Recently, I have practically stopped buying semi-finished products in the store in the form of sausages, frankfurters, and smoked meats. The reason for this is the dubious composition of store-bought meat products and the use of various flavor enhancers and preservatives in their preparation.
Experimenting, I have already prepared a lot of sausages at home. Today's turn is doctor's sausage. I admit, I had big doubts, but still I decided to try. The result exceeded all expectations.
Considering the simplicity of the cooking process and the minimal set of spices, it turned out just great. The taste and consistency are very similar to store-bought sausage, the only difference is the color, but I didn’t want to add coloring. Everyone at home rated my product very highly, so be sure to try making doctor’s sausage at home.
Preparation of minced meat
Beef and pork meat must be minced twice. The first time with a large mesh, the second with a fine one. Add spices (cardamom, sugar, salt) to the minced meat. Mix everything thoroughly.
Next, add the egg and milk. Beat the minced meat with a blender. The result will be a viscous mass. The main thing is not to worry about the color of the sausage. After all, you will get a natural color (without dyes). Place the prepared mass in the refrigerator and keep it there for about an hour. If you want your homemade doctor’s sausage to have a pink color, you can add vodka or high-quality cognac (2 tablespoons) to the minced meat.
Aromatic mixtures for cervelat
The peculiarity of cervelat is the fine structure of minced, but not ground meat and high fat content. The classic recipe calls for at least 50% fat pork. There are many methods of preparation: servelat can be smoked, boiled-smoked and raw smoked.
Proportions of seasonings per 1 kg of minced meat.
- Salt – 20 g.
- Glucose – 3 g.
- Allspice ground – 4 g.
- Ground black pepper – 2 g.
Optionally, ground coriander is added in the amount of 5 g per 1 kg of minced meat.
Homemade doctor's sausage, recipe No. 2
Since sausage can be prepared not only according to GOST, we suggest that you familiarize yourself with the recipe, which requires the use of minced pork. It may be similar to “Amateur” or “Doctoral”, and this quality is influenced by the grinding of the bacon. For example, to make “Lyubitelskaya” sausage, lard cut into pieces is added to the minced meat rather than twisted.
The composition of doctor's sausage according to recipe No. 2 will be as follows:
- kilogram of pork;
- 300 grams of lard;
- onions (to taste);
- 2 cloves of garlic;
- one raw egg;
- a tablespoon of gelatin;
- 0.5 teaspoon black pepper;
- 1 tablespoon each of nutmeg, semolina, salt (without top) and sunflower oil.
The list of ingredients has been clarified, now you can proceed directly to the cooking process. So, first we prepare the minced meat. We thoroughly wash the meat, cut off all the films, veins and cut into pieces. Grind the pork with a blender along with garlic and onions to obtain a creamy mass. Another option for grinding meat is to use a meat grinder. And if you want to make ham doctor’s sausage, you can add larger pieces of pork (chicken) to the minced meat.
Then add the egg and mix well. Pour in the spices: black pepper, semolina, nutmeg, salt, gelatin and sunflower oil. And mix everything again to evenly distribute the added ingredients.
If there is no special form for ham, then we use a baking sleeve. Or there is another original way - use a juice or milk box as a form. After all, homemade sausage can be cooked without special equipment.
We put the minced meat into a bag (sleeve), roll it up and tie it in several places with a rope (twin) so that the sausage becomes tight.
You need to cook it for 2 hours after boiling over low heat. The water should boil slightly. And the amount of water needed is such that the bag of minced meat is completely covered.
Let's consider another option for making homemade sausage using this recipe. It can be prepared in a slow cooker. To do this, place the bag of minced meat in the slow cooker in the evening. Turn on the “Stew” or “Soup” mode. We set the time to 1 hour. And until the morning the pan will work in heating mode. The most important thing is that before cooking the minced meat in the sleeve needs to be poured with boiling water. And in the morning, we take the finished sausage out of the multicooker and cool it. Once it has cooled to room temperature, it should be placed in the refrigerator for five hours (or better yet, overnight). After this, you can treat your household to a delicious doctor’s sausage.
If you want the boiled doctor’s sausage to be a pleasant pink color, then you can add a natural dye to it, which is the juice of raw beets, and alcohol (cognac, alcohol, vodka), or rather a few spoons of it, will fix this effect.
Seasonings for boiled sausages
The most popular seasonings for cooked sausages are coriander, nutmeg, white and black pepper and garlic.
The classic Doktorskaya recipe includes nutmeg.
Seasonings for Doctor's
Boiled “Doctorskaya” belongs to the so-called structureless sausages. Their texture is delicate and uniform.
Proportions for 1 kg of minced meat.
- Salt – 20 g.
- Sugar (glucose or dextrose) – 20 g.
- Ground nutmeg – 5 g.
- Crushed cardamom grains – 5 g.
Seasonings for "Molochnaya"
“Milk” sausage is prepared from a mixture of different types of meat, and its distinctive feature is its creamy flavor, which is emphasized by the desired mixture of seasonings.
Proportions for 1 kg of minced meat.
- Salt – 20 g.
- Sugar – 10 g.
- Ground white pepper – 5 g.
- Ground nutmeg – 5 g.
- Dried garlic – 5 g.
- Cumin – 1 g.
Optionally, you can add 10g of sage if you like bright spicy notes.
Seasonings for Chainaya sausage
Another type of tender boiled sausage, which is made from a mixture of pork and beef with the addition of lard.
Proportions of seasonings per 1 kg of minced meat.
- Salt – 20 g (in case of using nitrite salt, add in the following proportions: 10 g table salt and 10 g nitrite salt).
- Sugar – 10 g.
- Ground black pepper – 5 g.
- Ground coriander – 5 g.
- Granulated garlic – 7 g.
Nitrite salt is an important component of not only boiled, but also other types of sausages; its addition eliminates the risk of developing botulism.
Other cooking options
According to recipe No. 2, doctor's sausage can be prepared by baking in the oven. The only thing is that the sleeve with minced meat needs to be additionally wrapped with special foil. First, keep the sausage for 15 minutes in the oven at 180 degrees, then reduce it to 150 degrees and bake in foil for 30 minutes, after which we remove the foil and bake for another 10 minutes. But before the last 10 minutes you should pour some water into the mold.
We would like to note that no matter how you prepare boiled sausage at home, it will be much tastier than store-bought, and most importantly, much healthier for you and your entire family. Therefore, you should not spare any time or effort to preserve the health of your loved ones. After all, you can’t buy it for any money.
Emulsion
After the minced meat has been brought from the refrigerator, it is loaded into a kind of large blender - a cutter. Eggs, spices, milk and... ice are also placed there! The rotation speed of the cutter is about 3600 rpm. In this case, the machine parts, of course, heat up, but to make proper sausage, the minced meat must remain cold.
The minced meat comes out of the cutter in the form of an emulsion - a kind of dough for sausage. It has a rather liquid consistency, homogeneous and does not look too appetizing.
Photo: finished sausage dough
Composition of sausages
What is sausage made from? There are several types of sausages, the percentage of components of which are known to society:
- sausages consist of 35% emulsion, 30% soy, 15% meat, 10% poultry, 5% starch or flour and 5% additives;
- Shpikaki are produced in the same way as sausages. The only difference is that instead of poultry meat, fermented pork skin and lard are added;
- cooked sausage has 30% poultry, 25% emulsion and soy each, 10% regular meat, 8% flour or starch and 2% additives.
Now we need to figure out what the above components are?
The emulsion is leather, offal and meat waste. They are crushed and boiled well. The result is a light gray porridge.
Meat is taken from cattle, as well as pork. Most of all English briquetted pork. The flour is either corn or potato flour.
Additives are used in the form of coloring, sugar, meat, pepper, thickener, preservatives and salt.
In most cases, the meat product is replaced with soy. Soy is a white powder that is mixed with water and gradually becomes a porridge. It, in turn, can be salted, peppered, colored and added to sausage instead of meat.
An important property of soybeans is the absorption of liquid, swelling and increasing the yield of products. Soy protein is better if it can absorb a huge amount of liquid. If you analyze protein according to the degree of liquid absorption, then it should be divided into 3 categories:
- soy concentrate;
- soy isolate;
- soy flour.
Most sausage factories use concentrate. Its cost is more expensive than all others, but the absorption of liquid is much greater.
Popular types of sausages
Boiled sausage must be prepared from layered minced meat. Cooking is carried out at a temperature of 80 degrees. They often contain an abundance of soy. This product cannot be stored for long periods of time as it contains a lot of liquid. The composition of this sausage is not entirely clear: 17% protein and 40% fat. The energy value of 100 grams of the product is 410 kcal.
Raw smoked and hard smoked products are not subject to heat treatment. Cold smoking is done at a temperature of 25 degrees.
Cold smokehouse device
The meat product is fermented and rendered harmless. In order for this type of sausage to reach readiness, it needs to stand in certain conditions for at least a month.
The production of dry-cured sausages is carried out only from the highest quality meat using long-term drying, without using smoking. The minced meat contains cognac, spices and honey.
If only real meat is used to make such products, then the process occurs without the addition of various flavors and flavor enhancers. If the product was produced from old meat, then chemical additives and soy isolate are added to it. This product will be cheap.
Many people think that it is easy to recognize the freshness of a product by its color. If the sausage or meat product has a bright pink color, it means it is fresh.
In fact, this is far from true. Now there are many dyes, additives and nitrites that are harmful, but this does not frighten manufacturers at the plant, as it attracts buyers very well. The safest and freshest type of sausage is gray. This shade is obtained after the meat has been processed.
Can you be allergic to sausages and sausages?
Semi-finished meat products cause food poisoning if they are made from low-quality raw materials or were stored incorrectly. Allergy symptoms: nausea, vomiting, skin rash.
The sausage manufacturer can add anything to it, as long as it does not lead to human poisoning. As a result, people buy soy powder products loaded with starch, carrot fiber and masking additives. Natural sausages cannot be cheap due to the quality of the raw materials and the processing process.
Related publications
- Shelf life of sausages: where and how to store them so they don’t spoil
- How and how long to store sausages in the refrigerator, vacuum packaging, freezer
Subtleties of production
Despite the development of technology, the methods for making boiled sausage have undergone virtually no changes since the beginning of industrial production of this product. This is still a long and labor-intensive process that includes many important details.
It all starts with the deboning shop of the meat processing plant, where animal carcasses are cut in accordance with hygienic requirements. The separation of pulp from bones, as decades ago, is carried out manually or semi-automatically. Then the veins and animal fat are removed from the meat, the presence of which does not have the best effect on the quality of sausages. Depending on the mass of residual fat, sausage is divided into three grades: highest, first and second.
The next step is grinding the meat. First, it is cut into cubes, which go into a meat grinder. After the first grinding, coarse-grained minced meat is obtained, which industry experts call meal. It is sent to a finely ground meat grinder, from which the more familiar fine minced meat comes out.
Recently, more and more producers immediately grind meat into fine mince, saving a lot of time and energy resources. Simplification of the technology for producing meat mass has become possible due to the fact that the knives of modern industrial meat grinders are made of more durable metal.
Small minced meat is placed in special containers and salted with sodium nitrite. Then it goes into the freezer, where it is stored for at least 48 hours. It is believed that the higher the degree of salting of the minced meat, the tastier the sausage is. The final stage of creating a homogeneous meat mixture occurs in cutters - special machines for grinding minced meat. Then the meat mass is packed into casings under excess pressure, after which the sausage goes through the stage of binding, cooking, cooling and is sent to the warehouse.
Production in Europe and Russia
If we compare how sausages are made at a factory in the European Union and in Russia, the advantages are clearly on the side of the former. According to European standards, sausage products indicate not only their full composition, but also the quantity of absolutely all components.
According to the European standard, cattle meat is considered a product containing no more than 25% connective tissue and 25% fat. Pork is allowed up to 30% fat. Poultry and rabbit meat should contain no more than 15% fat and 10% connective tissue. In Russia there is no such requirement, so suppliers from Europe do not bother to prescribe the composition of sausages. This gives some idea of how sausage is made in Russia.
Russian GOST provides some guarantees of purchasing a quality product. But it is unlikely that it will be possible to find out the whole truth about sausage production using technical specifications.
What else is included?
Products such as hams, carbonates, and loins also do not contain 100% meat, although their price is equal to premium grade beef. To earn more money, water is added to the sausage, this allows you to save on meat.
A certain amount of meat product is twisted together with water in a vacuum processor, over time all the water is absorbed into the meat and becomes heavy. Visually the meat looks juicy. There is another option - injecting liquid with spices with a syringe. As a result, the ham becomes quite heavy. To prevent water from leaking out later, either gelatin or carrageenan is added to it.
As for low-cost sausages, it contains not only low-grade meat, but also various additions of missing trimmings. Often such trimmings already have various worms, such as echinococci and finns.
For long-term storage, especially for boiled sausages, various antibiotics are added to their composition. Some shops provide such a service as cutting sausages. As a result, this causes significant harm, since the slicing machine must be perfectly clean, and it is used to work not only the sausage that was asked to be cut, but also various types of products before that.
Based on all of the above, all the contents of those products, as well as microbes, ended up in the freshly chopped food. In addition, before cutting, the sausage must be cleared of film, but many people forget about this. As a result, all the dirt present on it will be on the sliced sausage.
Cuttings that are approaching the end of their shelf life are vacuum packed.
