Waist Friendly Wurst
October 21, 2007
It looks like sausage. It smells like sausage. And it pretty much tastes like sausage.
But instead of the usual 25 percent to 40 percent fat content of a regular sausage, butcher Josef Pointner's wurst, which was developed with the Fraunhofer Institute, is only about 2 percent fat. Entirely fat-free would only be possible in a vegetarian sausage.
It was Pointner's customers who gave him the idea for the new recipe, which is made with natural ingredients from pork and beef.
"More and more customers like Ms. Huber and Ms. Meier came into the store and said that their husbands weren't allowed to eat pork or beef anymore," the butcher said.
Real meat, more water
Low-fat varieties of sausage were already available, but even these contained 10 percent to 20 percent fat -- which his customers' doctors probably wouldn't have approved of. Those types with even less fat are typically made with poultry -- a switch neither Pointner nor his customers said they were willing to make.
To bring the fat content down, Pointner started by leaving out the bacon, rind and gristle and added water to the mixture instead of extra grease. The only drawback to the high water content is that the sausage can dry out more easily than the fatty version when not refrigerated.
"The first tries completely flopped," said Pointner. "They were like chewing gum."
After a few more attempts, the results started tasting a bit less like gum and more like sausage. The butcher called up the Fraunhofer Institute, a leading research organization in Germany, to share the news.
Pointner joined the institute in conducting further research and the team has since developed nearly fat-free recipes for a whole spectrum of German sausage varieties.
A major German retailer will begin producing the new sausage in the next few weeks, said Fraunhofer's Peter Eisner.
Interest from abroad
Germany may be home to a disproportionately high number of sausage lovers, but the new product is also making waves abroad.
"We're currently talking with a Russian company about starting a factory in Moscow," Eisner said. A partner in Beijing wants to offer the wurst in international hotels, and interest has come from the US, Latin America and other parts of Europe as well.