How to tell if the sausage is bad

Whether you commonly serve your family sausages for breakfast or tea, or you purchased fresh sausages to throw on a barbecue, it's easy to store these items in the fridge and then forget about them for a while. Before you think about cooking these sausages, make sure they have not gone bad and are safe to eat first.

Look at the sausage. Depending on the type of sausage you have, the sausage may look greyish in colour if it's gone off. There also may be a slimy coating over the sausage. Any mould is a definite sign of an iffy banger.

Smell the sausage. Bad sausage will have a sour smell to it that any meat that is going off starts to get. If the meat has any smell that is unpleasant and rotten, just get rid of it.

Refer to food handling guidelines and look at the "use by" dates for sausages unless you placed it in the freezer immediately after you bought them. Raw fresh sausages should be eaten within one to two days of purchase. Cooked and packaged sausages can be kept in the refrigerator for seven days. Frozen sausages can last about one to two months in the freezer. To avoid eating bad sausages, do not eat any sausage that has been in the fridge or freezer for longer than these recommended times.