Sausages, saveloys and burgers

Sausages, saveloys and burgers. We eat loads of them without once thinking about what goes into them. If you don't wish to know then stop reading this.

The first thing you need to know is that the legal definition of beef is everything that comes off a cow's carcass. When you bite into a big mac that you paid 99p for you are not buying into minced steak. That burger probably cost 5p to make. It probably cost more to transport the burger to the shop than it did to make it.

If it's off a cow and is at all edible, it'll be used in food production. When I made burgers the gristle and cartilages were cooked in a big vat and allowed to congeal.Then they were run through a mincer and added to the recipe as part of the meat content. Since then they've got even cleverer and can now remove every trace of anything remotely edible from the bones and turn it into food.

The next thing you need to learn is that burgers, sausages, scotch eggs etc are all produced by squirting the meat out of a machine. In order to get the meat to go through the machine the structure of the meat has to be destroyed. It is turned into a slurry that may only be 30% meat. The rest is soya and rusk, with additives to improve the flavour, hold the product together when it's cooking and some vitamins.
As Crocodile Dundee said "It tastes like shit but it'll keep you alive."

It's quite a sight to see a burger machine stamping out the patties on to the conveyor belt. In our factory the belt went through a freezer so that the burgers were frozen within minutes of being produced. The ingredients were mixed in a large drum according to a finely worked out recipe. We produced several grades of burger with different ingredients. If a modern day big mac style burger is considered the top of the range, I shudder to think what goes in the cheap range that you see in Chav City (the shop that has slebs advertising party nibbles)

We also made scotch eggs. They were quite labour intensive. We had an egg boiler, a machine that you loaded with fresh eggs at one eggs and boiled eggs came out of the other. Someone had to peel the shells off the eggs and keep up with the machine. I used to be able to peel an egg one handed, one in each hand.

The outer covering of the scotch egg was extruded as a flat round patty and as it travelled along the belt someone would place an egg on the patty. Then a girl would mould the scotch egg by hand and place it back on the belt. You'd need six or eight girls to do that. At the end of the belt the egg would pass through a batter curtain and drop into a tank full of breadcrumbs. The eggs would rotate as they climbed up another belt and be covered with crumb. Then they would drop into a conveyor fryer. When they emerged at the other end they'd be placed in trays to cool down before they were packed. That's a fairly standard way of producing food.
When I worked at the bakery, the method of making rolls was virtually identical. We even had a conveyor oven as well as several turntable ovens. I still have the scars on my arms where a hot baking tray touched my arm as I unloaded the ovens.

Saveloys. When I lived in London they were the after-pub food of choice (much like the kebab is today) and with as fearsome a reputation. My department used to produce them. What went into a saveloy? Do you really want to know?

We used to bake all the pies before they went out to the chip shops. These days most chippies buy frozen pies and cook them as required. Back then there were few freezers, so the chippies would buy them in ready cooked. There was a certain percentage of pies that leaked when they were cooked off and we'd recycle them by mincing them up and including them in the saveloy recipe. The saveloys were extruded from a machine with a piston that forced the slurry out through a tube. The saveloy skins were pigs intestines that came in a huge barrel of salt. It was a horrible job getting the skins out of the barrel, soaking them in cold water to make them pliable and then loading them onto the nozzle. It was quite a skilful job to make saveloys and one that attracted a fair amount of ribald comment from the lads as they watched a woman working a machine with a left hand action that would give a great hand job.
The completed (but still raw) saveloys were then cooked in dye filled tanks. This gave the saveloy its red skin. If a saveloy burst or wasn't up to standard for packing, it was recycled into the next batch of saveloys.

So it was conceivable that there was a tiny tiny fragment in a saveloy that was bake waste, turned nto saveloys, minced up and turned into saveloys, minced up and turned into saveloys etc etc.

Needless to say I haven't eaten one since.