Oct 2018 – Sausages and Burgers

Sausages and Burgers are a prime example of where the functional apple fibre from the MilaCel project can be utilized as part of a balanced diet. Both meat options are a regular on school menus, as they are a cheap and reliable method to add protein to a child’s diet with little to no fuss. Kids love sausages. They’re good with a side of mash and vegetables and they’re good in a bun with plenty of sauce. Take the skins off and you have meatballs ready to cook for a pasta sauce. Ground meat is so versatile for many different cooking applications, whether that is pork or beef. However, that can come at a high price when it comes to fats and oils.

Fats are usually added to ground meat products to improve upon the flavour and the mouthfeel when eaten. No one wants to eat a bland, dry sausage. People want a juicy, meaty sausage that is packed with flavour. This can have an adverse effect on peoples health as a processed meat. The team have worked to produce pork sausages which have a 30% fat reduction in them. The level of meat has not been effected because leaner meat has been used instead. The flavouring levels were not changed and the only other difference was the addition of the functional apple  fibre paste.

The benefits of adding the fibre to a fat-reduced meat include:


 – minimizing cook loss from meat drippings

 – no loss of flavour

 – reduction in shrinkage while cooking

 – the ability to incorporate more water into the mix

 – less moisture loss (due to the bound water) meaning a juicy mouthfeel

Another added bonus, which was mentioned in the list above, is the reduction of cook loss from the fats and oils leaching out of the meat. After the meat has been cooked, whether it was baked or fried, there is a coating of grease that is left in the pan. At home this may not seem like an issue, but on a large-scale basis with hundreds of mouths to feed, it can create a large problem to tackle. How do you remove and dispose of all that grease. With the fat-reduced sausages, there is less fat to lose through cooking, and the water-bound fibre holds on to liquid and creates a nice juicy sausage, without all the mess to clean up afterwards.