Barbecuing tips for tasty and safe summer sausages

Summer is here again, and that means great tasting barbecued sausages straight from the sizzling grill. Nothing beats that chargrilled, wood-smoked barbecued sausage taste, but barbecuing requires some food safety know-how to make sure that the food you prepare on the barbecue this year is safe for you, your friends and family.

A variety of bugs such as E.coli 0157, campylobacter and salmonella can cause upset stomachs as well as serious illness, and statistics show that raw and undercooked meat provides the biggest food poisoning risk. But there are some simple steps you can take to ensure that your food is safe as well as tasty.

1. Food preparation:

It is vital that you keep raw meat and raw sausages separate from cooked foods. Raw meat can contain food poisoning bugs that can contaminate cooked foods. So:

Always wash your hands after handling raw meat.

Use separate knives, chopping boards, and utensils for cooked and for raw meat.

Keep raw meat in sealed containers.

On the barbecue, don't put raw meat or sausages next to cooked or partially cooked meat.

If you have marinated raw meat in a sauce or marinade, do not use any of this sauce on cooked meat.

Make sure frozen food is thoroughly defrosted before cooking.

2. The barbecue:

Light your barbecue at least 30 minutes before you want to cook.

Only start to cook food when the coals are at their hottest - wait until the smoke has died down and the coals are glowing red, with a white/grey powdery surface.

Spread the charcoals evenly so that you have a more even cooking temperature.

3. Cooking:

Always make sure that you cook your sausages and meat until they are steaming hot all the way through, and until any juices run clear.

Always check that the meat you are cooking is cooked right through, with no pink meat showing at all. Just because your sausages look charred on the outside, does not mean that they are cooked on the inside, so double check!

Move your food around on the barbecue, turning it regularly to ensure that it cooks as evenly as possible.

If you are cooking for a lot of people, it can be hard to maintain a high enough charcoal temperature to cook all of your food thoroughly. Instead, you can cook your sausages indoors - poaching is good - and then finish them off on the barbecue to give them that delicious BBQ flavour.

If you are using a gas barbecue, you will have better control of the temperature, but you still have to make sure that food is cooked thoroughly all the way through. Adjust the height of the grill shelves and skewers to make sure that the temperature is not too high or too low.

For more barbecue safety tips visit the Garden Safety section of the British Gas safety website at britishgassafety.co.uk, and for gas safety tips in general you'll find information about the gas safe register (formerly Corgi) on the main British Gas website.