What’s in a food label? Uncured, naturally cured or no nitrate or nitrite added.

This year I’ve been working on a series of posts about food labels and what they mean. In earlier posts, I talked about what the Natural label means on a meat package, but I get some questions about Uncured, Naturally Cured or processed meat products that are made without nitrate or nitrite.

I’ve covered this topic before in a post called ‘What is Nitrite?’, but I wanted to cover it again in the labeling series.

Some processors want to create friendlier, less chemically labels and choose to remove nitrates. Also, when meat processors want to use the Natural or Organic labels, they are not allowed to add nitrites and nitrates as they are classified by the USDA as chemical preservatives.

 

What if you just removed these ingredients from natural products?

Just take it out. Problem solved.

Some processors do that, but without nitrite, deli ham would not be pink, it would basically be just a pork roast. Tasty meats like bacon and hotdogs wouldn’t have the same flavors we enjoy. And, most importantly, all of these products would be more susceptible to spoilage and the growth of dangerous bacteria. The nitrite helps them last longer on store shelves and in your refrigerator. Nitrite also makes them safer for you and your family.

So, removing it doesn’t work.

What is nitrite anyway and what is its purpose in meat?

Nitrite is added to processed meats like ham, bacon, and sausages (hotdogs, bologna, etc) for 4 reasons:

1.       It prevents the growth of Clostridium botulinum (the bacteria that causes botulism). Botulism can shut down your nervous system and that’s not healthy. It also helps control other dangerous pathogens and bacteria that cause spoilage, so it helps keep meat safe.

2.       It is a very powerful antioxidant and keeps the meat from going rancid. The fat in processed meat can get funky flavors if allowed to oxidize, and nitrite helps to keep that from happening. Ever notice why a package of ham can last for weeks in your fridge while leftovers go bad in a few days?

3.       It gives cured meats their distinct pink color. The nitrite reacts with the muscle protein and changes it to pink, and it stays pink for a much longer time than fresh meat stays red.

4.       It gives cured meats their distinct flavor. That unique “hammy” and smoky flavor of a ham or that unique bacon flavor in bacon comes from the nitrite.



German researchers discovered that nitrite and
not nitrate (curing cousins) was the form of
curing salt responsible for meat curing, and
started to exclusively use nitrite for curing.

Also, without nitrite, several products would completely lose their identity. The USDA has standards of identity that regulate what is a hot dog, bologna, or even bacon and nitrite is an important ingredient for making them what they are. Without it, they are no longer “cured.” This means bacon without nitrite would no longer be bacon, but would instead be cooked pork belly.

How do “Natural” and “Cured” coexist?

Even though, nitrate and nitrite are not allowed to be directly added to natural and organic labeled meat products, other ‘natural’ ingredients with high levels of naturally-occurring nitrate can be used to replace the synthetic forms.

Many vegetables contain high levels of naturally accumulating nitrate. In fact, the main human dietary source of nitrate isn’t processed meats, but actually green leafy vegetables like spinach and celery. When the nitrate is converted to nitrite, presto… meat curing can naturally happen.

Meat processors can use vegetable powder in processed meats as a source of nitrite to create the pink color and cured flavor. On the label, it may be listed as celery powder, flavoring, or natural flavoring. The nitrite derived from vegetables and found in vegetable powder and in natural meats is exactly the same compound as that found in conventionally cured meats.

However, this substitution doesn’t replace all the nitrite needed to provide important quality and safety attributes. The final nitrite levels are lower and the vegetable powder may have to be limited because it can give the meat product its own flavors, too. These lower nitrate levels mean that the naturally cured meats are not as well protected from spoilage and pathogenic bacteria like Clostridium botulinum and Listeria monocytogenes. So, other steps must be taken to help keep the product safe. Meat processors add natural antimicrobial ingredients or use extra processes like high pressure processing to protect against spoilage and dangerous bacteria.

So what’s the difference, really?

Generally, natural meats are going to be more expensive because the ingredients that go into them are more expensive. However, when your dinner hits the table, natural and conventionally-cured meats should taste the same and both are safe and nutritious for your family.

  

For this post, I want to thank Dr. Jeff Sindelar from the University of Wisconsin for helping me explain all the nitrate/nitrite chemistry. Jeff and I have been buddies since graduate school, and he is a great meat scientist who has devoted his research to naturally-cured meats. You can see him talking about it in his Meat Myth Crusher video.

 

 

 

 

Sausage and Legislation.

What are two things that you don’t want to see being made? Sausage and legislation.

Thanks to CSPAN, CNN, MSNBC, and the 24-hour news cycle, we get to see legislation being made (or not made) all the time. So, we might as well learn about sausage, too.

One day last week, we spent all morning working in the meat lab making sausage, and I snapped a few pictures and decided it would make a fun and informative blog post.

First, why even bother making sausage?



We went to Germany a few years ago and
tasted several German sausages. Yum!

You mean, besides tastiness? Sausage making has been used for hundreds of years to preserve meat. When salt and spices are added, it takes it longer for meat to spoil. Some sausages are very dry and acidic (think summer sausage and pepperoni). Bacteria can’t survive such conditions. Some sausages have been smoked to preserve them. The heat and the compounds from the smoke both serve this purpose.

Today, sausage allows meat producers to add value to low-value cuts and to efficiently use every piece of the carcass. Old-time butchers used to say that when you harvested a pig, you used “everything but the squeal”. When you cut up a beef or pork carcass into steaks, chops, and roasts (and bacon, don’t forget bacon), there is always meat left over. The extra meat is ground through a grinder that cuts it into small pieces, making even the toughest meat fork-tender. I talked a little about this in the “not pink slime” and the “cooking burgers” posts. There is fat trim and lean trim.

Here are pictures of our fat trim and lean trim.

You could just grind it and mix it and cook it up, but how boring. Let’s make something more exciting!

The fat trim was about 50% fat and 50% lean and was made mostly from belly pieces that we decided not to make into bacon. The lean trim was about 93% lean and 7% fat. It was made from ham pieces and pork chops that we had removed samples from. We mixed them together in a specific ratio to make sausage that was about 80% lean and 20% fat. You don’t want to make your sausage too fatty (for obvious reasons), but you also don’t want it to be too lean (it would be tough and dry).

Side notes:

 ***In the US, pork sausage can be 50% lean and 50% fat and still be labeled pork sausage. Generally, commercial sausage is not that fatty because consumers want a leaner product.

*** All of our sausage was made from pork skeletal meat. There are sausages made from liver or hearts or even salivary glands, but remember that if it’s in the sausage, it has to be on the label.





We put our ground pork in a big mixer and added the salt and spices. We buy most of our spices pre-mixed, but sometimes we mix our spices from a recipe.

This is where it gets cool.

Muscle is made up of protein. To do what proteins need to do in the body, they exist in long, folded-up chains. When you add salt to meat, the salt reacts with the protein and starts to dismantle it on a molecular level. As the proteins unfold, they start to stick to each other. They stick to everything, even water. We added water to the sausage in the mixer, and the protein soaked it up like a sponge.

This is the andouille on my glove. Looks yummy. See how it sticks to my glove.

Some of the sausage recipes include cheese. We can’t just use regular cheese. We have to use a special, high-melting temperature cheese. If the cheese melted, you wouldn’t be able to see it in the finished sausage

We added in the cheese as the sausage was mixing.

This is some Jalapeno cheese sausage. You can see the cheese and the jalapenos in the finished product. Yum! I didn’t take this picture. It was on the website of my late friend, Chris Raines, called Academic Abattoir.


Notice that Chris’ sausage was pink? Some of the sausage recipes call for the addition of cure (Sodium Nitrate). This gives the sausage it’s pretty pink color and cured flavor. Yum.

After mixing it for about 2 or 3 minutes, we grind the sausage again.
We always hold the meat in sanitized containers like this one. We call these ‘lugs.’ I don’t really know why. I guess because you have to lug the meat around in them.


Then we moved the sausage to the stuffer which is kinda like a vacuum in reverse. You fill it up with sausage and a piston pushes the sausage up through a tube, called a horn. The size of horn dictates how much sausage comes out at once.

This is a picture of some sausage in the stuffer.

We stuffed some of our sausage into chubs. This was the recipes we weren’t going to smoke, like breakfast sausage, some Italian sausage, and maple-flavored sausage.


This is another one of Chris' pictures.
These are sausage chubs.



We stuffed some of the sausage into natural casings. What are natural casings? Remember when I said that we use everything, but the squeal? The best sausage casings are made from pig intestines. They are washed and washed and washed and cleaned and treated and washed some more.

Before we stuffed them, we soaked them in water to hydrate them and flush them out one more time.

Here is what the casings look like in a package.

If you buy sausages in the store that have been stuffed into natural casings, it will say so on the package.

The casing goes over the horn, and the stuffer pushes the meat into the casing. It makes a long tube of meat. You can see the cheese in our sausage in this one.

I have a video of our meat lab manager stuffing the sausage into the natural casing.

After the sausage is stuffed in the casing, you have a long tube of sausage that looks like this.


If we left the sausage like this, it would be very hard to handle in getting it smoked and cut into serving-size pieces. So, we linked it.

To link the sausage, we pinched the sausage casing and twisted it. You have to alternate the direction that you twist the casing or you will untwist previous links. In big commercial sausage plants, they have machines that link the sausage as it comes out of the stuffer.

I have a video of linking, too.

This is what the linked sausage looked like. This was some of our jalapeno, cheese recipe.

We allowed it to rest in the cooler overnight. That gave the protein a little extra time to soak up the flavors of the spices.

The links all stay attached to each other until we cook it. When it’s cooked, the sausage links are hung over a metal stick and hung in the smoke house. In the smokehouse, they are cooked with heat and smoke is applied to give the sausage that nice smoky flavor. Yum.

This is a picture of a couple of students at a processed meats workshop from about 5 years ago. They are not my students, but I think that they are now both gainfully employed. You can see the linked sausage ready to go in the smokehouse.

This is a picture of our finished product. It was quite tasty!

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to sausage making. There are so many other neat things to talk about, like fermented sausage, different casings, hot dogs, canned sausage, pickled sausage, and other cooked meat specialties, but I guess that will all have to wait for another day’s post.

What is Nitrate?

I recently had a discussion with another mom about nitrates and nitrites in meat and their safety. She said that she buys nitrate-free products for her kids. She is a smart lady and wants to do the best for her family’s health, but she didn’t even understand what nitrate or nitrites are and sure didn’t know why they were added to meats.

I touched on nitrite a little bit in my processed meats post, but I thought a whole post about them might clear things up.

Question one. What is nitrate/nitrite?  

Nitrates and nitrites are chemical groups, part of lots of compounds, both natural and man-made. They are a combination of a nitrogen atom and either two (nitrite; NO₂) or three (nitrate; NO₃) oxygen atoms. When it’s added in processed meats it is usually combined with sodium or potassium (you would see it as Sodium Nitrite on the ingredient statement). Nitrite (the one with 2 oxygens) is most commonly used in meats.

I mentioned in a previous post the benefits of nitrite in the diet and linked to the video by Dr. Nathan Bryan.

Question two. Why is nitrite added to meats?

Good question. Have you ever heard of cured meats of meat curing? Curing meat requires nitrite. Some good examples of cured meats are ham, bacon, hotdogs, and pepperoni.

The nitrite in cured meats serves several purposes.

1. It gives cured meats that pretty pink color and the color that lasts a long time (unlike fresh meat color).
2. It gives cured meats their distinct flavor.  (Think about how a ham tastes so different from a pork roast.)
3. It protects the meat from organisms that cause spoilage and disease. Cured meats have a longer shelf life than most uncured meats. Nitrite directly prevents the growth of that nasty ol’ Clostridium botulinum, which is the bacteria that causes botulism (it’s also the organism used to make Botox, but that doesn’t mean we want it in our meat).
4. It prevents the meat from going rancid and protects the flavor of the meat.

Many historians think that meat curing was discovered by accident when salt contaminated with nitrite was rubbed on meat. (Salt was one of the first ingredients added to meat).

Question three. Why do we have uncured or no nitrite/nitrate added products?

Natural and organic products have become very popular in the last few years.  I covered this in one of my first blog posts. The definitions of Natural and Organic are regulated by USDA, and nitrates and nitrites are not permitted as an ingredient in products with those labels. If you try to make cured meat products like ham, bacon, or hotdogs without nitrite, the meat turns out a gray color and won’t have the typical cured flavor. Not so good.

Why don’t people want it?

When consumed in large quantities, nitrite can be toxic. Also, nitrite can combine with protein in meat at high temperatures and form nitrosamines, which are cancer-causing agents. Now, the amount of nitrite added in processed meats is very small and most processed meats are not cooked at those very high temperatures, so the level of nitrosamines formed is almost none. Processors also started adding the antioxidants, ascorbate (vitamin C) and erythorbate (structurally related to vitamin C), to cured meats to block the formation of nitrosamines. There has also been some scary stuff published that attempted to link hot dogs with cancer, but those studies have since been disproven.

So how do we get uncured ham and hotdogs that still look and taste like ham and hotdogs?

Remember in the processed meats post, I mentioned the video of the interview my friend Dr. Jeff Sindelar? He told us that people ingest most dietary nitrite from green leafy vegetables and not from processed meats. Technically, it’s nitrate (NO₃) that is found in most vegetables, but it’s is converted to nitrite in when it comes into contact with the saliva in your mouth. These same vegetables and/or their juices can be added to Natural meats as a source of nitrite. Processors may also add harmless bacteria, called a starter culture, to convert the nitrate in the vegetables into nitrite.

But, why does it say “no nitrite or nitrate added” and “uncured”?

Because nitrate or nitrite is not added directly, the process of the traditional cured meats is altered, so the manufacturers are required to say that it is “no nitrate or nitrite added” or that it is “uncured”. A more accurate term would probably be “indirectly cured” or “naturally cured”.

So, is it better or worse than conventional cured meats?

The answer to that question is, “Yes.” If you feel very strongly about eating natural or organic products and don’t want to consume artificial ingredients, or if there are other claims that accompany the natural claim, like grass-fed or antibiotic free, that are important to you, then these products will allow you to still enjoy hot dogs and ham and other cured meats. Realize that the nitrite is still in the meat product. It just comes from a natural source. 

One concern I have is that other ingredients, such as lactates, that help inhibit spoilage and fight off pathogenic organisms are not allowed in natural and organic meats, so they may be more susceptible to spoilage and are more dependent on processing techniques to guard against pathogens. You should be very careful to observe the use by dates and store them correctly. See my lunch box safety post for that info.

Natural and organic meats products are more expensive than traditionally-processed products, so the benefit of low cost protein is somewhat lost when you choose natural or especially organic.