Piercing Sausages - Needed or the Dirtying of a Clean Knife?

After a decidedly important discussion following stark revelations recently I decided to perform an experiment on the effect of piercing sausages before subjecting them to the devastating powers of my grill.

My belief has been for a while that puncturing ones sausage isn't necessary unless wanting to optimise the sausages health giving qualities.  An alternate opinion, and one I used to have until my Dad told me off, was that holes are required to stop explosions, although after dialogue it seems explosion means a bit of skin rippage and not a full on splattering of meat all over the kitchen.

The only way to test all this was to cook some chipolatas, 7p reduced from £1.20 to £1.13!  6 were lined up, 2 were left alone as the control, 2 were pierced once and 2 were pierced twice.  The results weren't stark...

Let's have the photos do the talking

Knife strikes are marked with the blue crosses, let's try not to focus too much on the state of my grill pan precooking :-p

So what was the outcome?

As we can see the 2 best sausages are the ones that had 2 pierce points, the 2 with piercings at one end of the sausage are buckling away from the pierced end and the 2 without and had major structural damage - no dangerous explosions though.  But what of the taste?  Well the extra fat retained by the non pierced beasts led to no noticeable change although I didn't actually check which ones I was eating.  

All in all the main thing to gather from this experiment was that saving 7p paid off in the no illness I suffered at the untrustworthy hands of their unfreshness.