How To Know If Sausage Is Spoiled
If you are going to check out whether sausage is spoiled or not, taste, texture and its color are good indicators. It will give off a terrible odor and start to turn green. Black molds begin to grow on the sausage.Spoiled sausage may have a bitter and rancid taste.
How do you know if a sausage is spoiled?If you have some sausages past their expiration date, look for signs that they are spoiled. You can tell if a sausage is spoiled if the meat has a slimy texture, and if the meats color has turned grey. When looking at a sausage, one indication it is spoiled, or is likely spoiled, may be the color of the meat turning to a slight gray.
If you notice the sausage looking white, or if the color looks different than you remembered it looking like when you cooked your sausage, this is an indicator that the sausage has gone bad. When the outside color changes to gray or brown on some, it is a sign that the sausage is starting to go bad. If a ground breakfast sausage shows a gray or brown discoloration on the outside of the meat, then that breakfast sausage is starting to spoil, and you are better off staying safe and throwing it out.
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Finally, if you notice any moldy appearance on the ground breakfast sausage, such as a splotchy, grayish-green, or blueish appearance, toss it out immediately, regardless if it is raw or cooked. When you keep cooked ground breakfast sausage in your fridge, store it in an airtight container, separated from the rest of your raw meat items, so that you do not consume damaged breakfast sausage; label your packaged sausages, and throw it out once it is grayish-brown and sloppy, smells bad, tastes bad, or is past its shelf life. The best way to know whether your ground breakfast sausage is spoiled is to look at the color, smell, texture, and the date on which it was put back in.
| Type of Sausage | Shelf Life |
| Raw/unprocessed Sausages | 1-2 days (In refrigerator) |
| Cooked Sausages | 3-4 days (In refrigerator) |
| Frozen Sausages | 3 months |
Sausage is considered spoiled when the meat changes color, when mold appears, or a foul odor develops. Sausage that has gone bad will have developed a slimy or gooey texture, and smell nasty or foul when cooked or eaten. Your sausages will begin to smell bad if they are bad; remember, meat should smell nothing but whatever herbs are in it. If the sausages, opened or not, raw or cooked, have been sitting outside for more than 1 or 2 hours, toss the sausages out, do not attempt to cook them, and do not eat them, because they are not any more safe to eat.
Sausages are best left out of the fridge for several days before cooking or grilling, to ensure that they are not spoiled. This way, you can store your sausages in the freezer indefinitely without worrying that they will spoil. Raw, unprocessed sausages will last 1 to 2 days in the refrigerator, depending on the shelf life stamped on the sausage.
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If the sausages have been sitting in the fridge longer than a week, or they smell any sort of funny, throw em out and make a fresh batch. If your sausages have been sitting around for a while, smelled bad, and turned green, you will want to toss them and get some fresh ones. If your sausages are starting to turn brown, then you need to make sure to cook them right away because they are starting to spoil, but should still be fine to eat. Cooked sausages usually last for three or four days in the fridge, or for four months in the freezer, but flavors start to degrade the longer you keep them.
Once opened, cooked sausages will generally keep about three to five days in the fridge before they begin to spoil. Fresh, uncooked sausages can be stored for one to two days in the fridge; once cooked, store in a refrigerated cooler (40degF/4.4degC or lower) for three to four days. Raw sausages last just one or two days in the fridge, cooked sausages last 4 to 6 days, and dried-cured sausages last almost indefinitely in the refrigerator, as long as they are not opened.
The finished sausage will be at about a 160degF internal temperature, measured with a meat thermometer, or you can cut open a sausage to inspect color and texture. Your finished sausage should smell just like a finished sausage, and possibly just like whatever flavorings you added to the finished sausage.
The sausage might even smell acidic, and an excellent indicator of that is a yellow-brown color all around. If your sausage has any sort of smell of being sour or is in some sort of disrepair, then it is likely to be faulty, and you should throw it away because it is unsafe to eat. As time goes on, different qualities of sausages will clearly shift which may warn you of its going bad. A sausage turning brown is a sign that the sausage is starting to get worse, but is not necessarily worse yet.
A small color shift is fine, but unless you are familiar with your fresh sausages color, it is hard to know whether discoloration is normal or spoilage. If your sausage has natural casing, and you notice it is slick, this does not necessarily mean the meat itself is spoiled. This is really only true for uncooked meat, since sausages will turn a greyish color once cooked, but this does not necessarily mean it is spoiled.
If the sausage is completely cooked through and is goopy, or has that strange, funky, sweet-sour flavor — you know the ones — then that is done, and you should simply toss it. You certainly do not want to use meat that is greasy, so if you do notice any sliminess, take it as an indication that your sausage is not good, and just toss it instead of risking an illness by eating it.
If you ate a ruined sausage which did not contain harmful bacteria, the sausage just tastes worse and you might get a upset stomach for several hours. If a sausage is contaminated, then it will have an awful smell, it will have started turning green, and may have even started growing mold.
How long does sausage take to spoil?
Fresh unsealed sausage that hasn’t been cooked can be kept in the fridge for about two days; once cooked, it could be kept there for about a week at 40 °F or lower. Hard or dry sausage, when sealed and unused, can be preserved for as long as six weeks in the pantry or for an endless amount of time in the refrigerator.
What happens if you eat spoiled sausage?
Depending on how severe the food pathogens are, eating damaged ground breakfast sausage typically causes symptoms including cramping in the stomach, fever, vomiting, diarrhea, and dehydration. Be aware that symptoms frequently take a day or two to manifest.