Sausage: Cased Or Uncased?

We know grilling and outdoor month has passed us by, but with the temperatures starting to cool off a bit, this is really our preferred time to cook outside. It also makes it a fabulous time to make your own sausage, but we're curious...
Which do you like better? Cased? Or uncased?

This past weekend was the American Royal BBQ tournament in Kansas City (look for a full post with super tasty pictures tomorrow!) and we're still recovering from the events. One of the best parts of attending and competing in a contest of this sort is 24 hour, round the clock, delicious food! So when surrounded by pound after pound of tasty smoked meats, it's ok to be a little picky about what you eat.

We're typically partial to smoked, uncased sausage. But the coiled and cased sausage above completely changed our mind. The slow smoke caused the natural casing to all but melt away, keeping all the fats and juices stored up inside. Delicious!

What way do you prefer your sausage (which sounds like a bad pick up line), cased or uncased? Let us know in the comments below!

Related: How To: Grind Your Own Sausage

(Image: Sarah Rae Trover)

Comments (16)

Sausage: cased or uncased?

Yes.

I prefer uncased, usually. I hate the casing not being easily cut with my teeth when I bite into it and then being forced to eat a bigger bite of sausage than I really wanted to. Uncased doesn't have that problem. (This is especially the case when eating sausage in a bun, when you can't really cut it up to eat it, obviously!)

I prefer uncased, mostly because there is some form of casing that appears not to agree with my digestion. Doesn't happen all the time, but it never happens with uncased.

I'm old-school.... to me a sausage isn't genuine if it isn't in a natural casing.

We're a german and polish family, so we only purchase sausages prepared fresh by our ethnic butchers :-P

I love cased sausage. I think I like the "al dente" texture of the bite and the little *pop* when your teeth break through the casing.

Uhh, now I'm drooling on my desk!

uncased, mainly because the casing grosses me out, but also because of the 'tough to bite' factor (ugh don't you hate it when you bite into a brat, break the casing and get squirted w/hot grease?). I don't mind it when it is cooked right though...the snap is sometimes nice :)

Natural hog, sheep, or bovine casing for everything but breakfast sage is what we prefer and use around here. When we do large batches of hot Italian, we will make a few portions uncased for use in lasagna and spaghetti.

To eat I generally prefer cased sausages. However I sometimes like to try my hand at homemade sausage and for that casings are just way too hard to handle working with.

Definitely uncased - the casing grosses me out too. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't turn down a good cased sausage, I just prefer the uncased. The thing i dislike the most about the casing is the little knot at the end.. always seemed to me like eating a belly button.

I like both. The snap of a cased sausage is really nice for me, but I also like the versatility of a sausage that doesn't have that. Both are good, for different things.

I've never seen uncased sausage for sale, but if I did, I would give it a go.

I don't mind casing, but I really get put off when ever the casing separates from the sausage. This happens when I'm cutting up cased sausage before cooking them. The case tends to be chewy and and I'm left with bits of case on my chopping board. They look like condoms! Gross but true.

I don't mind casing all the time, especially when I am browning the sausage as a whole or using it in large pieces in stews like this merguez and chard tagine.

I'm with 73: yes to both!

It really depends on what the sausage is being used for. I generally prefer thinner casings, though.

I'll take sausage any which way. However, I generally prefer uncased, especially with pasta or risotto.

One of my favorite meals at home is sausage and mushroom brown rice risotto:

http://donkeehouse.com/?p=1153

Sausage in natural casing is the best. The snap is so much fun, even though it kind of grosses me out too.