Most sausage skins are edible. Natural casings and collagen casings are designed to be eaten along with the sausage, while plastic and cellulose casings are not. The type of casing depends on the sausage, and in most cases the packaging will tell you whether to remove it.
Natural Casings
Natural casings are made from the intestinal lining of pigs, sheep, or cattle. They’ve been used for centuries and are fully digestible. Your body breaks them down the same way it processes any other animal protein.
Not all natural casings feel the same in your mouth, though. Sheep casings are the most tender and are commonly used for frankfurters and thin pork sausage links. Hog casings, found on Italian sausages and bratwurst, have a satisfying snap when you bite through them and are always eaten with the sausage. Beef casings are the toughest of the three. They’re typically used for larger sausages like bologna or salami, and they’re often peeled off after cooking because the texture can be chewy and unpleasant.
Collagen Casings
Collagen casings are manufactured from the hides of cows, pigs, chickens, or turkeys. The skin is broken down into a fine gel (roughly 95% water and 3 to 4.5% collagen protein), then reformed into a uniform casing. They look and behave a lot like natural casings and are fully edible. You’ll find them on fresh pork sausage links and many supermarket hot dogs. They tend to be slightly less tender than natural casings but are perfectly safe to chew and swallow.
Casings You Should Not Eat
Cellulose casings are made from wood pulp or cotton fibers. They have a papery texture and are always removed before eating. Many commercial hot dogs are made in cellulose casings that get stripped off at the factory before packaging, so the finished product arrives skinless. When cellulose casings are left on, as with some smoked sausages, the label is required to say “Remove casing before eating.”
Plastic casings are the thick, clearly artificial wrappers you see on products like summer sausage, liverwurst, and ground meat chubs. They’re not digestible at all and must always be peeled off. These are usually easy to spot: they feel like plastic, look like plastic, and often have printing directly on the casing itself.
How to Tell What You’re Dealing With
Check the packaging first. USDA rules require that any sausage sold with an inedible casing still attached must carry a clear statement telling you to remove it. If there’s no such warning, the casing is edible.
When you don’t have the original packaging, a few clues help. Natural and collagen casings are thin, translucent, and slightly irregular. They flex when you press them and have a subtle sheen. Cellulose casings feel papery and stiff, almost like parchment. Plastic casings are thicker, often shiny, and may peel away in a single clean sheet. If the casing doesn’t tear or chew easily, or if it feels distinctly separate from the meat underneath, it’s probably not meant to be eaten.
Removing Casings When You Want To
Even when a casing is edible, you might want to remove it for a recipe that calls for loose sausage meat. The easiest approach is to work with uncooked sausage. Run the tip of a knife along the length of the link with a shallow cut, just deep enough to pierce the skin. Flip it over, grab the split casing at one end, and peel it back. If the casing is sticking, put the sausage in the freezer for 15 to 20 minutes first. The firmer meat makes the casing pull away more cleanly.
If the sausage is already cooked, you can still remove the casing. Simmer the links in hot water for two to three minutes, rinse them under cold water to stop the cooking, then dry them off and make your lengthwise cut. The casing should peel away easily at that point.
Plant-Based Sausage Casings
Vegan and vegetarian sausages use a few different approaches. Alginate casings, made from a seaweed-derived gel, are the most common choice for brands like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. The sausage filling passes through the gel during production, which forms a thin edible skin around it. Other plant-based options use a mix of glycerin, starch, and carrageenan (another seaweed derivative). All of these are edible and designed to be eaten with the sausage.