The first mention of the preparation of sausage is found by historians in the annals of Ancient Greece and Babylon throughout the ancient civilized world. It was invented by chefs to treat local nobles, merchants and kings. At that time, isolated pork intestines and chopped lard with meat were used to produce sausage.
The recipe was modified every day, and the result was a product of the highest quality. It is still popular among all groups of the population due to its excellent taste and affordable price.
Today, cutting raw smoked sausage is considered an integral component of the holiday table. With its help, you can make unique sandwiches or simply cut it onto a plate and enjoy the wonderful taste. But rarely does anyone realize that the production of one stick of sausage requires a lot of effort from meat processing plant workers and the use of high-quality ingredients. Sitting at the table with a cup of tea and a sandwich, sometimes a question arises deep in my soul, how is delicious sausage made?
How is sausage made at the factory?
The production of sausages begins with the selection of a recipe and preparation of the technological process. For example, fresh, high-quality ingredients are chosen for raw smoked sausage.
What is sausage made from?
- Beef;
- Pork;
- Lard;
- Natural spices;
- Bacterial culture;
- Salt;
- Stabilizers;
Meat products arrive from the deboning stage in a form ready for production. Meat fillet and bacon are ground in a specially prepared meat grinder. For each type of sausage, the knives are adjusted and selected separately to create a unique minced meat texture.
If you go to a vegetarian store and ask the seller a stupid question: “Where is your meat?” - you will be immediately taken to a shelf on which sausages of different sizes lie in neat rows: “Boiled diet sausage”, “Boiled milk sausage”, “Classic ham sausage”, brawn, salami, cervelat, basturma and much more. And all this is done without the use of products obtained from slaughtered animals - from wheat, as a rule, or soy.
Dmitry Bystrov, associate professor of the department of public catering at Moscow State University of Food Production, told us about how plant-based sausage is prepared, what gives it flesh, color and smell.
“All sausages, in which meat is replaced with vegetable components, are made according to the model of ordinary boiled meat sausage. I worked for a long time at one of our largest meat factories and saw how it was prepared every day, so let’s first briefly tell you how boiled meat sausage is made, it will be clearer. For example, the same doctorate.
Beef and pork are separated from bones and veins and fatty and lean pieces are sorted separately so that the technologist can assemble the composition he needs from this. Then this meat is salted with spices and sodium nitrite, which is both a meat color fixer and a preservative. In this form, the meat is salted for about a day, after which it is thoroughly ground in two meat grinders to an emulsion. Then ice is added to the emulsion so that the minced meat does not fall apart during cooking. Next come milk and eggs, or, if manufacturers want to reduce the cost of the process, powdered milk and dried eggs. Then all this is finally mixed, shaped, then the sausage undergoes heat treatment in special chambers, after which the sausage is cooled.
Plant-based sausages are made using the same principle. The path is the same, it’s just that the meat is replaced with plant materials: soy, wheat, peas - whatever. This raw material is processed in a special way - roughly speaking, flour is made from it, which we, technologists, call fiber. I’ll say right away: wheat fiber in this type of sausage behaves best, it’s the easiest to work with - this is probably why sausage made from wheat is the most common. But soy is most similar in structure to meat, but has a special characteristic taste that has to be drowned out.
There is no difficulty in producing sausage from fiber: it perfectly absorbs and binds water, which gives the future sausage its flesh. Fiber is diluted with water, and the result is something like unleavened dough. A structure former is added to it - most often starch or carrageenan - so that the future sausage can take shape.
Next, it would be nice to add milk to the vegetable dough, which will add flavor to the sausage and increase its nutritional value. But if the manufacturer has the task of making not just sausage from vegetable raw materials, but specifically vegetarian sausage, then in this case regular milk can be easily replaced with soy milk. And in principle, you can easily do without milk and eggs - they do not affect the structure of the future sausage. If the manufacturer has the task of imitating the shade of meat sausage, a dye is added to this porridge - made, for example, based on beet juice.
To enhance the effect, you can add artificial fat to vegetable sausage. This is an unattractive product that even meat sausage producers use to save on production. The fact is that in Russia we raise mainly meat pigs, not fat pigs, so good pork fat sometimes costs as much as meat. Vegetable lard is made from water, stabilizing powder and vegetable oil. All these ingredients are mixed in a mixer and turned into a creamy mass. It is sent to the refrigerator, where it hardens, after which it can be cut as desired and added to sausages. You can calculate the vegetable lard in regular sausage by either boiling it or frying it: when heated, natural lard will begin to melt and become transparent, while artificial lard will remain white and its volume will not change. The advantages of this product, unfortunately, are exclusively technological; it has no special nutritional value.
So, the porridge was formed, color was added, fat, if desired, was added too - and the mass is ready for cooking. At this stage, something is added to the minced meat to shape the taste - for example, vegetables and spices. If you combine fried onions with black pepper and garlic, this combination will bring back memories of garlic meat sausage. And, most likely, flavorings will be added, which, as experiments show, work reliably and confuse people. For example, by dropping a few drops of burger-scented flavoring onto a piece of bread, it’s easy to convince yourself that this is indeed a burger.
After adding all the remaining components, the minced meat is thoroughly mixed, shaped, heat-treated and, cooling, hardens. The result is a sausage-like product with a distant or pronounced aroma of meat and its structure reminiscent of sausage.
It's important to say this. Vegetable sausage is a product for which no serious regulatory documents have been invented; there are no GOSTs for it. And everything very much depends on the manufacturer’s task. If he thinks that the buyer misses meat sausage, but cannot eat it, then the manufacturer, of course, will paint it with beets, and put Chinese vegetable fat in it, and call it something “doctor-like” so that our our eyes and memory helped us and we wanted to eat this sausage. And if the manufacturer has no need to make the buyer nostalgic for meat, then it doesn’t have to be painted, or called anything special, and it doesn’t have to add any pungent flavorings - but just make a pressed vegetable porridge with the taste of, say, sun-dried tomatoes and thyme .
There's nothing particularly complicated about plant-based sausage and it's easy to make at home. Even when I was studying at the institute, I carried out such experiments and made vegetarian sausage from chickpeas. I boiled it, turned it into a porridge that looked like hummus, added gelatin to bring the porridge together, added beet juice to give the pea sausage the color of meat, and then cooked it again and poured it into molds - into ordinary jars. Something similar to half a loaf of doctor's sausage fell out of my jars. I cut it into slices, put it on a piece of bread - and it really tasted like sausage. After all, visual perception is also important: if we see that a product looks like a sausage, we will more easily believe that it is a sausage. The brain helps us deceive ourselves.
By the way: you should not cook vegetable boiled sausage (as many people do with regular sausage). Meat usually shrinks when cooked, so the sausage will shrink when cooked. If the product contains almost no meat, but contains carrageenan or something else that tends to absorb water, then the sausage, on the contrary, swells when cooked. By this criterion, plant-based sausage is also easy to distinguish from real meat sausage. We once carried out an experiment - we cooked several types of cheap sausages: during this experiment, one sausage even exploded.”
Real sausage is made from meat. Don't believe me? Then let's prepare it with our own hands according to a very simple and understandable recipe, without special equipment or professional skills.
- Preparation time: 3 days.
- Quantity: 4 loaves of 300 g.
Required Ingredients
To make your own delicious sausage at home, you only need a few ingredients:- pork neck – 1.5 kg;
- fresh garlic – 2 cloves;
- bay leaf – 1 large or 2 small;
- table salt – 30 g (for 1 kg of pork you need 20 g of salt);
- spices optional (black pepper, coriander).
Necessary equipment
If you are making sausage for the first time and think that it is very difficult, you are mistaken. To prepare it you will need the simplest equipment:- wooden board for cutting meat;
- large sharp knife;
- a bowl with a volume of at least 2 liters;
- cling film;
- sleeve for baking;
- blender (or meat grinder);
- scissors;
- small saucepan;
- baking tray;
- aluminium foil.
Step-by-step cooking process
When choosing meat for homemade sausage, it is better to take not a lean piece, but one with fatty layers. Then it will come out juicy and tasty. Before cooking, wash the meat well under cold water and dry it. Then cut into plates 1 cm thick.
Each plate is cut into thin strips. Moreover, we will not cut the strips into cubes in the future. Let's leave it exactly like this. During the formation of the sausage, they will intertwine with each other, giving a characteristic pattern.
When all the meat is cut into strips, it is placed in a bowl for marinating. To do this, you need to measure out the salt and spices, and finely chop the garlic. So that it imparts all its flavor to the meat, it is crushed with the flat side of a knife and then chopped.
All components of the marinade, including bay leaf, are distributed on top of the sliced meat. Mix thoroughly with your hands until the salt and spices are distributed throughout the entire volume.
Cover the bowl with cling film and put it in the refrigerator to marinate. If time permits, it is better to spend about two days for this procedure. If you don’t have that much time, then 12 hours is enough.
After removing the film from the bowl, mix the meat again. In this case, parts of the bay leaf are removed. They should not get into the sausage during shaping. The third part of the minced meat is separated, transferred to a blender or meat grinder and chopped. Then add to the meat and mix well. The combination of strips and fine minced meat will achieve a uniform, dense texture.
The minced meat, kneaded until smooth, is visually divided into 4 parts. A loaf is formed from each. Simply molding minced meat into the shape of a sausage is not enough. Each part must be beaten on the board, spanked with your palms to compress all the pieces and expel air bubbles.
You will need a regular baking sleeve as a shell. It is cut to the size of the loaves with an allowance for curling. You should get 4 pieces 20 - 25 cm long. The ties can be cut from the same sleeve.
The spanked loaf is placed in a section of the baking sleeve. Place it on one side, moving it with the edge of your palm so that the workpiece fits tightly to the polyethylene. Roll it up like a candy and tie the ends tightly.
When all the loaves are tightly packed into the baking sleeve, the pieces are put back into the refrigerator. They must continue the fermentation process for another 24 hours.
You can prepare sausage in several ways: boil or bake in the oven. It's better to try two methods as the taste is slightly different. The semi-finished product needs to be cooked for two and a half hours at low temperature (not higher than 80 degrees).
Doctorskaya is one of the most famous types of Russian sausages. Its recipe was developed in the 30s of the last century - since then it has become a national specialty. It is produced by many factories throughout the country. Among them is the Moscow plant of the Dymov company in Krylatskoye. About eight tons, or 10 thousand loaves, of doctor's sausage are produced here per day. Since it is especially needed for preparing Olivier salad, production volume traditionally increases by another 20% before the New Year. We visited the enterprise and learned how and what doctor’s sausage is made here.
Recipe without secrets
Doctor's sausage began to be produced back in the 30s of the 20th century. The new variety, developed by the All-Russian Research Institute of Meat Industry of the USSR, was supposed to include premium beef, lean pork, eggs, milk, salt, sugar, and spices. And now enterprises that produce sausage with this name must use only these components. As expected, at the Dymov plant it is made from beef and two types of pork of varying fat content. When asked about the secret ingredients that give the product a certain taste, technologists are offended: they assure that the composition contains only what should be there according to the standard, and all components are listed on the label.
About 40 tons of meat are deboned at the Krylatskoye plant per day.
Beef arrives at the plant in the form of graded meat ready for processing, and pork is brought in in the form of carcasses cut in half. This happens at night, so that when the deboning workers arrive in the morning, the half-carcasses are already in the storage facility. Some of the meat is supplied from our own pig-breeding complex “Dymov. South" in the Krasnodar region, the other part is purchased from third-party manufacturers. Quality service employees and technologists check incoming raw materials: they inspect half carcasses, selectively do microbiological analysis - if deviations from quality standards are found, the meat is returned to the supplier. Information about each half carcass - its weight, from which farm and when it was received - is entered into the database.
Half carcasses are sent for deboning - separation of meat from bones. About 40 tons of meat are deboned at the Krylatskoye plant per day. There is practically no waste left as a result of cutting: the bones are sent to processors to be made into bone meal, and the skins are sold to other manufacturers. In cheaper varieties of sausage, the skins are used as an emulsion. Part of the raw meat, the so-called valuable pieces, is left for the production of smoked meats and taken to another plant of the company - in Dmitrov. Everything else, high-quality meat, is used for sausages, including doctor’s sausages.
Meat grinder and blender
The doctor's sausage production shift starts at 15:00 and lasts until 23:00. The main volume of product shipment occurs at night, and in order for the sausage to go to warehouses and stores as fresh as possible, it begins to be made in the middle of the day. Before this, raw meat is stored in rooms with a temperature from 0 to plus 2 degrees.
At the beginning of the shift, the meat is brought in boxes to the processing shop. Large pieces are placed in a meat grinder called a “grinder”. The diameter of the grid is only five millimeters, so the raw material is homogeneous. The grinder can produce more than 3,800 kilograms of minced meat per hour and operates at very high speeds. If you suddenly open the lid, a special sensor will stop the mechanism so as not to injure the employee.
According to the recipe for the production of doctor's sausage, pork with a lean content of 70% is required.
According to the recipe for the production of Doctor's sausage, pork with a lean content of 70% is needed. Technologists explain that this has nothing to do with church fasting and soybean sausages. Lean and fat content are indicators of the ratio of the fat layer in the raw material and the meat itself. To achieve the desired level of leanness, two types of pork are mixed in production - lean and semi-fat.
From the meat grinder, the minced meat is transferred to a mixer, where raw materials with the required parameters are obtained. Salt is also added to the mixer, but without spices for now - they will be needed in the next step. The ratio of fat and meat is checked using a special device - a food scan. The saucer with raw meat is placed in the scanner and left there for 30 seconds. Using infrared spectroscopy, the scanner determines how much fat, protein and moisture the minced meat contains. If the fat content is lower than required, additional fatty raw materials are added; if the mixture turns out to be too fatty, lean ones are added.
Next, the resulting raw materials are loaded into a cutter - a huge blender. The knives rotate at a very high speed - about 3,600 revolutions per minute, and thanks to this, the minced meat turns into a fine emulsion fraction in 20 minutes. First, denser meat - beef - is ground, then pork, spices, milk, and egg melange are mixed into it. Due to the high speed of the knives, the raw materials heat up very quickly, and according to the technology for preparing good minced meat, the temperature of the raw materials should not be higher than plus 2 degrees. Therefore, flake ice is also added to the cutter bowl. It cools the mixture, and later during heat treatment this moisture will simply evaporate.
Smoked boiled sausage
The workshop workers unload the finished minced meat into special containers and send it to the next stage of production - extrusion. Here, another machine stuffs the shell with minced meat and secures it with metal clips. In the production of doctor's papers, a protein shell is used, not a polyamide shell. Technologists explain that if you eat it, nothing bad will happen.
The minced meat is loaded into the funnel of the machine, which produces approximately 35 loaves of sausage per minute
The minced meat is loaded into the funnel of the machine, which produces approximately 35 loaves of sausage per minute. Portions of minced meat are dosed automatically, but the machine still cannot do without a person. Employees periodically replace expired corrugated shells with new ones, check the integrity of the loaves and weigh them.
The resulting loaves are hung on metal frames and sent for heat treatment. The frames are loaded into the chambers, the operator selects one of the programs (in our case it is “Doctoral GOST in a protein shell”) and starts the heat treatment. The first stage is warming up, consisting of three stages. At each of them, the temperature inside the chamber increases by 5 degrees, and so the loaves are kept for 20–30 minutes. Next comes drying, during which the sausage is heated from the inside and its casing is dried.
The finished and cooled sausage is sent for packaging. At the plant, the raw material processing area is separated from the packaging department. In order for an employee to move from one zone to another, he needs to change a disposable gown, cap, mask, shoe covers, and gloves. Before entering, hands must be washed with hot water and then brought to the automatic dispenser with a disinfectant.
In the packing room, workers manually cut a metal bracket and place the loaves on the line. The machine places the sausage in a vacuum casing, sticks a colored label on it and a thermal tag with the production date. The loaves come off the conveyor in small batches of six, and several knives separate them from each other. The operator visually checks the tightness of the packaging, selectively carries out control weighing and places the sausage in boxes. The finished and packaged doctoral dissertation is sent to the distribution center. From there it will be transported to warehouses and shops at night.
Today you can buy sausage, boiled or smoked, in absolutely any supermarket. Store shelves are literally bursting with this beloved product. But should you include sausage in your daily diet? What is this popular product made of today?How to make sausage andwhat ingredients are usually included in its composition - read about this in the article.
To buy a stick of sausage, citizens of the USSR had to stand in long lines. However, this product itself was made exclusively from meat and, at least, was not harmful to health. Soviet sausage contained at least 99% pork and beef. Perhaps various kinds of sanitary rules were not particularly carefully observed in meat processing plants in those days. However, no harmful ingredients were added to it at that time to reduce the cost of sausage. Or they did it extremely rarely.
Today, unfortunately, the situation has changed radically. According to modern standards, sausage must contain at least 45% meat. But even this indicator is not always observed by plants.
How to make sausage: manufacturing technology
About what exactly domestic and foreign manufacturers can add to this in our time product, Let's talk a little lower. Now let's figure out how, in fact,sausage must be cookedaccording to all the rules.The technology for its manufacture is actually relatively simple.
So, Includes the technological process for manufacturing this popular productroughly the following steps:
Pork and beef arriving at the enterprise are preliminarily deboned, trimmed and sorted;
the meat is chopped, salted and set aside for maturation;
the mass prepared in this way is fed into the chopper for the second time;
the finished minced meat is injected into a casing with a binding.
The answer to the question abouthow to make boiled sausageor smoked, thus, it is actually simple. Minced meat stuffed into casings is simply dipped into boiling water or subjected to prolonged smoke treatment.
Varieties of sausages
Thus, we found out and enterprises. The price for this type of meat products in stores is however, may vary significantly. The cost of sausage today, as in Soviet times, depends on its variety. Currently, if you wish, you can purchase:
Premium quality sausage. According to regulations, such products should be made from ham, shoulder or back muscle.
First class products. Such sausage can contain up to 6% connective and fatty tissue.
Second grade sausage. Products in this group may contain up to 10% fat.
It is precisely from such products, and from no others, that real sausage should be made. However, in practice this is quite rare. In our time, perhaps, only premium sausage contains meat alone. And not all of it and not always.
Most Common Supplements
What is sausage actually made from?modern factories?In order to reduce the cost of the final product, in addition to the meat itself, producers Nowadays can be mixed into minced meat:
soy;
fiber;
ground skin, sinews and even bones.
Oh there using these ingredients, and we'll talk further.
Soybean for cheaper
Probably everyone has heard that this product of plant origin is almost without fail added to sausage today. Soy itself, in principle, cannot cause any particular harm to human health. The problem in this case is different. The fact is that some manufacturers add genetically modified soybeans to sausage.
Not yetthis product has been around for so long supplied to Russia from Europe. AND manufactured using itThe sausage, while not very tasty, was at least relatively safe. However, recently the situation has changed somewhat. Today, manufacturers add mainly Chinese soybeans. The fact is that, firstly, it costs less, and secondly, it turned out to be more accessible. Chinese soybeans can easily turn out to be genetically modified.
TO how to make sausagewith added soy? In this case, everything is extremely simple. First, the legume grains are ground into powder. Next, this white “dust” is mixed with water, tinted and added to the minced meat, replacing part of the meat with it.
Is fiber good or bad?
This ingredient today may even contain quite expensive sausage. Fiber is usually produced from carrots. However, no vitamins remain in it after processing. Moreover, this ingredient is not absorbed by the body at all. Some scientists believe that fiber is beneficial because it can cleanse the intestines and stimulate its functioning. In Germany, for example, this ingredient is added to almost all semi-finished products. However, on taste qualities sausages, this product, of course, does not have a very beneficial effect. In addition, the use of fiber allows manufacturers to write on the packaging something like: “Contains only natural ingredients” and “Soy-free.” As a result, the sausage is selling out with a bang. But, of course, it cannot be compared with real pork or beef.
In addition, fiber, unfortunately, is often made not only from carrots or, for example, oats, but also simply from... sawdust.
Skin and bones
The use of such ingredients also allows manufacturers to position their product as completely natural. When making sausage, bones and skin are simply ground into porridge, diluted with water and added to the minced meat. At the same time, it is written on the packaging that the sausage is made exclusively from pork or beef. Perhaps bones are not the most harmful product, but in some ways even useful. However, the information presented on the packaging in any case secretly misleads the consumer. Well, who, one might ask, will prove that bones and skin are not parts of a pig or a cow? That is, not beef or pork
How to make sausage at home
The permitted additives described above can be called the safest. They may degrade the taste of the sausage, but for the most part they are not harmful (with the possible exception of modified soy). However, other, much less harmless components can be added to sausage products today. These could be, for example,various kinds of dyes, thickeners, “meat flavor” additives. Therefore, many housewives, of course, would like to learn how to make sausage themselves. After all, only in this case can you be sure that the final product will not contain anything harmful. 
To prepare the simplest homemade sausage you will need:
cling film;
thin cord;
chopped meat.
The film is pre-cut into pieces. Then minced meat is placed on each of them and the whole thing is rolled into a “sausage”. The meat in the resulting stick should be packed as tightly as possible. Next, the cling film is tied with a string on both sides and everything is sent to cook in low boiling water for about 40 minutes.
You can, of course, make more complex types of sausages at home, including smoked ones. But this will require special equipment. For example, you will need to purchase a powerful electric meat grinder with a special attachment and a smokehouse.
How to make chocolate sausage
In addition to the usual one, you can make this kind of sausage at home. To prepare it you will need cookies(1 kg), butter (200 g), milk (250 g), sugar (200 g). You will also need to prepare some cocoa powder. The cookies for preparing this sausage should be placed in a bag and crushed with a rolling pin, and the butter should be melted in milk on gas. Sugar is mixed with cocoa and poured into a saucepan.
How to make chocolate sausagefurther? And then everything is simple. Pour milk, butter, sugar and cocoa into cookies and knead into a thick “porridge”. The resulting mass should be rolled into a “sausage” in cling film and placed in the freezer.
Instead of a conclusion
So we found outhow to make sausage. Horror sunhis what's happening in modern enterprises specializing in the production of such products, it is not that fat and bones are added to the minced meat instead of meat. Meat processing plants were also criticized for this in Soviet times. However, nowadays various kinds of chemicals - dyes and thickeners - can be added to sausage. This is, perhaps, the most terrible thing. Well, the question about meat remains open: is it really pork or beef? During Soviet times, sausage was at least completely natural. Today, unfortunately, this is far from the case.
So prepare this product at home and try to buy it in the store less often. And if you decide to buy sausage in a supermarket, carefully read the packaging and look at the price tag. A product that is too cheap will in any case harm your health and the health of your loved ones.
