The Sausage of the Future

FROM THE BOOK

The Anatomy of the Sausage

What constitutes a sausage differs widely from country to country. In the Czech Republic, a salami would never be called a sausage, and in Britain, brawn (also known as head cheese) is considered a meat preparation and surely not a sausage. In this book, we present a broad view of the definition of a sausage, which makes the possibilities greater and the results more surprising. The sausage is easily deconstructed into a few key components: mass, moisture, glue, flavor and skin.

Mass makes up the biggest part of the sausage. At around 65 per cent, it might also be referred to as bulk, body, corpus, lion’s share or meat. Mass can be made of one or a combination of ingredients such as meat, fat, offal, grains, legumes, seeds, fruit, vegetables, and so on. It is often a dense substance, containing little water. Its purpose is to be the body of the sausage and to hold its shape; it also needs to be sympathetic to the “glue,” or to become so during cooking.

Moisture is the second biggest part of the sausage. Originally the mass is made of a combination of lean offcuts and trimmings: pieces that are tough naturally. Therefore, traditionally around 30 per cent of the sausage is water and fat. The latter gives – besides moisture and tenderness – a great deal of flavor, while the added water content makes for better mixing. In general, added moisture is divided into 
two categories: water-based and fat-based. However, the basic rule is for the combined mass and moisture never to contain more than 15 per cent of water, unless it is for a gelatinous type 
of sausage such as head cheese.

Glue is what holds together all the ingredients of a sausage. It seldom constitutes a large percentage of the contents of the sausage, but it is crucial to its integrity. The glue, or gel, is also referred to as the binding of the sausage. How you bind the sausage depends on what ingredients you are using and how you treat them. Often ingredients already contain a natural binder that just needs to be activated, for example by being combined with other ingredients, heated up or broken down into little particles that form new bonds.

Flavoring is only a small percentage of the sausage, but one which has a huge impact on the final product. Besides the usual salt and pepper, the most common spices are mace, cloves, garlic, onion, nutmeg, cinnamon, sage and rosemary – a collection of highly aromatic ingredients. Salt is not there simply for its taste but also for its flavor-enhancing properties, as it lifts the aromatic tones of the other ingredients.

Preservation is what makes the ingredients of
a sausage stay fresh, by creating an environment in which bad microbes cannot multiply. These environments include a pH-level of under 4, 
a high salt level, lack of oxygen or water, exposure to smoke, heat, cold and good bacteria. It can even be the addition of certain ingredients such as beetroot, rosemary or cranberry. It is possible to combine one or more of these ingredients or processes to achieve a satisfactory end result.

The environment has a big impact on the avour of a sausage, but even more so on its texture.

Skin has an obvious primary task and should work closely together with the preservative(s). A sausage with the wrong skin can spoil by the effect of the preservative. For example, a dried sausage requires perishable skin in order to release the moisture. Or, when a sausage is to be poached in water, the skin needs to protect the mass from mixing with the water. Originally, when sausages were the result of efficient butchery, there was an abundance of casings available in the animal naturally. However, since around the middle of the 20th century, there have been many different types of casings invented that go beyond the intestines. These are created to serve new purposes,
 such as suitability for vegetarians, or reinforcement for a more mass-scale production.