THE CHATTER
Screaming sausages and the British scientist who studies them
The video is brief – a mere 22 seconds in length. Yet in it, a range of sausage sounds is on full display. From the quotidian to the unusual: a sizzling crescendo, which builds to a full-blown scream.
Six breakfast sausages sizzle in a well-used frying pan over high heat. The screaming, which is nearly indistinguishable from a playground at recess, only occurs when the pan is agitated and dies down when it’s at rest.
Since reddit user Imjustkidding posted it on Sept. 24 (“My breakfast sausages begged for their lives this morning. Listen to their cries for mercy.”), the video’s chilling, albeit sparse, narrative has garnered more than 1.2-million views. As Munchies points out, although this may be the most popular documentation of sausage sounds to date, it’s not the first.
According to Know Your Meme, the “Screaming Sausage” phenomenon (a.k.a. “Scared Sausage”) dates back to the summer of 2009 when YouTuber vincent lloyd posted evidence of sausages shrieking from beneath a broiler. A year later, YouTube user mrshotglass posted a video of a sausage squealing while being microwaved.
So, Imjustkidding’s video is just the latest in the ongoing documentation of the pronouncements of pork products. But what causes the squawking in the first place? Is it simply due to steam escaping through holes in the sausage casing – “like a meat kettle” – as another reddit user surmised?
According to the work of British food scientist Stuart Farrimond, today’s sausages aren’t nearly as boisterous as their historical counterparts. His conclusion is based on research that included recreating
recipes dating back to 1845, a clean, lightly oiled pan heated to 160 degrees Celsius, and a decibel meter. In a 2017 interview, Farrimond told Extra Crispy that contemporary links make less noise because they “tend to have more lean meat and less moisture.”
In an effort to duplicate the ideal conditions for screaming sausages, The Daily Meal performed their own experiment involving four types of sausages, four kinds of pans (cast-iron, nonstick, slanted and high sides) and various cooking methods (low-high heat; dry, oiled and water-filled pans). To no avail: “they never screamed.”
However, a last-ditch effort – roughly 40 seconds in the microwave – caused hot dogs to emit “a definite horrormovie scream noise,” The Daily Meal reports. But it also produced “a pulpy mess.”
Consider yourself warned.