Sausage on Pizza

Pepperoni is a cured sausage. It was fermented and air-dried weeks before it met a pizza, and it arrives ready to eat.

Pizza sausage is raw ground pork. It goes onto the pizza uncooked and cooks in the oven, which is a completely different proposition for the kitchen and for the pizza.

It goes on raw

This surprises people, and it is the correct way to do it.

Raw sausage cooks through in the time a pizza takes, and while it does, it releases fat and juice directly onto the cheese below. Pre-cooking it means that fat ends up in a pan instead of on the pizza, and the sausage arrives dry.

The constraint is size. The pieces have to be small enough to cook through in a few minutes, which is why sausage is pinched into small nuggets rather than sliced into rounds like pepperoni. A piece much larger than a thumbnail will still be raw in the middle when the cheese is done.

Fennel is why it tastes Italian

Ask what makes Italian sausage taste Italian and the answer is almost entirely fennel seed.

It brings a sweet, faintly aniseed note that sits underneath the pork and the salt, and it is the flavour people recognise without being able to name. Garlic, black pepper and sometimes chilli fill in around it.

It also explains why sausage pairs so well with sweet vegetables. Fennel and caramelised onion or roasted pepper are pulling in the same direction, which is why sausage-and-peppers is a fixture rather than an accident.

Crumbled or sliced

Two forms turn up and they eat quite differently.

Crumbled is the standard: small raw nuggets scattered across the pizza. You get sausage in most bites, the pieces brown on their exposed surfaces, and the fat distributes widely.

Sliced means the sausage was cooked first and cut into rounds. More like pepperoni to eat, with firmer texture and less fat going into the pizza. Some places do it for consistency and speed.

Crumbled is generally better and messier. Sliced is more predictable, and neither is wrong — it is worth knowing which one a shop does before you decide what to expect.

The fat problem

Sausage is a fatty topping and that fat has to go somewhere.

On a pizza with sausage alone it is a feature — the rendered fat carries the fennel and garlic across the cheese. On a pizza that also has pepperoni, meatball and bacon, four fatty toppings render at once and the result is a pool.

That is the case against a loaded meat pizza, and it is the same balance argument our guide to topping combinations makes: one salty fatty element, then something pulling the other way.

With sausage, the thing pulling the other way is usually a vegetable. Peppers, onion or mushroom all work, though a wet vegetable alongside a fatty meat asks a lot of the base.

Hot sausage and sweet sausage

Most pizzerias carry one or the other and some carry both, and the difference is chilli rather than sugar.

Sweet sausage is the default: fennel, garlic, salt and pepper, no heat. “Sweet” here means “not spicy” rather than actually sweet, which confuses people ordering it for the first time.

Hot sausage is the same base with chilli flakes worked through. It is not usually very hot, and the fennel is still the dominant flavour underneath.

On a pizza the practical difference is smaller than it sounds, because the cheese blunts chilli considerably. If you like heat, hot sausage plus chilli flakes at the table gets you further than hot sausage alone.

What goes with it

• Peppers — sweet, and the classic partner for good reason.
• Onion — sweetens as it bakes and cuts the fat.
• Ricotta — mild and creamy against a strongly seasoned meat.
• Chilli — if the sausage is mild rather than hot.

What it does not need is a second heavily seasoned meat. Sausage is already carrying fennel, garlic and pepper; adding pepperoni’s paprika and chilli on top gives you two loud things arguing.

The exception people make is a plain cheese base with sausage and nothing else, which works precisely because there is nothing competing. On a pizza that simple the fennel comes through clearly, and you notice how much of the flavour was coming from the sausage all along.

The short version

Raw pork seasoned with fennel, pinched small so it cooks in the bake, giving up its fat onto the pizza as it goes. Pair it with something sweet, and do not stack it with another loud meat.

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