For The Best Grilled Sausages, Make A Foil Pouch Of Flavor

What could be more fun than firing up the grill and getting your BBQ on? With so many different styles of regional BBQ in the US alone, there's no shortage of unique ways to smoke and heat your meat. The wide variety of popular store-bought sausage brands allows you to grab many different styles for your next cookout. There are a lot of ways to step up your grilled sausage game, many of which are surprisingly simple. Try an easy method for achieving smoky BBQ flavors on a gas grill by adding your favorite wood chips to a foil pouch and grilling your sausages alongside it.

Though you're grilling sausages on a standard grill and not an actual smoker, using a foil pouch with wood chips has a similar effect. It's incredibly easy to fold up some foil into a pouch shape, fill it with the wood chips of your choosing, seal it, and poke ventilation holes to let the smoke out. All you need to do is set the flavor pouch on the grill while it heats, check for the smoke, and then add sausages for grilling. You can determine the amount of smoky flavor you want by the size of the holes you poke in your foil pouch. Keeping the lid of your grill closed will also help contain that smoky flavor inside while your sausages cook.

With myriad different types of sausages to choose from, you can pick the ones you like best that will play well with a hint –- or more –- of smoky grilled flavor. Making a foil pouch is a straightforward process and you can select from a number of the absolute best woods for smoking and grilling or even combine a few different ones to fully customize your flavor. For example, kielbasa sausage is especially smoky and would pair nicely with hickory or mesquite wood chips. Cajun andouille sausage tends to be more spicy, so using a standard oak wood chip flavor pouch would add a nice bit of smoky flavor without overpowering the cayenne and paprika elements.

You can also use a foil pouch filled with wood chips for non-beef and non-pork sausages to give an extra punch of flavor for grilling. Consider using apple wood chips in your foil pouch alongside a batch of chicken apple sausages to amplify the sweet and savory tastes. When grilling a merguez lamb sausage, try pairing it up with smoke from cherry or pecan wood chips. There's an endless supply of winning combinations between your favorite sausages and flavors of wood for smoking.