Sausage casing - natural or synthetic?

[Skogsgurra]

I am now leaving my EE environment to seek advice on a matter that popped up when we were having Cristmas lunch. It is about sausage casing and what alternatives there are today. A short description and the questions can be found here:

http://www.gke.org/pub/files/Sausage Casing.pdf

If anyone in materials knows about this, please share your knowledge!

Gunnar Englund

http://www.gke.org

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Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.

 

[btrueblood]

Quite likely it is a processed casing. If it's edible, then it's a collagen casing, made from collagen recovered from hide and bone, and yes, the "manufactured" casings typically don't have the bite, or snap, of a natural casing.

 

[Skogsgurra]

Thanks BTB! You probably experienced that little sausage when we had lunch at Stockholm Grand Hotel. It is present on all smorgasbords. None is complete without it.

The casing is edible. Most people don't react to the different "snap".
Collagen, you say? Is that a natural skin? Or one of those greenie recycled products?

Gunnar Englund

http://www.gke.org

--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.

 

[btrueblood]

Well...the artificial casings are made from natural skin, and is intended to be as close to the original casing as possible. Both casings are essentially collagen fibers (animal connective tissue), and the only real difference is how it got that way/shape.

Yes, that sausage did look familiar...and now my mouth is watering. We had good old American bacon for breakfast. I may need to go looking in some Swedish/Norwegian markets, and see if I can find those for New Year's day brunch...

 

[ornerynorsk]

A delectable research site can be found here.

http://www.sausagemaker.com/

and a less tantalizing but more informative one here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casing_(sausage)

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

 

[patprimmer]

Certainly some years ago, nylon 6.6 was used as sausage skin material. It would exhibit all the properties listed except I would expect it would burn more readily than described. Maybe not.

It melts sharply at 256 deg C and dissolves readily in strong acids and slowly in moderately weak acids. It smells like burnt feathers when burnt as it is an amide like proteins. It also digests like a simple protein.

Regards
Pat
See FAQ731-376 for tips on use of eng-tips by professional engineers &

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[Wrenchbender]

I don't know if this applies to Scandinavian varieties, but, 'Je weniger die Leute darüber wissen, wie Würste und Gesetze gemacht werden, desto besser schlafen sie nachts'. (The less the people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep in the night.) - Otto Von Bismarck