SERIOUS SAUSAGE - ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT SERIOUS SAUSAGES
- What makes Serious Sausages different from other Halal sausages?
Serious Sausages have three unique features, which distinguish them from most other Halal sausages available in the British market place.
Ethical meat. We source all our meat from farms where animal welfare is a high priority. We use farm assured free range beef and lamb, and farm assured barn raised chickens. The meat which you eat has come from an animal that is ethically raised.
Local produce. All our meat and ingredients are local. We believe that well managed British farms produce some of the best quality meat around. As well as supporting the local economy, we prefer not to transport animals or meat hundreds of miles.
Real meat. We use real cuts of meat, which you would recognise and be happy to cook as they are in your own kitchen.
Aside from these three key features, Serious Sausages never contain any colourings, flavour enhancers or E-numbers. Never ! Our premium quality meat does not require any help to taste and look good!
- I heard that sausages are made with all sorts of horrible things. What goes into a Serious Sausage?
Serious Sausages use only the finest quality ingredients, and real meat. The meat we use comes direct from the Halal abattoir, and we cut it up into smaller pieces for going into the mincing machine with all the other fresh ingredients. For example, our chicken sausages are made from thigh and leg meat. When you look closely at a serious Sausage, you can see that it is quality meat, coarsely minced.
Many other Halal sausages are made of mechanically recovered meat (MRM). Wikipedia describes MRM as “..... a paste-like meat product produced by forcing beef, pork, turkey or chicken bones, with attached edible meat, under high pressure through a sieve or similar device to separate the bone from the edible meat tissue. The most common use of MSM is into hot dogs.” Sometimes, the less palatable term ‘meat slurry’ is used to describe the products of mechanical separation processes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanically_separated_meat
Let’s be very clear. At Serious Sausage Company, we NEVER use mechanically separated meats. We prefer quality meat cuts, which have their own taste. We don’t wish to add excess salts, spices and flavour enhancers to make meat slurry more palatable.
Thanks to EU regulations, mechanically retrieved meats cannot be labelled as simply ‘meat’. They must be clearly labelled as mechanically separated, mechanically retrieved, mechanically recovered, or mechanically deboned, so that the consumer is fully informed
- Why do your beef, lamb and chicken sausages cost different amounts?
Serious Sausages are priced differently because the real price of beef, lamb and chicken vary in the market place. A kilo of chicken from your butcher is never the same cost as a kilo of lamb. The same principle extends to our sausages. Our chicken sausages are cheaper than lamb sausages. Our sausages have a high real meat content. Most of the range has 85% meat content (remember- that’s real meat cuts).
Other Halal sausages often use a little beef or a little lamb, and then add a lot of chicken (often MRM) to keep the production costs low. If you use the legal minimum of lamb, you can call it a lamb sausage, even though it is predominantly made of chicken.
Our sausages are seriously simple to understand. Beef means Beef. Lamb means Lamb. Chicken means Chicken. We never mix the meats. That is why the price varies.
- If your sausages are 85% real meat, what is the remaining 15% made of ?
Don't worry about the remaining 15% ! That is simply bread rusk, herbs, salt and required preservatives. Every sausage needs rusk to make it soft and juicy. If we put more than 85% meat into a sausage, it will turn into a sheek kebab!
- Are Serious Sausages healthy?
We believe that they are. We have already described the quality and type of the meat used above. In addition, we use rusk (like breadcrumbs or rice flour) to give sausages that delicious juicy texture. We currently use less that 1.4% salt in our sausages (1.4g salt per kilogram meat, or 0.14g per 100grams of meat). In most definitions, that constitutes a low salt food. http://www.eatwell.gov.uk/healthydiet/fss/salt/checkinglabelforsalt/
Naturally, beef, lamb and chicken also vary in terms of their fat content. Chicken meat is the lowest fat meat. We also recommend frying with just a drop of oil, or grilling without any additional oil.
- Why can’t I buy serious sausages in my local Halal butcher shop or supermarket?
We are in discussions with butchers and shops to start supplying through them. Most Halal butcher shops prefer sausages to be pre-frozen, as they tend not to have much space in the chilled cabinets. The Serious Sausage Company is seeking to produce more pre-frozen goods, so that you can get a hold of Seriously good sausages through your local Halal shop.
We currently have a distribution schedule which takes us to different areas of London, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and the Midlands. We also have stockists in these places, and are planning to increase these every month. Why not ask your local Halal shop to get in touch with us?
- How can Sausages ever be Halal?
A few people have asked us this question! Some British Muslims feel that sausages can’t really be Halal, because they have grown up seeing them as a food which is made of non-Halal meats. Sausages made with Halal meat and Halal ingredient are of course Halal! A few British Muslims also struggle to accept the concept of sausages because they are an unfamiliar item in their ‘country of origin’ diet. We often tell them it’s not much different from a sheek-kebab. Both are made of minced meat, but one uses a casing around the mince meat, and the other does not.
It is interesting to note that the earliest recorded sausage recipes are 5000 years old and come from Sumeria (modern day Iraq). Sausages are a daily part of many Muslim cultures, especially in North Africa and the Middle East.
- Are Serious Sausages only for Muslims?
Not at all ! They are for everyone who loves good quality sausages, and enjoys the taste of best quality British Beef, Lamb and Chicken. In Fact, we have many non-Muslim customers. We promote the Halal aspect strongly, because the British Muslim community does not have access to the same range of quality prepared foods, which other Brits have. And when it comes to Sausages, British Muslims have had to make do with a very limited range to date. One of our mantras is: “Great British sausages, for all Brits!”
- Are Serious Sausages certified Halal?
Our Sausages are 100% Halal. Guaranteed by us. However, we recognise that it’s good to have an objective external opinion! We are currently working with a major Halal Certification Body to gain certification. The process for getting certification takes several months, and we have been advised that the earliest an auditor can complete the audit is mid 2011. This is partly due to the fact that Serious Sausage is moving to new premises, and so the auditors need to verify that location.
In the meantime, the SSCo personally verify that all meat and ingredients comes from suppliers which are recognised and respected by the local Muslim community as Halal product suppliers.
Our humble mission includes promoting the view that Halal food requires an animal to have led a decent quality of life, as well as been slaughtered in the correct manner.
- Why are you so Serious about ethical foods?
We believe the industrial food system has led to low cost foods being produced at the expense of quality, and without due care and attention to the health of the consumers and the health of the planet. At its worst, the industrial food system puts animals through a tortured existence, which produces cheap food, but at great cost to animal welfare, huge compromise to taste, and unknown cost to human health.
Increasingly, we are becoming distanced from the food we eat, and many people are not aware of how the meat they eat was produced. At Serious Sausage, we feel that all consumers should able to make an informed choice. That is why we go to such lengths to explain our sausages.
- Why are Serious Sausages more expensive than some of the other Halal sausages you can buy?
For all the reasons above! We feel our sausages are well priced, given the quality of meat, high meat content, absence of MRM and of course the high ethical standards we follow. You can take every bite with confidence. These are Halal sausages with a difference. Compare the ingredients in Serious Sausages, with other sausage product you may buy.
Perhaps a more interesting question to ask is “why are other Halal sausages so cheap?”
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