What’s Really In Sausages? | Talking Point | Full Episode

There's nothing quite like the smell of sausages cooking. So viewer Simon quite enjoys sausages just like me, but he's concerned about them. He wants to know what's exactly in our sausages, and if eating too much of it can cause, you know, things like cancer and other ailments. So in this episode of Talking Point, I'll do the investigating for you. Check out these sausages, maybe eat a bunch of them too. Those are so good. I'm tired from chewing. The beef ones? You haven't had those? No, I haven't had a lot. Sarah Ali is a competitive food eater. So in the same amount of time, she cleaned out six large sausages to my two and a half. I'm done. Those were good sausages, man. I think you did a really good job. But you're the real winner. I mean, we don't. Stuffing ourselves with sausages isn't the main reason why Sarah and I are meeting today. An avid sausage lover, she's going to show me how sausage varieties have grown over the years. You definitely have to try this one over here, it's the organic beef, bacon, onion and tomato sausage. Okay. I just recently found out about these and they taste like a like bolognese kind of flavour. Wow, like pasta with a casing, okay. That's exactly right. And I'm not sure if they have them here but they have like the German Weisswurst. I really want to try some of the new flavours that they have. Let's go with the chicken madras curry sausage and let's have the Italian sausage here. Thank you. Okay. Those are pretty good. Yeah. Do you think there has been an increase in demand for sausages in Singapore? Definitely. When I do go supermarket shopping, there's like a whole range of like new flavours. You know, you get to have so much options. And the only reason why is probably because there are more people eating sausages. Why do you think that's the case? Sausages are just convenient and very easy to cook kind of snacks. So you're saying the supply has increased also because the demand has increased? Exactly, yes. It's not just in supermarkets. So you see like a rise in varieties of sausages. They actually do have now like independent kind of like butcheries opening up. Yeah, you've seen like even those small-scale ones, artisanal sausages. And they make their own sausages too, right? Exactly, yeah. Okay. With so many different types of sausages out there, I wonder if people know what's in them. Do you know what is inside your sausage? I don't know. Which part of the cow is used to make the sausage? How was the gym? Uh, bad. Okay. What's your favourite sausage? Chicken. Chicken. Which part of the chicken is in the sausage? Thank you very much. I don't know. I also don't know. Never mind. Thank you. Okay. Because I know it's like a blend of many parts. Do you think the whole thing? Maybe the head also. The stickers are everywhere. Most people don't know exactly which part of the animal makes it into the sausage. I'm taking these guesses to Sean Francis, a butcher of 20 years. Hey Sean, how are you? Come out back. Okay, great. Sean, so I went out, asked random people about what they think are in our sausages. For pork, they think everything from the ears to the hoofs, the tail. We had the chicken, you know, right down to the head. Chicken feet, bit of tail in there as well, and for beef, they have rubbed around, even some of the legs as well. What's going on with this guy? The head, I didn't... How accurate are these people in terms of what they think are in our sausages? They're definitely a lot more accurate with the cow here. Okay. With the chicken and the pig, there's a... Definitely a bit of creativity there. So, no tail. No tail. No tail, no feet, no ears. No, no, no. No inside, probably no organs. Some people think it's all mashed up, right? No, I mean, in some products there definitely is, but the only insides of a pig that's in our sausages are the pig casing. That's a pig's intestine. All natural sausages are made out of intestines. You've got a variety of meats here. Yeah, sure. I've actually prepared a few cuts here for you to look at. So we'll start with the beef. This cut here is the chuck on the top of your chart there. It's a great cut for sausages because of the fat to lean ratio. This one here, just from looking at it, I can tell that this is around about 70-30, which is kind of the leanness that we want. The weight stuff, the fat. Yeah, that's all the fat. All right, the pork. So, snout, ear. You wouldn't get too much meat out of these cuts for sausages. Things like a jowl and a cheek would be way too fatty. What we have here is our shoulder and back fat. The reason we use back fat is because fat from this part of the pig here has got a lower melting point. So it'll actually keep it juicy. That can be the difference between using back fat versus the fat from the ham or the leg here. You can feel that the back fat is hard. The texture will stay together and it will actually hold inside the sausage. Right. Yeah, whereas the fat from the leg is a bit more softer and a bit thicker. And it will melt a lot faster when you're cooking a sausage and it all comes out and you end up with a dry sausage. Let's go to our chicken. There's definitely a lot of misconceptions there about what goes into chicken sausages. Especially here, I can see a few feet. Not in the sausage, yeah. Most people at home don't know the way around a chicken. Let me just get that out of the way. This here is our thigh. And what we would do is we would bone this out completely and we would use the whole piece with the skin on. That adds to the fat. This here would be around about enough for a one and a half sausage. So in general a good sausage would have 70% lean meat, 30% fat? Yep, that's what I believe. That would be the same whether it's chicken, pork, beef, sausage? Yeah, pretty much. I mean we make our lamb ones a little bit leaner than that. Sean has an order to fill for some pork sausages, so I'm helping him with it. We're going to put all this meat, we're going to push it down the hole and it will get minced. All Sean adds to the pork is seasoning such as salt, white pepper and rice flour. These sausages have about 90% of pork shoulder and back fat and 10% of seasoning and water. Water binds the ingredients together. It also helps the meat suspend the fat so you don't end up with a dry and crumbly sausage. But this 90 to 10 ratio is not the case for all sausages. Some of those types of sausage that you would get pre-cooked in maybe a supermarket style, some of those could have some breadcrumbs, maybe a bit more flour. And then when you put those products in there, you can also add more water because the flour and the breadcrumbs require more water. That's where you get the weight and that's how you get more money. Right, so it's just as heavy a sausage, but it's got less meat. Yeah. Okay. Chuck it in. All right. Now we get to use our hog casing. I'm just going to go ahead and put it on the nozzle. So what we're going to do is just go like that. Wow, that was quick. Yeah. It's time for another Talking Point test. And my sausage of choice? Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. They range between 40 cents and four Singapore dollars for a hundred grams. I want to know just how much meat there really is in these sausages. Most of us are familiar with these more processed chicken sausages that we see in the frozen and chilled section of the supermarket. A hundred grams of this fan favourite is about 90 cents, whilst a hundred grams of this more upmarket smoked version comes in at 2.70 cents. That's triple the price. But price notwithstanding, if you look at the ingredient labels, they both contain sodium nitrite, which on the more premium brand is listed as E250. Sodium nitrite is one of the main reasons why sausages get a bad reputation. But what exactly is it? So this is the one that they use usually for making sausages and cured meat. It's a preservative but also gives you the colour and also the flavour. Sodium nitrite prevents the growth of food poisoning bacteria and the most well known is the Clostridium botulinum which causes botulism. That's like food poisoning, that gives us a really bad tummy ache. Correct and sodium nitrite is very effective against it. The issue is not so much about Sodium Nitrite. It's actually about the reaction that Sodium Nitrite has with the meat. They can form N-nitroso compounds. The most common is the N-nitrosamines. So N-nitrosamines are a class of compounds that has been classified as carcinogens by the WHO. And carcinogens are no good for us because they can lead to... Yep, cancer. And then the most common cancer associated with processed meat would be the colorectal cancer. So there will be three ways in which N-nitrosamines can form. When you have sodium nitrite added to the meat, So the meat will naturally contain some amino acids and so the nitrite can react with the amino acids to form the cancer-causing N-nitrosamines, but that reaction is much much lesser because the environment in just meat alone is not favorable for the formation. But when we are cooking it at high heat then the nitrite can also further react with the Amino acids that are present inside the meat. Then you get a lot more of the N-nitrosamines being formed. And then the third condition, the nitrites. When it reaches the stomach, because the stomach is more acidic, the nitrites can actually be more reactive and will start to react with the amino acids that are present. And then it can form even more N-nitrosamines. N-nitrosamines, which are cancer-causing? Correct. So from the curing stage to the cooking stage and then the eating stage is actually a whole compounding effect of nitrosamine. Why is sodium nitrite still being used so much? There are many other ways in which we can preserve food nowadays. So we can keep the meat chilled or keep it frozen. So the benefits of using nitrites as preservatives is a little less prominent nowadays compared to in our ancestors' time. But if you want to achieve the pink color and the flavor of cured meat that there really is no other alternatives. There are other alternatives that tries to give it the color, but it will still not be able to give you the flavor of a cured meat. Nitrite added to cured meat is actually very highly regulated. So in Singapore, the regulation is 125 milligram or 0.125 gram per kg of meat. So it's actually very low level. As much as it is a form of preservation, sodium nitrite is also added to give sausages the distinctive taste we are all so familiar with. The amount of nitrites in our processed meat is tightly regulated here. But according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, if you eat 50 grams of processed meat daily, so that's about one and a half of these sausages, and can contain up to 6.25 milligrams of sodium nitrite in Singapore. Your risk of colorectal cancer increases by 18%, so that actually means you are 1.18 times more likely to get colorectal cancer if you eat this amount of processed meat per day, compared to those who eat none. There might be a solution. Singapore's first company that mass produces sausages without nitrites, and I've been given access to how it's made. So, first we've got to go through the foot bath. We'll bring in any things that we don't want to bring in. So this is pure fresh pork leg. No funny parts, no off-cuts, skin and all that. Sausages here are made with pork leg instead of the shoulder, the cut of choice when I was at the butcher's earlier. The reason why we use pork leg is because it has got a very good water binding capacity, so it ends up in a much juicier product. Particularly for smoked and cooked sausages, they go through one round of cooking, so you want it to remain juicy after the consumer reheats it. I'll give it a try. Just use your knee and activate, just guide them out. Yeah, yeah. Oops! Okay, stop. Alright. Okay, what happened here? It snapped. It snapped. Oh, it snapped. Not my fault, right? Yeah, not your fault. It happens. It happens. Sausages here are cooked and smoked before being packaged. Oh! Here's one batch of fresh sausages. Mmm, I can smell that. So these are cooked, right? That's right. They are cooked. So after cooking and smoking, they will be able to be kept in the chiller for about a month. Only one month? Alright, so now this is the final product after it's been smoked. So actually after we pack them in the vacuum bags, we will send them off for high pressure processing at the facility nearby. So high pressure processing is a form of pasteurization. So we are trying to inactivate or kill off any microbes that are inside so that we can extend the shelf life for even longer. And then it comes back with two months shelf life. It's a form of pasteurization that does not involve heat or chemical additives. So the products go through about 6,000 bar of pressure. To give you an idea, your car tires, they are inflated to about three bar. Okay. So that's like 2,000 tires worth of pressure. So why then aren't more companies just not using sodium nitrite and using these machines? Well, sodium nitrite is a lot cheaper, a lot more convenient. We don't have to send it off somewhere, get it back again. So that is an extra step, extra logistics involved. So most companies would use this as a preservative? That's right. We avoid them because we want to produce a clean label product. But then, nitrite has got a certain flavour and so we had to try to mimic the familiar flavour by using fresh spices. It took us a while to get the balance correct because when people talk about sausages, that familiar flavour is very important. To give their sausages the familiar cured flavour, a blend of over five different types of herbs and spices is used. Okay, let's do the taste test. All right, looks pretty good. Juicy, moist, you know, it's got the familiar taste of a sausage. I like the smoked bit. So instead of using sodium nitrite to preserve its sausages, Jill's Sausages uses a high pressure process to extend its shelf life. 100 grams of these sausages cost about $3.30, that's almost 8 times more expensive than other cheaper versions at the supermarket. But this price point is comparable to other premium sausages that have sodium nitrite. Earlier I'd send chicken sausages for testing. I want to know how much of my sausage is really meat. Four weeks later, my lab results are in. The 10 types of chicken sausages I sent for testing cost between 40 cents and four Singapore dollars for 100 grams. Which option would contain a higher ratio of meat? These are 10 sausages that you brought in. I have arranged from the lowest meat content to the highest meat content. Well, the first one we have 34% and then follows by 51%. 51. So it take a leaps from 30 to 50 already. Okay. And then 60, 70. In the highest ones, we have 85%. Wow, 34 to 85, that's almost a 50% difference. Yes. If it's about 30% meat, what is the other 70% made up of? The sausage is normally made up of two things. The actual meat, the meat content, and the rest will be fillers. Things like starch, and then followed by soy proteins, and then food additives, flavouring, colourings, and also water. The sausage samples were broken up for testing. The sausage with the lowest meat content looks less like actual meat compared to the sausage with the highest meat content. That's due to the presence of fillers. Fillers are typically starches from rice, bread or rusk. They absorb water to bulk up the sausage and add to its weight. Normally those manufacturers they never put how much chicken content they put in. Okay, so even though it says pork, chicken right at the top, we don't know actually what percentage? Yes, we don't know. When it comes to price, is it then fair to say that the more expensive the sausage, the more meat it would have? Yes, so out of these 10, these three are the most expensive and it ranges from 75% to 85% of meat content. My test proves that the more expensive the sausage, the more the meat content. Which leaves me one last thing to investigate. Is sodium nitrite all that I need to think about when it comes to eating sausages? I've asked Dr Grace Tan to join me. Oh hey doc, you're just in time. I've prepared breakfast, lunch, brunch. Oh, these look delicious. So when it comes to comparing the sausages, are the fresh ones better than the processed ones? I would say that the fresh ones are better because the processed sausages tend to have more additives, preservatives and salt and sodium nitrite, whereas the fresh ones, there's more meat and less preservatives in it. But there is still salt, fat in it, which also leads to other kinds of health problems. So there's an average of between 500 milligrams to 1,500 milligrams of salt in each processed and slightly fresher sausage and the recommendation actually for every person is about 1,500 milligrams to 2.5 grams of salt a day. So really if you just take two sausages a day that's really your salt intake. You hit your limit right? Yeah. When you have a large amount of salt in your body, you tend to retain water and that results in increased blood pressure and you then get damages to your arteries and your blood vessels which then lead to more complications. It sounds like it. So I usually tell my patients that If you really wanted to eat a sausage for example, you know it's not that you can't eat it or you shouldn't eat it, but I would say go to a butcher that you trust, that makes the sausage in a way that doesn't involve too much preservatives or additives. Eat good meat in that sense. So when it comes to cooking sausages then, is one way better than another? There are some health groups that advise poking holes in a sausage. That allows some of the fat to drain out. Alright, so you can see some of that oozing out. But at the same time, that's what makes a sausage right? It's that's the good tasty juicy bit. Oh look at that fat. Yeah, so you're potentially reducing the fat in that sausage. Yeah, which maybe doesn't make it taste as good, but... Okay. Making it a little bit better. Just a little bit. So I've kept these sausages in the fridge for about two months now, and I think they're still good to eat. So there are options for consumers now when it comes to the more processed sausages they can keep. So personally, I love all kinds of sausages, from the kind we get at the butchers to the more processed versions at supermarkets. But you know what, having worked on this episode of Talking Point, I think I'm going to limit my sausage intake to just once a month. After all, having too much salt in my diet is never a good thing.