How much “real meat” is in the grilled sausage that costs 3 yuan on the roadside?

I don’t know when it started, but there will always be a stall near major tourist attractions, office buildings, shopping malls, and schools, selling crispy, tender, and fragrant grilled sausages.

The intestines are cut symmetrically several times and fried in hot oil with a sizzling sound until they "bloom". When a golden shell forms on the surface, they are sprinkled with cumin, chili and other seasoning powders. When you take a bite, you will find that the outside is crispy and the inside is soft and glutinous, and it is fragrant and crispy.

For such a perfect starch sausage, the highest praise from foodies is——

“I really like starch sausages, but I don’t like anything with meat in it.”

Image source: Screenshot of a platform

Although this sentence fully reflects everyone's tolerance and preference for starch sausage as a street snack to satisfy cravings, you may have "misunderstood" starch sausage - starch sausage really cannot be without meat, otherwise it would be illegal .

As long as it is regular ham

Meat is the main ingredient

Ham sausage appeared as an innovative meat product in the 1980s, but due to price competition in the market, the meat content once decreased.

In order to rectify the chaos in the market, in 2007, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine and the State Administration of Standardization jointly issued the national standard GB/T 20712-2006 "Ham Sausage" for ham sausage.

The definition of ham sausage is:

A meat sausage product made from fresh or frozen livestock meat, poultry meat, and fish meat as the main ingredients, which is marinated, stirred, chopped (or emulsified), stuffed into plastic casings, and sterilized at high temperature.

GB/T 20712-2006 "Ham"

From the definition, we can know that as long as it is a regular ham sausage, meat is the main ingredient .

In the definition of ham sausage in the new national standard for ham sausage implemented in 2024, meat is also retained as the main raw material. Of course, there are other sausage products, such as Old Beijing Sausage, Jiahe Blood Sausage, etc., but they are not ham sausage.

The Hebei Provincial Local Standard did have a standard for starch sausage, which stipulated that the starch content should be greater than 10% and the protein content should be no less than 5% . However, this standard was implemented in March 2009, lasted only four years, and was abolished in May 2013 .

So some of you may have eaten real starch sausages when you were a child, but they no longer exist now.

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How do you know how much meat is in ham?

See the rating

The national standard uses starch content as one of the main criteria , and divides it into four categories based on the starch content: starch-free, special grade, superior grade and ordinary grade.

The starch contents are ≤1%, ≤6%, ≤8% and ≤10% respectively.

The corresponding protein content is ≥14%, ≥12%, ≥11%, and ≥10%.

The fat content is between 6% and 16%, and the water content is between 64% and 70%.

Are you a little surprised? Even ordinary-grade ham sausage has a corresponding protein content of ≥10% (although the protein content here is not equal to the meat content, the soy protein marked on the ingredients of many ham sausages will also be counted into the protein content).

In other words, although 99.9% of the "starch sausages" you eat at street stalls are made of ordinary-grade ham sausages, as long as they are imported through regular channels , the meat content in them is not as low as you think.

Moreover, you don’t have to be too resistant to the addition of starch in ham sausage. **Starch is an important means to increase the output rate of ham sausage and maintain the high-quality taste of the product. **However, adding too much starch will inevitably reduce the meat content in the product, resulting in reduced meat elasticity and a "soft" taste.

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However, if you want to further inquire about what kind of meat is in the sausages used in street stalls, it may be difficult to say.

The ham sausages that are commonly sold on e-commerce platforms for a few cents each are likely to be the raw materials of these starch sausage stalls. Judging from the ingredients, most of them are mainly water and chicken and duck meat. Some insiders on the Internet have revealed that the production of these ham sausages will contain a lot of leftover ingredients such as chicken skin, duck skin, skeleton mud, etc. This sounds reasonable. After all, this price cannot support the use of high-quality meat as raw material.

However, an organization once tested several common and cheap ham sausages that can be purchased on these e-commerce platforms and found that they all met the standards .

The meat content is not as low as you think

No need to talk about "preservatives"

Regarding starch sausage, another common saying among parents when I was a child was: "Starch sausage contains too many preservatives and nitrites, and is unhealthy."

But in fact, the rational use of preservatives is a very important part of the development of modern food.

Nitrite is widely used as an antibacterial agent, antioxidant, and color preservative in food processing, especially in meat processing. In particular, the role of inhibiting bacteria is very important. The botulism toxin in meat is very toxic, and antibacterial agents can ensure the safety of the meat we eat .

Food additives have strict safety limits. As long as you buy products that have been formally produced and inspected , you don't need to worry about safety. Most of the nitrite poisoning incidents that everyone has heard of are caused by roadside vendors adding nitrites at will without common sense, or by homemade kimchi.

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It should be noted that although there are no safety issues with regular starch sausage products, such products often have excessive salt content and are fried , which makes them not so healthy from a nutritional point of view. They can be used occasionally to satisfy your cravings, but it is not recommended to eat too much.

Finally, if you still want to try "starch sausage without any meat", it really exists... but you may not like it -

Old Beijing fried sausage , even if it is a sausage made of pure starch.

Fried sausage. Copyright image. Reproduction may cause copyright disputes.

It is made by mixing flour and starch in a certain proportion, kneading the dough with boiled five-spice powder, then steaming it and letting it cool, then cutting it into slices that are thinner at one end and thicker at the other end, frying it in a frying pan until crispy, and eating it with garlic juice.

Although it is called "intestine", it has no meat. Many people who come to Beijing for tourism are deceived by its name.

References

[1] Yang Yanmin, Zhang Fu, Wang Jipeng, Cao Xinqiao, Development history and classification of ham sausage, Meat Industry, 2007.1, p47-48

[2] https://www.foodaily.com/articles/32203

[3] https://m.jiemian.com/article/7279157.html

[4] https://new.qq.com/rain/a/20211127A09VQ000

[5]https://www.toutiao.com/article/7182082988434342432/?source=seo_tt_juhe

Planning and production

Author: FOODHACK Yuzi, Master of Food Science from University of New South Wales, Scientific Advisor of A Bite of China

Review | Chen Ran, Associate Research Librarian (Science Communication), Senior Engineer, COFCO Nutrition and Health Research Institute

Planning丨Yang Yaping

Editor｜Yang Yaping