To prick or not to prick?

That was the question asked to the Hairy Bikers, Dave Myers and Si King, as one fan looked to settle a debate over the correct way to cook sausages.

Harry wrote to the Hairy Biker Agony Uncle Podcast to say: “Please solve a food dispute between my partner Paul and I.

“Every week we have a traditional food night, we each get to choose which basic British meal we are going to have.

“Paul tends to go for ham, eggs and chips, I invariably choose sausage and mash.”

Harry says the Paul insists that the correct way to cook the sausages is to prick them first.

Against the act of pricking, Si said: “If you prick them you’re basically letting all the flavour leach out into the frying pan.

“You only used to prick them in war time because they were such poor meat. They were called bangers because they’d explode in the pan which is why you needed to prick them.

“But now they are such high quality, you don’t.”

Dave said: “Bangers. They used to put water in with the pork to fill them out. So you’d put them into the pan and if you didn’t prick them they’d go bang!”

The Barrow biker says that you don’t want the fat to escape from the sausages by pricking them.

He said: “You need some fat content in your sausage, and you want the meat to cook in the fat.

“So you want that fat to stay in the skin until you unleash it into your mouth.

“So you never prick your banger!”

The bikers then discussed their preference over frying and grilling their sausages.

The answer came down to the type of sausage being used.

For a big Cumberland sausage, Dave recommends colouring it in the frying pan before finishing it in the oven.

“It was my mother’s way,” said Dave. “The Cumberland cobra.

“My mother used to get an apple, core the apple and fill it full of raisins, put the apple in the middle, coil your cobra around the apple and bake it.

“So not only did you get your sausage baked nicely, you got a ready made apple sauce.”