Chances are, you cook sausages on a regular pan like the rest of us, turning it onto different sides regularly to ensure even cooking. If you’re a sophisticated sausage specialist, you might have even invested in an indoor grill with sausage cooking plates that cradle each link in a perfect embrace to ensure even cooking without having to turn over. The UPAN Sausage Frying Pan takes the cooking plate design of that indoor grill, but applies it to an erstwhile standard pan you can heat on a stovetop, allowing you to cook sausages just as easily without having to clutter the countertop with another appliance.
A specialty cast iron pan, it comes with curved channels on the cooking surface, each one sized to hold a sausage in place while providing even heating on the sides and bottom. Will you still have to turn your sausages? Sure, but the design should allow it to brown more surface area at a time compared to traditional pans, which should cut down cooking time, so you can get to eating sooner.
The UPAN is a rectangular-shaped cast iron frying pan, with four curved channels in the middle that should allow you to cook four kielbasas at a time (one on each channel). According to the outfit, it can also fit six hand-linked butcher’s sausages (four in the middle, one each at the ends), eight machine-linked supermarket sausages, and any random combination of whatever other sausages you decide to cook. You can, of course, cook anything else than will fit in those channels, such as bacon, meatballs, and any similarly-sized food items.
Sausages should take around 10 minutes to fully cook in the pan at low heat, so it shouldn’t take all that long to get your meals ready. Meatballs, on the other hand, should cook in 12 to 15 minutes, while bacon goes for eight to 12 minutes, depending on how crispy you want them. Oh yeah, the outfit also recommends using the pan to cook those English-style toad-in-the-holes, which, they claim, should take around 17 to 20 minutes.
The UPAN has a single-piece cast-iron construction, so it should be as durable as any cast iron cookware you’ve got stashed at home. It’s been seasoned with flaxseed oil, then baked at 800 degrees Celsius, giving it a natural non-stick coating that’s free of harmful substances. Like all cast-iron cookware, of course, that seasoning isn’t permanent, so you’ll want to season it yourself occasionally, all while taking care not to damage it by cleaning it properly (e.g. hand wash only, using a plastic scraper to remove stuck on food).
Do you really need a specialty pan just for cooking sausages? Probably not. If you enjoy cookware that’s tailor-made for specific foods, though, and you do cook enough sausages on the regular, then it may be a worthy addition to your kitchen stash. If nothing else, it looks like a fun way to cook longer food items on a stovetop.
The UPAN Cast-Iron Sausage Fry Pan is available now, priced at $49.
