Recipe - FAILED. Please help me talk it out.

[LinkMeAllOver]

Okay, so earlier today I did a large batch that was supposed to emulate the flavour profile of Chinese and Taiwanese Lu Rou Fan, which is a simple pork with predominantly soy sauce and 5 spice as the standout flavours. I posited a question regarding salt vs. sodium with regards to working out how much salt to use since soy sauce is a major component and I didn't want a blisteringly salty end product. I thought I did the math properly and worked out how much salt was in the soy sauce I used, made the sausages, and even at the mixing stage I had doubts regarding the bind. Gave it a bit more time to mix but plunged ahead with stuffing. I just tasted it and the flavour is great but I'd say at best it reached about 70% bind. It had all the typical hallmarks you'd expect: kinda dry and a bit crumbly.

Here's the recipe:
2.100 kg pork
350g 5 spice
220g sugar
375ml soy sauce (each 15ml contains 1 gram sodium, which should equate to 2.5g total salt if my math is correct)
= additional 62.5g salt
215g salt
375ml rice wine (not rice wine vinegar)
60g ea. onion and garlic
30ml orange extract
45g dried orange rind

It certainly tasted salty as it normally would. With 277.5g of salt in 2.100kg meat = 13% salt.

So, one would think the culprit is the combined acidity of the soy sauce and rice wine, right? I'm happy to eliminate the wine since I don't really think it showed through very much and wasn't as much of a factor in the flavour profile as I would have thought/liked. I've read that soy sauce typically has an acidity of 1% lactic acid. I've seen people talk about using baking soda to neutralize acid before using ingredients in sausage. Any idea how I can do the math of how much to use to kill off the acid in the soy sauce?

I also need to figure out what to do with 45 lbs. of no sausage product that I can't sell. I thinking of breaking it all out of casing and repacking it as sausage crumble for stir fry and dumpling/gyoza? Any other ideas?

[redzed]

2.1 kg pork? is that correct?

[LinkMeAllOver]

21.1 kg pork? is that correct?

Nope. Mistyped. 21kg. Sorry.

I'm not able to edit the original post? Is that correct? Just curious. I don't see a little pencil icon to edit it.

[Albertaed]

Is this a cooked sausage or dry sausage? I tend to think your bind issue is in the mixing or if cooked the temps it’s cooked at.

[LinkMeAllOver]

This is a fresh sausage cooked. I cook them all the same way, low heat over a grill or pan-roasted.

[Albertaed]

Well I’d make it again taking care of your mixing and cooking to be sure you eliminate your techniques. If your cooking does not cook out all of the fat and it mixed well then you can investigate further. Maybe you are simply asking to much out of a fresh cooked sausage texture wise . A picture of the final cooked product would be a big help.

[Albertaed]

Well I’d make it again taking care of your mixing and cooking to be sure you eliminate your techniques. If your cooking does not cook out all of the fat and it mixed well then you can investigate further. It’s not really stated how much and what type of fat you are using.Maybe you are simply asking to much out of a fresh cooked sausage texture wise . A picture of the final cooked product would be a big help.

[Mmmm Meat]

That's a great question. I'd always assumed that NaCl was the source of saltiness in Soy Sauce (and it may be). The ingredients list of Soy Sauce lists only Sodium content (and not Chloride). If I remember my chemistry from a hundred years ago, NaCl dissociates in a water based fluid to become Sodium and Chloride ions - not totally bound together as they are in crystalline salt. When including it in sausage I would assume that you use the content of Sodium per volume of Soy Sauce and measure it as though it was crystalline salt.

Here's some reading - the section about a third of the way down the page called "Mechanisms of Salt Tasteis" indicates that Sodium is primarily responsible for a salty taste. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK5 ... 2C%201980).

If it was me, I'd mix up just a pound of grind and use the 879 mg sodium / 16 g soy sauce as though it was pure NaCl, dose it up to your desired Soy Sauce addition and use that sodium content as though it was pure salt. For example, if you wanted to add 32 gr of Soy Sauce to the mix, then you calculate the salt addition as 1758 mg NaCl. If nothing else, it gives you a good starting point from which to adjust your crystalline salt addition in future attempts.

Edit (number three) - I might be wrong, but I believe if the fat content of the mix isn't somewhere around 20% or more, the sausage mix may end up dry and crumbly. You didn't say what your fat content was, so I added this as another potential source of the problem. Good luck!