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I've done several beginner sausages now, but have been venturing online to look at recipes for some more customized sausages.

One thing I'm experimenting with is lower calorie sausages. My understanding with these is that it's a good idea to use pyrophosphate for water retention. However, when I look at these recipes, they lack salt. Is this a mistake, or does the pyrophosphate take care of that job?

Thank you for your responses.

Welcome to the forum.

That's an interesting question. I had to have a look around to confirm my thinking. This is what the Ohio State University say:

Salt (both sodium chloride and potassium chloride) is very important to the action of phosphates. At the levels of addition that phosphates are limited to, the addition of salt has a major effect on ionic strength and more specifically, the chloride ionserves a valuable role in causing electrostatic repulsion of muscle proteins. Emulsion stability of phosphate-treated emulsions is dramatically reduced in the absence of salt. At lower salt levels (0.75 percent and lower), the maximum allowable level of 0.5 percent would further enhance emulsion stability, if they could be used legally. At conventional salt levels (2 – 2 ½ percent), we see no additional value in adding phosphates at more than about 0.3 percent of the finished product weight. In addition, the effect of phosphates on increasing yields of emulsified product is less than with whole muscle products.

Is it one of Captain Wassname's recipes from this Low Fat thread?
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6861
If so, the salt's in the spice mix. That may also be the case with the recipes you've been looking at.

There's also a thread on lower fat sausages here:
viewtopic.php?t=3296

I realise that there's a difference between low fat and low calorie, but they're a good starting point. If the meat's low calorie, it's just then a case of trying to replace some of the carbs in the filler. Maybe you could do this by using veg instead - Low fat/calorie Pork and leek maybe?

I hope this helps.

Phil

Wot 'e sez.

Pyrophosphates are just one of four groups of phosphates used in meat production. Most phosphates are alkaline and thus one reason for their use is to increase meat pH and aid with water retention as you say. But not all. For example, sodium acid pyrophosphate is, you guessed it, acidic.

But the most important function of phosphates, as Phil's quotation above stresses, is to work in conjunction with salt (sodium or potassium chloride) to extract myosin. Myosin is the water-soluble protein that binds a sausage back together and makes a so-called meat "emulsion" stable. Phosphates are so effective that just a small amount allows you to cut the amount of salt used in half, making them very useful for low-sodium mixes. Sodium pyrophosphate and tripolyphosphate are most useful in this regard.

Now, too much bind can be undesirable, giving your sausage a texture that seems tough and rubbery. That's why fat is a critical part of the mix, stretching out the protein matrix, creating succulent little pockets in it, and preventing it from becoming too dense. So if you're planning to cut calories in your sausages by reducing the amount of fat, phosphates may create more problems than they solve. You'd be better off using another ingredient, such as rusk, which also absorbs moisture and serves to create breaks in the bind.

Hope this helps!

Thanks TLP. Whilst rusk is great to reduce fat, the OP wants low-calorie; I'm not sure that rusk will be any better than meat from a calorie perspective.

Any ideas for sausage that use a lower calorie product as a filler?

Phil

One way to reduce fat calories is to use a vegetable/soy emulsion. I forget the calorie differance but I think it's something like 1/2 to 2/3's less.

I'd forgotten about that Dan. The recipe's here:

http://www.meatsandsausages.com/sausage ... l-emulsion

Phil

wheels wrote:Thanks TLP. Whilst rusk is great to reduce fat, the OP wants low-calorie; I'm not sure that rusk will be any better than meat from a calorie perspective.

Any ideas for sausage that use a lower calorie product as a filler?

Phil

My thoughts:
Basically the energy content of fat is close to 40,000 Joules per gram (9 'kitchen calories' in old money, which I'll refer to simply as calories) and carbohydrates close to 17,000 Joules per gram (4 calories) - replacing fat with rusk on a weight for weight basis will reduce the energy content as one ingredient has about half the energy of the other - but my guess is that during the cooking none of the carbohydrate energy will be lost, whereas some of the fat will render out...

So you'd need a low calorie 'padding'. Off the top of my head I can think of a few candidates, both natural and processed:
1) Onion - Raw onion contains 40 calories per 100gm - Sweat down in vast quantities and use as a binder in a similar fashion to some Spanish morcilla recipes.
2) Cooked pumpkin/squash - (as in the Spanish 'Chorizo de Calabaza') - I'd be tempted to dice the firmest squash that you can find, cut into small cubes, boil, spread out on a cloth over a rack and allow to cool so as to get rid of as much moisture as possible; or roast in the skin at a low/moderate temperature so as to cook out a lot of the moisture, without browning too much, before further preparation.
3) Konjac noodles (sold as 'water noodles' - an over-priced, virtually tasteless, almost zero calorie slimming aid) - if you bought the 'rice' noodles these have already been cut into fat-sized pieces. If you go down this route they should probably be treated as a totally inert ingredient having no affect on the bind of the farce. Note that these noodles do not absorb flavour, they just add bulk and appearance, and pass through the gut undigested (check them out the following day!). If you try this I'd be keen to know how they work out and see a picture of the cooked and uncooked result (but not a picture of the 'second day' sausage - yuk!) as I have no intention of trying it myself.

If I really wanted a low energy sausage I'd be tempted to buy Marianski's book on vegetarian sausages, find a low calorie one that I liked, then mix this with my preferred meat-sausage mix in the ratio 40:60 to 60:40 to taste.

What I would probably do in practice is to make a really good meat-sausage, packed full of flavour with a brilliant texture, and accept that I can only eat two of them for every three that I ate before.

Philip

^^^Great post, thanks. This subject interests me - even if the OP seems to have gone walk-about!

Phil

Any ideas for sausage that use a lower calorie product as a filler?

I'm working on a turkey recipe that uses cooked eggplant and cooked mushrooms. I'm hoping you'll make it and replace the sausages at the top of your blog. I also made Len Poli's recipe for gyoza sausage and it used cooked shitake mushrooms, green onion, water chestnuts and blanched Napa cabbage. I'll add to vagreys' post in a day or two. I think that there are a number of vegetables that could be incorporated; their physical form may have to be adjusted by drying or pureeing or some other manipulation but we are used to grinding up meat after all.

+1 for Swing Swang's post

Mmm... Water Chestnuts, now there's an idea.

(I could, of course, just kept quiet about the ones on my blog!)

Phil

I'm glad you post an honest record, it keeps me from making the same mistake (I would have never guessed those recipes would be poor). The reason I haven't posted the turkey sausage recipe is because I accidentally used turkey that was pre-salted. I'll end up with two versions by the time I'm done (I better like it). One other filler you could consider might be cauliflower roasted then puréed to a smooth paste. I could imagine this going into a Swedish potato sausage for instance.

Cauliflower 'rice' is all the craze over here at the moment, perhaps there's merits in that?

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/ ... lower-rice

"Cauliflower rice," that's a new one! Although, obviously it wouldn't give you the same mouthfeel as fat, it does seem like a low-calorie alternative to rusk, to stretch out and create pockets in the protein matrix, so that it doesn't feel too dense and chewy. I wonder if you'd need to pre-cook it, so that it doesn't end up as "crunchy bits" in the sausage. Looking at other low-fat recipes, I see a number that call for cups of cooked onions, which also works.