313Chapter 17
Cooked Sausages
Eero Puolanne
Introduction
For producers and consumers, cooked
sausage is an ideal meat product: it can be
made by many different formulations and in
many forms (Fig. 17.1 ). All edible parts of
the carcass can be used in an effi cient way,
thus making it possible to utilize its entire
nutritional capacity. It is a ready - to - eat food
that can be eaten cold or heated, as a part of
a meal or on its own. It requires little prepara-
tion time, and no skills are needed to prepare
a meal from it. In addition, salt, nitrite, and
heating improve the safety and keepability of
meat far beyond that of fresh meat. Sausage
is presumably the fi rst multicomponent food
product that was prepared by an industrial
process.
Main Types of Products
Worldwide
In his booklet Principal Characteristics of
Sausages of the World Listed by Country of
Origin , Kinsman (1980) separates cooked
sausages into two categories: (1) cooked sau-
sages made from uncured meats, ground,
seasoned, stuffed into casings, and cooked
but not smoked, usually served cold (exam-
ples: Braunschweiger liver sausage, liver -
cheese), and (2) cooked, smoked sausages
made from cured meats, chopped or ground,
seasoned, stuffed into casings, smoked
slightly, and then fully cooked, which do not
require further cooking before consuming but
are often heated before serving (examples:
Berliner, bologna, Cotto salami, frankfurters,
smokie links, and wieners). Kinsman pres-
ents hundreds of different sausages, includ-
ing basic formulations and processing
principles, from around the world, listed by
country of origin. The second category,
cooked smoked sausage, is most commonly
regarded as cooked sausage. In his extensive
textbook, Feiner (2006) also presents exam-
ples of cooked sausages from around the
world with preparation details.
Some common types of sausages as exam-
ples will be described below. Sausages with
the same name or of the same type are pre-
pared in different countries from meat of dif-
ferent species, with or without added
phosphate, with or without extenders, with
varying seasoning, and so on. A detailed
catchall coverage of world sausages is there-
fore not possible, as for example, in Germany
only there are more than a thousand different
kinds of sausages and in the United Kingdom
more than four hundred! The Internet is an
endless source of information on these differ-
ent varieties.Frankfurters (Wieners)
Frankfurters are typically made of beef and
pork, but poultry and other meat sources are
also used; they are 30% – 40% lean meat and
15% – 30% fat. Sausage is usually fi nely
chopped, but the fi nely chopped mass may
also contain grain - size meat particles. As
frankfurters are eaten hot, the salt content is
usually relatively low, 1.6% – 1.8%. They are