Instead of cooking sausages in a frying pan, I found that it’s best to stick them in the air fryer. Air fryer sausages are so easy to make. When you cook sausages in an air fryer, they cook pretty evenly, and it’s a much easier way to get them cooked when you need them. Plus, they are a healthy alternative to frying sausages in a frying pan, as you don’t need as much oil.
However, the trick to getting them to come out of the air fryer juicy is to let them rest for three minutes after cooking before slicing into them. I learned this recipe tip from chef Devan of the food website Braised & Glazed. I didn’t think this would make much of a difference, but I was really surprised that it did.
While some cooking enthusiasts recommended using a fork or toothpick to poke several holes in each sausage to prevent them from bursting and releasing all their juices in the air fryer, I found that this dried and deflated them.
Some people decide to brush sausages with a little oil to stop them sticking to the surface, but my sausages cooked perfectly well without it. Plus, sausages have sufficient fat in them to avoid this.
Instead, I just popped them in the air fryer without any prep work and let them cook at 170C for 12 minutes, before turning them over slightly and cooking for a further four minutes at the same temperature.
If you have a lot of sausages to cook, I would recommend cooking your sausages in batches to ensure that each one has plenty of space to cook evenly. As I only had three to cook, this wasn’t an issue.
These sausages were pretty quick to cook as they were not that thick, but for larger sausages, I’d recommend cooking them for an extra eight to 10 minutes.
Once the sausages were cooked, I let them rest for three minutes before slicing them open to prevent the hot juices from spilling out.
I left the sausages resting on the worktop with a sheet of tin foil covering them to keep in the warmth.
According to the chef, resting a sausage is “even more important than resting a steak” because a sausage is basically a meat water balloon.
He explained that when the casings break, most of the delicious fat and juices will leave, and you’ll end up with drier sausages.