Storing Sausages

Storing sausages should be performed at refrigerator temperature. When making fresh or smoked sausage, it should be treated as fresh meat. We can keep at hand an amount that will be consumed within a few days and the rest skould be frozen. Though freezing prevents spoilage of sausage nevertheless keeping it longer than 6 weeks in a freezer will lower it’s flavor, though it will still be nutricious and perfectly safe to eat.

We should also bear in mind that there are differences between home and commercial refrigerators and freezers:

Keeping meats in home freezers long enough might spoil them, too.

Smoked meat has a better flavor but it is still a fresh meat and should be refrigerated. Only some specialized products, cold smoked for long periods of times and air dryed for months can be kept at room temperature without refrigeration.

When deep frozen meat can be stored for a long time :

After de-freezing (in coolers) meat is ready for processing. It should not be freezed again.

 Freezing

 To understand concept of freezing it is necessary to remember the fact that the meat (or our own body) consists of up to 75 % of water. What happens when you place water in a freezer – it freezes but also increases its volume.

 What about meat – it contains water everywhere, on the sutface and inside. The water inside of the meat, like the water inside of the bottle, will become ice and because of its increased volume will expand and do damage to the meat protein, resulting in a loss of elasticity and its ability to hold water. It damages meat’s structure though we can’t see it with a naked eye.

This happens mainly when the freezing proces is slow as it allows for creation of large crystals of ice. When freezing fast the formed ice crystals are smaller as the freezing of water happens so rapidly that it does not alow time for ice crystals to grow larger and the damage to the internal meat structure will be smaller, too. To freeze all water present inside of the meat we have to create temperatures of (–22º  – 30º  C) , which is well beyond range of a home refrigerator. Industrial freezers solve this problem by blasting fast moving cold air over the product that drops the temperature to –40º  C.

Thawing

Thawing must be done slowly, preferably at refrigerator temperature < 40º  F(<4º  C) that will allow for the ice crystals to dissipate slowly in time without creating significant damage to the texture of the meat.

 Prefered methods of thawing are :

• In the refrigerator < 40º  F (<4º  C)
• In cold and fresh running water, you can leave it in a container with ice and water, but add more ice as needed
• In the microwave

Note : Freezing is done not to improve the quality of the meat, but to extend its shelf life and any time meat is frozen and thawed, quality will suffer. The same applies to smoked and ready to eat products, they never taste the same again.

Notes

A ready to eat product should not be stored for more than 7 days if held at 41º  F or 4 days at 45º  F. This practice will help control the growth of Listeria monocytogenes, a harmful bacteria.

Garlic is often used in making sausages but it  looses its flavor rapidly.

Meat freezes at 28º  F (-2º  C)

In frozen meat, light accelerates discoloration. Meats kept in freezers, should therefore be covered, as a precaution against the normal lighting.

Meat should be stored at 32 – 40º  F (0 – 4º  C).

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