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Starch, bacteria and bones: what else experts have found in sausage
Experts tested the product from several brands and found out what you can eat and what you don’t need.
One of the most popular cooked sausages since Soviet times is “Lyubitelskaya”. It is easy to distinguish it by its characteristic speckles of bacon on the cut. But in Soviet times, everything was clear: when buying sausage, they knew what to expect from it. And now, any purchase can come as a surprise, and not always pleasant. What brands of sausage you can buy and what not worth it, experts from Roskontrol found out.
Do you have meat?
The laboratory examined samples of “Lyubitelskaya” of six brands: Velkom, Klinsky, Borodin’s Meat House, Myasnitsky Ryad, Rublevsky, Chernyshihinskiye Sausages.
“All samples are class A meat products. That is, they must contain at least 60 percent of meat,” the Roskontrol experts explain.
But meat is expensive. To save money, manufacturers try to get more product from the least amount of raw materials. What is not added to the recipe to increase the weight of the sausage. As it turned out, none of the samples studied did not correspond to the declared category – the meat in the sausage turned out to be no more than 50 percent. And even less.
But that’s not all. The meat in the composition should be meat, not skins, tails and God knows what else. And this is also a problem. Pork skin, poultry meat, gum and carrageenan were found in the sausage of “Borodin’s Meat House”. There was not a word about these ingredients on the label. In the sausage “Velkom”, in addition to skin and poultry meat, they also found the remains of bone tissue. Collagen protein, which is not provided by the Lyubitelskaya recipe, was found in sausages from Myasnitsky Ryad and Rublevsky. And “Chernysikha sausages” distinguished themselves by the presence of gum and a starch-containing component, simply wheat flour, in the composition.
Tasty and unsafe
“Lyubitelskaya” from the brands “Velcom” and “Klinsky” passed the taste test successfully. True, there are nuances. In sausage from “Welcom” not enough meat, and in what is, there are a lot of extraneous components: poultry meat, pork skins and bones. BUT Klinsky sinned even more solidly: the bacteria in this sausage are 13 times higher than the permissible norm.
By the sausage “Borodin’s Meat House” discovered a foreign taste and smell, “Chernysikha sausages” distinguished themselves by a strange taste and color, and the product “Myasnitsky Ryad” и “Rublevsky” looked bad in section. In addition, bacteria of the Escherichia coli group were found in the sausage “Myasnitsky Ryad”, and Staphylococcus aureus was found in the “Chernishikha sausages”.
“As a rule, we eat sausages without subjecting them to heat treatment. Therefore, non-compliance with safety requirements for microbiological indicators is a significant direct health risk. Staphylococcus aureus in sausage is generally an extremely rare but dangerous find. Some of its types of staphylococcus can be the cause of severe food poisoning. Staphylococcus aureus is resistant to both high and low temperatures, this microorganism produces a toxin, which is also not destroyed by heat treatment, ”says Anna Plakhotnik, leading specialist of the expert center of the Union of Consumers, “I”.
Total: five out of six samples, based on the results of the examination, went to the black list. Only the sausage of the Rublevsky trademark turned out to be at least safe, but you can’t call it high-quality either.