Monday, November 27, 2006
The Sausage King
I think I'm the new sausage king.
At M's school yesterday, I manned the barbecue for two hours at the mix & mingle day. Two hundred and thirty snags passed under my tongs.
One comment that kept recurring was how good the sausages were. They were a regular sausage from a major supermarket chain, which started me wondering, so I tried one.
It reminded me of the recently tried Krispy Kreme doughnuts, very fatty, though without the sugar, but definitely some binding agent as no fat at all leaked from them. It's curious how fat gives such a good mouthfeel to foods. It's also wondrous how much fat can legally make its way into a sausage. There is a minimum meat protein requirement (in other words, real meat) of 60% per kilo and to this you can legally add 50% of that weight in fat. So in one kilo of sausage, there must be 600 g meat protein and up to 300g in fat is allowed.
Want that again?
That's 30% fat content and only just over half a sausage has to be meat. The babies I were cooking were straining at this limit. Not to mention a binding agent to hold all that fat together. Yet people were saying they were good. It may be somewhat immodest to say that cooking had something to do with it, but I believe it has. As soon as a sausage is cooked right through, which would equate with a steak for instance being well done, there is no point to any further cooking as it starts to dry the sausage out. What I was doing by removing the sausages from the barbecue as soon as they were cooked was to retain their mouthfeel, leaving them with a certain succulence that people noticed.
I made a supermarket sausage taste good. Two hundred and thirty times.
Oh my, what have I done?
At M's school yesterday, I manned the barbecue for two hours at the mix & mingle day. Two hundred and thirty snags passed under my tongs.
One comment that kept recurring was how good the sausages were. They were a regular sausage from a major supermarket chain, which started me wondering, so I tried one.
It reminded me of the recently tried Krispy Kreme doughnuts, very fatty, though without the sugar, but definitely some binding agent as no fat at all leaked from them. It's curious how fat gives such a good mouthfeel to foods. It's also wondrous how much fat can legally make its way into a sausage. There is a minimum meat protein requirement (in other words, real meat) of 60% per kilo and to this you can legally add 50% of that weight in fat. So in one kilo of sausage, there must be 600 g meat protein and up to 300g in fat is allowed.
Want that again?
That's 30% fat content and only just over half a sausage has to be meat. The babies I were cooking were straining at this limit. Not to mention a binding agent to hold all that fat together. Yet people were saying they were good. It may be somewhat immodest to say that cooking had something to do with it, but I believe it has. As soon as a sausage is cooked right through, which would equate with a steak for instance being well done, there is no point to any further cooking as it starts to dry the sausage out. What I was doing by removing the sausages from the barbecue as soon as they were cooked was to retain their mouthfeel, leaving them with a certain succulence that people noticed.
I made a supermarket sausage taste good. Two hundred and thirty times.
Oh my, what have I done?
4 Comments:
Call it miracle or magic which ever you would like. It's why I can't eat that stuff even when it might taste good.
Hi tanna, they're stunning figures aren't they? Though I have to say I do like a quality snag.
You need fat in a sausage, trust me, I have tried them without!
Cheers
Stephen
Hi stephen, of course you are exactly right, it's even mandated by law and I should have mentioned it. The point I was making was that these sausages were very bland and it was the fat that was making them tasty, there was no other saving grace to them.
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