Sausage shrinkage

[EdwinT]

Hi All,

I have been making sausages for a while now (a year or more) with the following outline recipe:

Leanish pork meat: 57.5%
Pork back fat: 23.2%
Homemade rusk (flour, water + baking soda) : 6.2%
Water: 11.1%
Spices: 2.0%

I found this formula to produce a good quality sausage that is not too dry and cooks well - not much skin splitting etc. However, production runs now mean that making the rusk at home is too time consuming. We have therefore contracted a local bakery to making the rusk for us. The rusk they produce is much drier than the version we make at home. This allows the rusk to have a shelflife of months since no mould grows on it.

The extra dryness means that it absorbs more water so we put less less rusk in and have increased the water as follows:

Leanish pork meat: 57.5%
Pork back fat: 23.2%
New extra-dry rusk (flour, water + baking soda) : 3.5%
Water: 13.8%
Spices: 2.0%

The resulting sausage again cooks well and has a good texture. However, I noticed that the sausages made to the new recipe may be shrinking more than their older cousins.

Questions: Am I correct in assuming that the extra water would cause them to shrink more when they are being cooked?

If I went back to the same amount of water as before (11%) and increased the fat content slightly to 26% would you think this would cure the problem?

[RodinBangkok]

I'd start by adjusting only one component in your formula at a time. You stated you modified both the water and rusk. When modifying formulas I modify one component only, and then insure that the cooking process for testing results is exactly the same. In a case like this I'd make one test batch modifying the water content, then another modifying the rusk content. Note the results, which is closer to what you want, then modify the other suspect ingredient on a second trial based on those results. By modifying more than one variable your going to open yourself up to a long trial and error process to get the formulation back to where you want it.
Secondly make sure you have an agreement with your local baker that he cannot change his formulation of rusk without you knowing, or you will open yourself up to more problems in the future...unexpected ones that can cost you a lot of problems.
Volume production brings its own set of problems, one of the most important is a stable source for your ingredients. You may also ask them to produce the rusk to your formulation. Secondly its very important your scaling your formulations by weight very carefully for every ingredient.
Adding dry formulations that cannot be equalized by saturation can be difficult. By that I mean that if the rusk has been exposed to a high humidity environment it can changes its hydration significantly. In bread making dry ingredients such as oats can be equalized by soaking them to a saturation level so that you are neither adding or subtracting to the hydration of the formula, this is not possible with rusk.

[captain wassname]

Thats good advice from Rod.Change 1 thing at time from your original.
I dont think that liqid would give you a shrinkage problem.I make a beer sausage with 25% liquid and it cooks OK

Jim

[EdwinT]

Thank you very much for the helpful advise. I will try to change one thing at a time as you advise and repost when I have further news.