You Can't Hurry Sausages On The Grill

... they need to take whatever time is necessary to oven them to being done in the middle after you've seared the outsides. If you move them back onto the flames because they are taking too long and people are getting impatient, you end up with this.

Disastrous!

There is no penalty for cooking sausages ahead of time and keeping them warm. You might as well start them early and buy your ovening time on the front end.

Grrr.

What Went Wrong

The sausages were taken out of the fridge and put right on the grill. Their interior temperature started at 45 and needed to get to 165. That's too much to ask of indirect heat on the Weber. As the sausages are cooking, the charcoal is being consumed and the temperature inside is going down. By the time the interior temperature hit 165, the outsides had been incinerated.

I spent some time this morning online and found some key tips. First, take the sausages out well in advance and allow them to warm to room temperature. Had they started at 70, that would have been a 25 degree improvement.

Second, you can parboil them before putting them on the grill. If you keep the water (or beef stock or beer or whatever) around 150, you can cook them almost completely without drying them out. Allegedly, that takes about 20 minutes. You then use the grill to brown their skins.

Thirdly, you could put them in an aluminum pan with some liquids, as above, and put that in the kettle as the coals burn. The claim is that this allows the smoke to flavor the sausages while they cook all the way through. I'm skeptical as I can't see that much smoke going through the air-water interface and then the water-sausage interface.

Finally, and this is my own idea, I could put them in the toaster oven at 125 and warm them there for 10-15 minutes before grilling them.

I'm going to try a couple of these tonight and see which one works best.