we are starting to cook sausages before the customers order and so we are guessing that they will order a certain amount as soon as they walk in. This is okay for now as we only opened recently but we need to find a better solution. I am trying to find a suitable way to pre-cook the sausages. I have tried par-boiling or poaching the sausages but the problem here is that our sausages are not tied at the ends so the sausages lose a lot of the flavour when cooked in liquid.

My ultimate goal is to find a way to fully pre-cook the sausages, let them be stored somewhere and then just brown them off on the grill for a minute when the order comes in. However I still want the juicy taste that is produced when frying in a pan. Is this possible? Am i looking for the impossible?!?

I would greatly appreciate any help/advice on this.

Thank you,

Tom @Bulldogs Korea

Welcome Tom

Unless you have the sausage linked so they can be poached (and even then I think the quality will suffer), the only suggestion I can make is, assuming you're fairly busy, people order as they enter and then join the queue for service; by the time they reach the front of the queue would the sausage not be cooked?

I'm guessing that this is you:

http://afatgirlsfoodguide.com/2014/01/25/bulldogs/

It looks superb!

Phil

we sell specialty sausages to a lot of restaurants. For many we vac pack in 4's in cook able pouches. When the order is delivered everything is poached gently in the packs and then either chilled or I think frozen in some cases. This means that at service orders just need browning/heating through which takes a fraction of the time and avoids worries/drying out.

Superb idea. Now why didn't I think of that!

Phil

If you've only recently opened, you don't really know what your normal demand for various sausages will be, yet. Part of what you are facing is what all start-up food shops face - figuring out how much of what to have ready at any given time. This takes experience and time, because it changes with the hour, the day of the week, the weather, events in the world...everything that influences for what people have an appetite. Take the time to collect and study the data, and you will benefit. Over time, you will learn how many you need to have on the grill in advance so that about the right number of sausages are finishing on the grill in time for customer demand. This is true, even if you pre-process your sausages to reduce the prep time at point of sale - they still need time to heat through and brown/crisp.

Also, you have to decide what kind of fast food you want to be known for, and what kind of customers you want to attract. You can invest more time to be fast and higher in quality. You can invest less time and be fast with lower quality. Or you can make higher quality food without investing more time in the process, but it won't be fast food. You can develop a clientele that's interested in fast fuel and doesn't care that much about the quality, or you can develop a clientele that appreciates quality and will wait a few minutes more for it.

I've never done restaurant work but have cooked for camps etc and do the sausages on the side for fun. I've had a couple of what I consider lucky wins for sausages, the first of which is the addition of baking powder, which increases bind and lowers the point of the Maillard reaction, and the second is steaming for a precook, as it's faster and more predictable than dry cooking and doesn't pull out moisture and flavor quite like poaching. Taken together you get a quick-browning sausage quick-cooking sausage. I've never found a food quite so difficult to time as sausages and try to preempt the process if I can.

Sous-vide is perfect for that. Parcook the sausages at a low temperature (I use 60-65ºC for sausage) enough time to fully pasteurize them, chill fast and keep at <3ºC for one week or freeze. On the serving day reheat in 56ºC water (the safe threshold), where you can keep them for a few hours without compromising quality, picking them up as you need them. Grilling would only be required for a nice surface crunch and a few minutes should be enough.

If your not too concerned about appearance, spatchcock the sausage before frying, this will really reduce your cooking time.

Cheers WW

The best way to pre-cooking sausages and reheating them, whilst keeping them at their best? Cook them fully and reheat them in foil? Cook them and reheat on an open tray? Part cook them and finish them on the day.

I don't think it is possible.