Swallow This (21 page)

Manufacturers have various methods for adding proteins to their products. In the case of fish fillets, these can be injected with a solution of fish protein hydrolysate (FPH) or homogenised fish proteins (HFP). Alternatively, these substances can be included in a brine. If you’re talking sausages or meatballs, then the protein powder can be added directly to the meat mix along with the corresponding amount of water to produce a springy consistency. Alternatively, the powder can be whisked with water until it forms a cloudy gel, which then sets to form a very firm jelly with the pliant ‘give’ of a stress ball. This substance, which looks white, beige or brown, depending on whether pig, cow or poultry collagen has been used, can then be canned, pasteurised and stored at room temperature until it is needed, ready for mixing into a range of ‘meat applications’, everything from burgers and chicken supremes to meat fillings and salami. Manufacturers also use a sprinkling of collagen powder to add heft, and a glossy thickness, to gravies and ready meals, such as a cottage pie or roast beef dinner.

Protein powders are extremely attractive to meat processors for two reasons. Firstly, they allow for a more ‘natural’ label. The only ingredient listing needed will be ‘beef protein’, ‘poultry protein’ or ‘pork protein’, which is unlikely to cause alarm. We all know that we need protein to build muscles, right? Secondly, when reconstituted with water, protein powders can be used as a direct substitute for a significant proportion of the meat and fat in a formulation, and so, in the words of one company, ‘beef up their sales’.

Here’s how the figures stack up. A manufacturer pays £1.85 a kilo for ‘beef trim’ (scraps of boned, frozen beef supplied ready for processing) but only £0.85 a kilo for beef protein powder. By replacing 10 per cent of the beef with protein powder and water, an industrial-size meat processing company using 200 tons of meat a week can make a significant weekly saving of £20,000. And with supermarkets exerting constant pressure on suppliers to keep their prices unfeasibly low, this is precisely the sort of cost adjustment that allows manufacturers to make some money. As one protein company puts it: ‘Functional proteins allow you to replace more expensive ingredients in your application, thereby reducing cost while increasing yield.’

Food manufacturers can also choose functional proteins derived from blood, for instance plasma. The Belgian company, Veos, explains:

Plasma proteins have an enormous water binding capacity. At temperatures above 65°C, the albumin proteins form a 3-dimensional network which becomes a strong and heat-stable gel. This gel-forming property, as well as the high solubility in brines, makes the protein-enriching product well suitable for injection in cooked hams [sic]. Plasma is also used in cuttered and ground meat products where a strong ‘meat bite’ is needed, especially when the meat product is eaten warm like frankfurters.

Alternatively, in a deli counter pâté perhaps, globin might be more suitable:

The allergen-free protein is an excellent emulsifier as it stabilises the water/fat/protein matrix [mix] in cuttered and ground meat products. By consequence, it prevents fat and water separation before, during and after cooking. In preparation of warm emulsions (like pâté, liver sausage) one part of globin stabilises 20 parts of hot water and 20 parts of hot fat. For emulsified products where we use cold raw materials, 1 part of globin easily binds 7 parts of fat and ice.

Like collagen, a dash of added blood products does wonders for a manufacturer’s profit margins. They’re easy to get hold of too, ‘sold through a worldwide sales network in over 70 countries on six continents’.

Transglutaminase, phosphates, hydrocolloids, starchy fibres, soya, gelatine, protein powders – meat processors can deploy a catholic selection of ingredients and processing aids to add water to meat. Many choose a belt and braces approach, using several of them at a time, along with other additives.

Here are two typical formulations:

A recipe for hot dogs

Ingredients:

Fatty meat (58%)

Meat with tendons (7.2%)

Bloodied cuts (actual wording) (7.2%)

Water (21.4%)

Functional premix (phosphate, monosodium glutamate [MSG], antioxidant, sodium citrate, colour) (1%)

Wheat fibre (1%)

Starch (2%)

Spice mix (0.6%)

Nitrite salt – a preservative (1.6%)

A recipe for bacon brine

Ingredients:

Water (83.38%)

Carrageenan (1.25%)

Sodium nitrite – a preservative (0.10%)

Sodium erythorbate – a preservative (0.50%)

Dextrose – a sugar (1.50%)

Sodium citrate – an antioxidant and acidity regulator (0.75%)

Salt (9%)

Phosphates (1.50%)

Collagen protein (2.00%)

Xanthan gum (0.02%)

The business of adding water to meat is relatively easy when you’re talking about emulsified products, such as hot dogs and mortadella, or ‘comminuted’ products, like burgers, sausages and meatballs, because the meat is already minced up or pulverised, the cells have been broken down and are more absorbent. But special equipment is needed to encourage more intact cuts, hams or chicken breast for instance, to soak it up; ‘static absorption’, as it’s known in the meat business, just won’t do the trick.

So manufacturers can ‘tumble’ the meat along with the brine in a vacuum machine that looks a bit like a sealed version of a drum concrete mixer. As the tumbler drum rotates, steel paddles inside it slowly move the meat pieces to create a mechanical massaging effect, which helps it absorb the watery solution and free protein from the meat tissue. Once heat treated or cooked, usually in plastic bags in steam or water baths, this semi-liquid protein, along with added chemicals, binds the meat pieces firmly together, making it look like one intact joint.

A brine injector machine is another useful bit of kit. Meats are fed into it on a moving belt and injected repeatedly with the brine using several rows of needles that puncture the flesh, creating tiny cavities, and transporting the solution deep into the cells of the meat, effectively turning it into a sponge. Needle brine injectors are extensively used for processing boned bacon, ham and chicken breast, but not for whole birds, because the needles would puncture the skin and leave black marks. However, poultry processors can instead use injectors fitted with high-pressure nozzles to ‘inject’ the brine, so that the meat can pick up more water. The makers of one such machine claim that it can inject 12,000 chickens an hour, ‘without the hassle of blisters’.

Whether they have been dipped, tumbled or injected, or had a sack load of binders added directly into the mix, many of the cured and ready-cooked meats we eat, however substantial they might feel, are awash with water, and when we buy them, we are paying through the nose for water laced with chemicals. In 2013, when the
Guardian
revealed that major supermarkets were selling, perfectly legally, frozen chicken breasts with 18 per cent added water, the newspaper calculated that consumers who bought them would be paying about 65 pence a kilo for water. When the
Daily Mail
carried out its own investigation subsequently, it concluded that the figure was actually much higher, £1.54 a kilo to be precise.

In the processed meat trade, the term ‘liquid lunch’ takes on a whole new meaning.

11

Starchy

If you’re a dedicated home cook, you might have a packet of cornflour or arrowroot at the back of a cupboard – to make custard perhaps, or thicken a fruit sauce – but starch is not a core grocery item for most people. And why would it be? Starch is an uninspiring ingredient. This common carbohydrate derived from plant foods such as corn, wheat, potato, cassava and rice, is white, powdery, tasteless and odourless. In itself, it is a non-event, a heap of nothingness, about as exciting to eat as wallpaper paste; indeed, it is used for precisely that purpose.

In food manufacturing, however, starch is essential kit, by far the most commonly used item in the food manufacturer’s box of tricks, as one authority explains: ‘Since their development in the 1940s, modified food starches have become a vital part of the food industry. Practically every category of food utilises the functional properties of starch to impart some important aspect of the final product.’

It’s no exaggeration to say that the modern processed food industry is predicated on the stuff. This is why, when you turn to the ingredients listings on the massed ranks of manufactured foods, the word starch turns up with regularity, sometimes prefixed by a source, say, potato starch, or more often by the enigmatic word ‘modified’.

Although it is an omnipresent ingredient in many foods we regularly eat, few of us understand the role that starch plays in specific products; and because it is so ubiquitous, only the most wary of us question its use, not least because alongside all those ingredients and additives with long science lab names, starch sounds like the very least of our problems.

Food manufacturers, on the other hand, are fully aware of the myriad uses and applications for this anonymous commodity. Starch acts as a muse for the modern food industry, a biddable, versatile, obliging substance that inspires a never-ending flow of creativity. Although it is utterly lacking in any food personality of its own, the very neutrality of nondescript starch makes everything feasible. Think of it as a facilitator, an ingredient that generates a boundless range of technical possibilities.

Added starch makes puffed potato snacks and breakfast cereals crisp and expansive, it makes your tortilla chip crunchier, and your crisps crispier. It lends smoothness and creaminess to processed cheese. It extends the shelf life of yogurt, gels fruit and cream fillings, adds fibre to bread, replaces eggs, makes batter more clingy, adds porosity to crackers, and airiness to cakes. In tumbled, injected and emulsified meats, such as sausages and ham, it can mimic fat, so acting as a ‘meat extender’. Starch seals in moist glazes and marinades and acts as a carrier for flavourings and colourings. Thanks to starch, you can transport your mousse dessert upside down and it will emerge unruffled. It stops your orange juice from separating and makes it cloudy. Starch binds the water in mayonnaise, margarine, ketchup and salad dressings, toughens up dough for the onslaught of factory baking, and adds viscous heft to bouillons and gravies. It stiffens canned foods – soups, pulses, vegetables – and makes ready meals more resilient to the temperature challenges posed by chilling, freezing, transportation, reheating, and the general stress and elevated temperatures of factory production. Starch provides ‘freeze/thaw stability’, prevents freezer ‘burn’ (damage to food from freezing) and gives food more ‘microwave tolerance’. Last but not least, it can create a texture. Whatever consistency is needed – crisp, crunchy, melting, creamy, succulent, gummy, mouth filling, elastic, smooth, shreddable, jellied, stringy, cuttable, short, smooth, cohesive or chewy – multi-tasking starch can deliver it.

Food manufacturers love starch for its ‘functionality’. Not only does starch make it practical to create a long list of manufactured food and drink products that would otherwise be totally unfeasible, starch is not fazed by the tough requirements of industrial food production. Its virtues for manufacturers are numerous, and according to one authority they include ‘adhesion, antistaling, binding, clouding, dusting, emulsion stabilisation, encapsulation, flowing aid, foam strengthening, gelling, glazing, moisture retention, molding, shaping, stabilising and thickening’. Starch truly is a miraculous ingredient that fulfils a whole catalogue of manufacturing needs.

But how can one boring, anodyne ingredient do so much? After all, starch in the form that ordinary people know it, such as cornflour and arrowroot, can only perform a fraction of the tasks mentioned above. As you might have guessed, the starches available to food manufacturers are rather remote relatives of those we might use at home. They have been altered in various ways to endow them with properties they lack in any of their recognised household forms. As one group of researchers puts it: ‘Food manufacturers generally prefer starches with better behavioral characteristics than those provided by native [natural] starches.’ Natural starches, you see, are badly behaved, dysfunctional starches that can only ever find their true potential through the improving hand of food technology.

Modified starch, the most familiar of these ‘improved’, more ‘functional’ starches, has clocked up decades of steadfast services to industrial food manufacture. This type of starch can be made using various techniques to change (modify) its characteristics. These include breaking it down with acids, bleaching it, converting it with enzymes, pre-gelatinising it by heating and drying it so that it forms a gel in cold water, oxidising it, cross-linking it with fats, converting it into esters or ethers, and bonding it with phosphates. Starch can also be browned using dry heat (dextrinisation) to turn it into ‘starch sugars’, such as maltodextrin. Put it this way, modified starch is definitely not something you could cook up in any home kitchen.