Air-Fryer British Sausages

The British banger is a different animal from the American breakfast link or the Italian sausage. It's plumper, paler before cooking, with a higher rusk content (the breadcrumb filler that makes it slightly bouncy on the inside). It's served in a soft white roll with brown sauce or mustard, or alongside mashed potato in a pool of onion gravy, or in a breakfast spread next to eggs and beans. It is, in any of these configurations, the workhorse of British cooking.

The air fryer cooks them better than the pan does — paradoxical, given how fundamental the pan-fried sausage is to British cuisine, but true. In a pan, you turn them four times to get even colour. In the air fryer, the dry heat hits every surface simultaneously: the sausages come out evenly browned, not blackened in patches, and the skin tightens without splitting open and leaking fat. Two minutes of effort, ten minutes unattended, no spitting fat all over the hob.

The photo shows the natural endgame: two browned sausages on a plate, white sub-style rolls split open and waiting, a hot-dog assembly visible behind with ketchup and mustard zigzags. This is the bap. This is what you came here for.