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Hi All,

I contract out a local butcher to make my sausages for us. Currently we are using rusk (as per the recipe on these pages, using flour and baking powder) as our filler. We currently use around 6% filler and all is working well but making the rusk is very time consuming and not really commercially viable when more than 10kgs of filler is needed.

I have therefore been thinking about using just plain flour as the filler rather than rusk but am worried about texture, crumbling sausage (I like the sausage to remain firmish when cut) and a back-taste of flour. In order to leesen the taste of flour I have thought that cooking the flour in the oven for 20 minutes before letting it cool to use as the filler.

Does anyone have any thoughts or experience of using wheat flour as a filler? How would it alter the characteristics of the sausage, etc?

Just a thought, could you not have the rusk shipped direct from the UK

Flours have their place but will give a very different result and can't be used at anywhere near the same level. I wouldn't even consider them as a rusk replacement.

Oven dried breadcrumbs would be my choice as a replacement. Use at 1:1 breadcrumb:water

Phil

Thanks for the suggestions. BriCan, I don't want to rely on anything imported. I am really looking for local solutions. I was using shop bought breadcrumbs at first but the yeast in them was fermenting the sausage within 2 days with the result that the sausages had an unreasonably short shelflife. By using rusk this shelflife has been extended to 4 days.

I am on the hunt for an alternative filler. Rice flour is not available here.

You cannot simply add raw starches or flours to a mixture as a filler, they must be cooked in some form first. Commercial products such as TVP's textured vegetable proteins, or perhaps some cereals such as oats may be worth a try.

Just wondering but are there any local factories baking foodstuffs that could sell you what would be their waste product? So long as it's still clean, perhaps they're just throwing it away. I mean bread crumbs or broken crackers that could be roasted and crushed or stuff like that.

EdwinT wrote: I was using shop bought breadcrumbs at first but the yeast in them was fermenting the sausage within 2 days with the result that the sausages had an unreasonably short shelflife. By using rusk this shelflife has been extended to 4 days.

You could try baking the crumbed bread on a low heat maybe to see whether that helps? If not, scalded rice is a traditional filler in some areas - it can make the sausage look a bit anemic though.

Phil

sorry have not been around for a while.
Is your filler to reduce meat content a a commercial consideration?
Do you add water?
Protien powder will absorb a lot more water than rusk or crumb

Jim

Sorry to have not responded earlier to all the suggestions/questions.

Our recipe is basically:

Meat and fat: 81%
Rusk: 6%
Water: 11%
Spice: 2%

We were originally using commercial breadcrumb as the filler (with less water) but we found that the yeast still active in the breadcrumb was fermenting the sausage and gave it a very sour flavour after just two days in the fridge, hence we moved to using the homemade rusk recipe available in these pages. This change turned (imho) our product from a good homemade product into a professional quality product overnight.

I was thinking of using cooked flour as the filler (just open a bag of flour, pour it onto a bakjing sheet and cook it in a hot oven for 20 minutes then leave to cool. My reasoning being that surely rusk is really only cooked flour at the end of the day(?) and once you add water to it before mixing it into the sausage mix, all you have is a mix of cooked flour and water, so why bother making the rusk and then whizzing it up in the food processor (we've already worn out one of these in the process)?

Does anyone know if the chemical structure of the flour is altered when making the rusk dough or is it just still cooked flour at the end of the day?

You could try soy protien it absorbs a lot of water (about 5 times its own weight)
Give you
meat 80%
soy 3%
Water 15%
spice 2%.
I have used soy and pea protein (absorbs nearly 10 times its own weight in water) in beer sausage when I wanted maximum liquid.
I would imagine that other protein powder would work to a greater or lesser extent.
These powders are used by body builders so should be readily available but dont get the flavoured ones.
When I made these high liquid sausages they did benifit from a small amount of rusk so maybe you could go with protien plus a very small amount of rusk. (less than0.5%)
The alternative is to go to an all meat sausage which will probably need just a little water.

Thanks a lot for the suggestion regarding soy/pea protein Captain Wassname. I will give it a try.

There are a lot of people on here who know a lot more about this type of thing than I do, but maybe the sodium bicarbonate and the tartaric acid alter the structure of the flour quite a lot? Given that sodium bicarbonate will destroy veggies and meat if added to hot water while cooking. Point being roasted flour may end up really gluey.

Pennies worth

Try rolled oats. Oats have to be cooked in order to keep because they are so high in various healthy fats and otherwise they go rancid. So this is done at source by the producer, usually by steaming. e.g. the starches are already cooked.

My recent experience of using them has been so good that I have abandoned home made wholemeal bread crumbs.

I find the oats at 10% meat weight, with an equal amount of water, make a nicely moist sausage with a great mouth feel. They also impart a delightful, to me, background flavour.

I use them as a filler to get the texture/mouth feel, moisture and flavour just where I want it.