OT: Barbecue TV advert

[Alan]

In message , Derek ^ wrote

You assume that the meat has always been handled in a proper way and comes from a reliable source.

Go into your local 24 hour large supermarket at 8/9pm, just after they have just filled the freezers, and you will find most of the stock is no longer frozen. What chance is there that the 'chilled' meat hasn't been subjected to the same inappropriate conditions..

Are not British farmers complaining about inferior stock arriving in the UK from the rest of Europe and from further afield?

I doubt that just cooking the outside surface of your steak, by any means, will ensure safety where the food chain relies heavily on those on minimum wage with little or no training.

I wonder if the two steak meals for a fiver offer available in a lot of pub restaurants ensures that highest quality of meat has been used.

BTW, yesterday I watched what I assume to have been the environmental health people educating street traders into the wisdom of displaying meat products all day in the full sun without any form of refrigeration. This was in Southend-on-Sea High Street where one of those fake travelling farmers markets had turned up. The council seem to alternate them with the fake French and German markets that travel between towns each week selling expensive goods purchased cheaply from the local 'tat' warehouse.

[Owain]

To me the addition of /some/ cereals is what makes British sausages have a softer and looser consistency than their continental counterparts, which is part of the appeal of the British sausage. If I wanted salami or wurst I'd buy salami or wurst etc.

Of course I am partial to both black pudding and haggis, which have cereals (barley, I think) even if they aren't "sausages".

Fairy nuff, but isn't labelling the main problem then, not the fact of cereal inclusion? I'm not very tolerant of potato, so avoid a lot of Cornish pasty style products similarly.

But Tesco sell a wide variety of sausages

Owain

[Owain]

I think that's a little unfair; I wouldn't describe Lidl as a tat warehouse.

Owain

[Andy Hall]

On Mon, 10 Jul 2006 00:21:08 +0100, Owain wrote (in article ):

Except that that's a fallacy. It isn't necessary to adulterate sausages with cereal to create a "British" style sausage.

Labeling is generally a problem and has been made worse by manufacturers trying to hide ingredients that don't need to be there and are not particularly good food value.

That's true. I was really talking about the cheap generic rubbish.

[John Rumm]

I worked with somone once who had in the past done a short term job with one of the major supermarkets. He said he would never buy any meat from them which was not clearly identifieable as a piece of meat (i.e. no processed products or mince etc). Having heard some of the tails of what they used to do with the food, I can understand why! (and Andy was not too far from the truth)

[Tim S]

Also, the mincing machine warms the meat quite a bit and this give the bugs a period of optimised breeding.

Cheers

Tim

[Mary Fisher]

'ill-defined' is in itself not a good definition. All ingredients are listed, nothing which could possibly be floor sweepings or bogeys are in there.

You can get gluten-free sausages.

I don't believe anything put out by T*sc*

Um ...

So it's irrelevant!

Everyone needs a hobby :-)

I wouldn't be so cruel to duck breasts as to barbecue them. Our preferences differ.

Mary

[Mary Fisher]

It's not, it's a tradition.

Quite.

Or oatmeal. I love both. Especially the black pudding with large cubes of fat in them

Mary

[Tony Bryer]

^^^^^

Many a true word said in jest?

[Mary Fisher]

I smiled about that too, but tails are good by themselves and, being full of bone, unsuitable for sausages.

Mary

>

[Christian McArdle]

Also, sausages are normally pork, which seems to be more attractive to those bugs that infect humans than lamb or beef. If having a steak, I'm pretty sure I'd want my pork relatively well cooked, when I'm happy with fountains of blood from my lamb or beef.

Christian.

[Bob Mannix]

As I understand it...

The requirement for good cooking certainly applies to sausages rather than steak but the type of meat is irrelevant. After the second world war, much of the pork production in the UK was infested with some sort of worm. Food was scarce and it had to be eaten so pork was associated with instructions for cooking extra specially well and this association with pork and "well cooked" has remained laong after it became unnecessary.

The likelihood of disease causing bacteria (other than salmonella in chicken) being in/on meat is determined by the cut surface area as, for animal meats, the bacteria get in from outside on knives, through air borne contamination etc. For any steak (including pork), the cut surface area is clear and searing on a barbeque is enough to kill any bacteria (whether the inside is rare or not).

Minced meat is an entirely different thing. The cut surface area for minced products is huge and permeates the product. Sausages, beefburgers etc., should not be rare in the middle (unless you make them yourself from mince you have just made yourself and keep things clean).

Chicken/poultry is different as the salmonella bacteria arrive and grow internally.

Qrfpb "value" sausages of course are probably exempt as they contain no discernible meat!

[Brian Sharrock]

Definitely possible when grilling/barbecuing sausages !

After buying a 'healthy-grill' (the type where the foods is on contact with a top and bottom plate) I purchased a 'digital cooking thermometer'. It's a calculator sized gizmo with a long flexible braided cable connected to a four-inch(?) probe. My reason for purchasing it was that the meat being grilled could be 'browned' on the top and bottom surfaces while I had no idea what temperature had been reached on the insides. The thermometer can be set to a Meat Type (Chicken, turkey, lamb, pork, beef ) and a 'Taste' (rare, medium, well -done} :logic precludes setting such as Pork+Rare etc. An audio alarm can be set to beep when the food's internal temperature reaches the set point.

I now use the thermometer on everything that gets cooked. (particularly sausages; oven-cooked, grilled and barbecued)

[Owain]

On the bosom of young Abigail Was written the price of her tail And upon her behind For the use of the blind Was the same information in braille

Owain

[Mary Fisher]

Don't you ever wonder how you survived as long you have before you used the thermometer?

:-)

Mary

[Mary Fisher]

Things can't be kept 'clean' if you mean sterile. You mentioned air-borne infections, you can't get away from that. Your own skin, no matter how well you wash your hands, is inhabited with bacteria. and as for what's in your mouth and gut ...

Mary

[Bob Mannix]

I meant clean, not sterile (otherwise I would have said "sterile" - the clue is in the words :o) ). Clean enough not to give yourself something nasty - anything on your finger is likely to get into you anyway. I made the point that you can make them yourself and cook them fairly quickly as (a) you set your own cleanliness standard (b) no-one elses bad cleanliness is getting into your burgers (that you are going to eat rare) and they won't be hanging about too long for bacteria to reproduce. You will know you haven't put raw chicken through the mincer and then raw beef without cleaning it (for example).

My main points were about the difference between cut meat slices and minced product and the out-of-date pork concerns, however.

[Mary Fisher]

Did you make that up?

Mary

[Mary Fisher]

That would be sterile then.

Quite.

I reckon that most commercial sausages will be made in premises with the very highest standards of cleanliness. The abattoir is where infections are likely to arise and that happens on the meat you use yourself too.

Well a) I very rarely eat chicken, b) I can't understand why it should be minced and c) why would you want minced chicken as well as minced beef?

I also doubt that such things happen in commercial premises. In some small butchers it might.

I must have missed something, I can't remember those points.

Mary

[Bob Mannix]

So you either have something nasty all the time or your surroundings are sterile? I don't think so!

Indeed but the bacteria have more time to grow if the mincing process was some time ago in a factory and you don't actually *know*, you just reckon.

I made no distinction between large commercial premises and small butchers, just between doing it yourself and taking something someone else had done.

If you had forgotten those points there's not much I can do!

I wouldn't eat commercial burgers rare in the middle (although I might like burgers that way)

I wouldn't eat commercial sausages uncooked in the middle (well you probably wouldn't want to)

I would eat steaks rare in the middle (including pork)

I would mince my own beef, make burgers and eat them rare in the middle.