The humble sausage.
Every year in the UK we eat a meaty 3 billion of them.
From coiled Cumberlands to herby Lincolnshires and skinny chipolatas.
There's no doubt about it, we love our bangers. Mmm.
Tonight we follow the production of traditional pork sausages.
From farm to fork, via this rural factory in North Yorkshire.
I'm Gregg Wallace.
Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!
I'm finding out how the simple sausage...
That's a sausage superhighway!
..is at technology's cutting edge.
This is the first one we're running in a factory. Hey-hey!
I'm Cherry Healey.
Slow and painful.
I want to know how to get the best from our bangers.
We've got a grill versus a fry.
Fight it out!
And I'm discovering the secret of a favourite sausagey snack.
And the egg drops into that sock of meat.
Is a meat sock a technical term?
And historian Ruth Goodman... Oooh!
..learns how a German bratwurst became top dog in America.
So we're getting an early association between sausage dogs,
dogs and sausages.
Every week, this factory produces more than 4 million sausages.
And this is the delicious story of how they put the sizzle
into every one.
Welcome to Inside The Factory.
This is the Heck sausage factory in Ripon, North Yorkshire.
It's the largest independent sausage company in Britain.
22,000 square feet and 101 workers.
All dedicated to one of our favourite traditional foods.
Over a year, they turn out what would be a string of sausages
nearly 13,000 miles long.
That would stretch from here to Honolulu and back.
They make 17 different types of premium bangers,
including chicken and chorizo.
But tonight we're following the production
of their 97% pork variety.
Is that good? That's very good. OK, thank you.
And pork comes from pigs.
Most British pigs are born and reared indoors.
But to get a close-up look, Cherry's at a farm in Suffolk,
where the piglets are bred outside.
17,000 of them a year.
Hi, Jonathan. Hello. I've never seen anything like this.
Jonathan Greene has been working with pigs for 25 years.
They've all got their little houses and their courtyard
and their feeding troughs. It's like a little town.
Yes. On this field alone, there's 750 sows and their babies.
Jonathan and other large-scale pig farmers use crossbreeding
for the best commercial results.
What breed are these pigs?
These sows are Landrace-Duroc crosses,
chosen for hardiness. So you get the combination of a hardy sow
having large litters.
And we use the Hampshire boars because they give us good muscles,
good meats in the carcass.
This sow is about two years old and this is her fourth litter.
All right, shall we play count the piglet?
Oh, look. Oh, Mummy's showing me her sign of "go away".
They're four days old and they're already running around
and are really strong.
Over the next five weeks, they'll double in weight
and they'll look like this.
Then they'll be moved on.
When will they leave the farm? They will leave the farm tomorrow.
Tomorrow? Yes. Where will they go tomorrow?
They will go to a farm and be reared indoors for 22, 23 weeks...
..on that farm. And then they go...? To be made into...
Sausages. Sausages, yeah.
Is it more cost-effective to take them indoors?
Very much more cost-effective, because to rear them outdoors,
running around in this cold environment,
their food conversion's not very good at all.
Cos they're burning off lots of energy...
Yes. ..protecting themselves from the cold? Yes.
When they leave here, they'll go on to a diet
that will grow them in such a way that they have
lots of lean growth, but not excessive fat growth.
Because people don't want to eat too much fat,
but they want a little bit of fat for the succulence in the meat.
They'll go to an abattoir at about six months old,
the same age and size as these pigs,
who are staying on Jonathan's farm to breed.
Look how curious they are! Hello.
How does it make you feel to see your pigs go off?
It's part of the business that you're in, is to produce meat.
You look after them as well as you can,
but I don't get attached to them, no. I'm getting attached now!
Oh, my God, they're biting my boot!
About 30% of the meat on a pig is suitable for sausages.
That'll be the shoulder cuts, the belly,
and perhaps some from the neck.
It's a lot. It is a lot, yes.
It's a huge amount. Yes. Yeah. Nothing on a pig is wasted at all.
The loin is used for chops, the ham for ham.
What about something like the snout or the ears?
Well, the ears and the trotters will probably go over to China
because they're delicacies. No part is wasted.
No. Snout to tail, nothing's wasted.
You know, they're fighting over your welly boot because they all want
to have a nibble of your welly boot. Yeah. And my coat.
Will they just eat anything?
SHE LAUGHS
Or beat you up, yeah!
I mean, it was inevitable!
You know what? If you kneel in a field of pigs,
that's going to happen. It is, it is. Yeah.
This farm doesn't supply OUR factory,
but 60 other British pig farms do.
All the animals are slaughtered
according to industry-standard methods.
Then the pork shoulders are taken to commercial butchers.
One of them is a family firm in Consett near Durham.
Whoa!
You go through how many shoulders a day?
3,000 to 4,000.
That's immense. Yes.
Commercial director Jack Young checks them for quality.
You've got a good bit of solid lean meat there.
Decent amount of fat coverage there, but not too much.
What's a shoulder got that makes it good for sausages
that a belly wouldn't?
A pork shoulder is about 80% lean, 20% fat.
And that gives you a good mix for a solid sausage.
I'm making sure there's no hair on the rind.
So a perfect sausage pig is bald with a bit of fat? Yes.
THEY LAUGH
These super-sized shoulders are about twice as big
as the ones in your local butcher's.
Arr, Jim lad! Ha-ha-haar!
I'm on it like a car bonnet!
So I hang on to the leg here, hook it somewhere... Oh!
Oh, that's a slippery one.
Our countdown to sausages...
Whoa!
..begins.
There's something wrong with your hook there - it just slipped off.
There are up to 28 butchers at work here
deboning and preparing the meat.
They're protected by chainmail.
A 21st-century stainless steel version of medieval battle dress.
Mate, I'm dressed up. Can I get a knife?
Not a chance, no. No? 100%, no.
Tony Lawes is head of production.
So, this is real butchery.
There's very skilled people here, yeah.
There's dangerous machines and dangerous, obviously, implements.
Each knife is numbered and allocated to a butcher,
who must keep it perfectly sharp.
What do you have to do? Take out the bone, take off the skin,
take out all the bits you don't need?
First two gentlemen take the ribcage off.
What is happening here? That's an open-top de-rinder.
It's a very dangerous machine.
Got to be very skilled to do this, I tell you.
Wow!
Wow.
There's a blade there, that's a big blade.
Whoa, whoa. All the way across that way.
The razor-sharp points on the roller pull the meat onto the blade,
which strips off the skin.
He's the only one not dressed up in chainmail. Well, you can't wear
one of these chainmail because he's got teeth on this machine,
so that would grab you and take you in.
Ah. So he can't have any of that.
The skin can be made into pork scratchings,
or sold to other factories for budget sausages.
Brilliant.
The most skilled butchers work alone.
This lad's the fastest in the building. 570 in a day.
All I just saw was a blur of arms and a knife!
The rest are on the pace line.
They have about ten seconds to cut away their part of the shoulder
as it moves along the conveyor.
When I'm not here, do you play music?
Yes. You do? I like Abba when I'm deboning meat.
Abba doesn't make you bone it fast.
You want summat loud and summat with a beat in, you know what I mean?
A bit of AC/DC. Yes.
# You got it!
# Yes, you have! #
From the first to the last man on the line,
it takes just one minute to completely debone a joint.
And this line will do 2,000, 2,500 a day.
Fabulous. Fabulous.
Do you know what? I thought this would all be like machine.
I didn't think I'd find a line of skilled butchers.
Every animal's totally different.
Yeah, you don't make animals in a machine, they're all different.
Yeah, so every one is different.
# If you want blood
# You got it! #
The shoulder blade comes out and the ball socket,
then a lean cut of meat named for its shape.
Leg-of-mutton cut on a pig. Every animal's got them, you see.
Every animal's got a leg of mutton.
Yeah. It's solid. Solid, pure meat.
That's a big steak. Yeah.
It's only used in skinny ranges of sausages.
There's not enough fat on it to make a sausage.
Some people like more meat. All this health kick, no more fat.
Do you know what I mean? You need a bit of fat.
Of course you do. It's a sausage!
Next one, he takes all the glands off.
Any bit of gristle that's been left on.
The average shoulder has enough meat for around 100 sausages.
Is this now finally our sausage meat?
It certainly is. Well, hang on a minute, we've taken quite a bit off.
I mean, we started off with, what, 12, 14 kilos? Yeah.
What have we got now? Four?
Four, four and a half. Nothing gets wasted, though.
Even the bones. The bones get taken away.
They get boiled and... For lipsticks, mascaras,
anything with animal fat in.
Wine gums - that's where you get 'em from.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Well, you don't wear mascara, so you're all right.
One minute. Lipstick, you do.
GREGG LAUGHS Aye, I've seen it.
Thank you so much, mate. No problem. Honestly, I mean that.
Thank you so much.
These workers slice their way through a pallet of shoulders
every ten minutes.
Then the meat for our sausages is vacuum-packed and dispatched
on the same day.
Pretty much every country in the world has its own kind of sausage.
But whether you prefer salami, saucisson or saveloy,
their history goes back a long way.
Ruth is in St Albans investigating.
6,000 years ago, people in the Middle East were putting cooked meat
into goat stomach linings.
In ancient Britain we were probably doing something similar.
But it was the Romans who gave us our first modern type of sausage.
Back in 300 AD,
St Albans was known as Verulamium
and was one of the biggest towns in Roman Britain.
Excavations have revealed tantalising clues
about ancient sausage-making here.
My guide is archaeologist David Thorold.
David!
Hello, welcome to Verulamium. Thank you.
Were the Romans big sausage eaters?
They seem to have brought a lot of their cuisine with them
and sausages were one of the things that they ate regularly
back in Rome and around the Mediterranean,
so it does seem likely they would have been eating sausages here.
Is there any proof at all?
Well, it's hard to find definitive evidence for something
like a sausage in archaeological context normally,
but here at Verulamium we do look like we've actually got
some firm evidence for it.
So we have a photo here of excavations carried out
in the 1930s by Mortimer Wheeler,
and in one of the buildings
in the town he found under the floor
a number of semi-articulated
horse skeletons.
And this is his report?
And this is a section written by a professor who was an expert
in bones at the time and he says in here,
"The pieces of horse dismembered in this way were perhaps the waste
"of a sausage manufactory."
So sausage manufactory - that's a sausage factory?
Yes, it's a relatively small-scale one, but, clearly,
if you're dealing with more than one animal,
you're doing quite a few sausages from that.
We don't know how horse-meat sausages would have tasted,
but there is a 2000-year-old recipe for a pork variety
cooked by the Romans.
I've come to the Verulamium Museum, where Italian chef
Valentina Harris... Hello!
..is helping me recreate a version of these sausages.
"Lucanian sausage is prepared as written below.
"Pound pepper, cumin, savory, rue and parsley.
"Spice of bay berry.
"And add liquamen and the meat that has been pounded well."
So the main job, really, is to pound our meat up.
Oh, look, there we go. Oh, yeah. Coming through.
The recipe calls for sort of half the proportion being pork
and the other half being pork fat or lard.
Right.
Oh, yum.
Along with the extra fat, they added a salty fermented fish sauce.
That is liquamen.
Right. It seems an odd thing to be putting with meat, really,
doesn't it? I know, but they put it everywhere.
This fish sauce is similar to the kind still used in Asian cooking.
I'm going to go...there.
But the innovation from the Romans that's still in our sausages today
is the spicing and seasoning. Cumin, bay leaves and pepper.
So that's very salami like.
We need a good pinch of salt going in there. Mm-hmm.
In goes the parsley.
So, now, the next thing we need to do is to get it
into the pork casing. Right.
Push down like this, OK? Mm-hm. Mm-hm.
OK.
OK, squeeze and twist.
Ooh! Ooh! THEY LAUGH
Perfect. Right, let's tie them all off.
If they were to be kept long term,
the sausages would have been smoked before frying.
So... There we are.
There we go. These are very elegant ones that we prepared.
OK.
That's salty. That is seriously salty.
This probably shouldn't be a surprise.
The name sausage comes from the Latin salsus,
meaning salted or preserved in salt.
To me, it tastes like the sort of food that is for filling you up
after...heavy labour. Like a long march or something.
Mmm. Yeah, they're quite spicy!
So what did the Romans ever do for us?
They certainly gave British cooking flavour, and that, I think,
includes the great British sausage.
I won't look at it quite the same again!
THEY LAUGH
The pork shoulders from the butcher's
have travelled just over an hour
down into North Yorkshire.
And they've arrived at our factory...
..where every day, they make around 625,000 bangers.
The intake area receives a steady supply of fresh meat
from 7am to 5pm...
..overseen by Jack Tate.
Is this the pork shoulder? This is it, yeah.
Brilliant. OK, all right, how do we get it off?
20 of these one-tonne meaty mountains come into the factory
every day.
Test your driving skills!
It's 38 minutes since sausage production began at the butcher's.
OK, mind your feet.
Mind your feet! Pork coming through! Prime pork!
I just need to check the temperature, make sure it's all OK.
I can tell you what the temperature is. It's cold, mate.
Sitting around two degrees.
That's good? Spot on. Better get on with it, then, hadn't we? Yeah.
We need to grab you some seasoning. What's that, a mix? Yeah.
Do you know what's in it? Salt, pepper, little bit of ginger,
little bit of coriander in there, and preservative.
I tell you what, let's not bother with it,
because I don't like coriander.
We'll try it.
The factory get through 1,000 kilos of herbs and spices every day.
That's it, we just need to go grab some frozen pork.
Cor, that is super cold. Super, super cold!
Whoa!
Whe-ey!
Oh, that is freezing!
What temperature is that freezer? About minus 18.
Why have you got a load of fresh and some frozen?
That's to help with temperature control.
As the pork's going through the machines,
they tend to heat up and it's just to help with keeping the temperature
of the pork down. Oh, OK. Is that it?
That's your lot. So to make sausages, just the pork shoulder,
just seasoning? That's it. Thank you very much indeed, Jack.
I'll take it from here. Yeah.
Oh!
THEY LAUGH
Right, I'm coming! I'm coming!
I'm taking these ingredients along the length of the building
and into the first stage of production, mixing.
You, I suppose, are Mica.
I am, yes. And you are in charge of all of this?
Yeah. Let's get some frozen meat flaked.
You get a box. Can you manage?
I'm strong as an ox, me.
The workers wear hygienic head covers and layer up underneath
because the factory is kept at a chilly 4 degrees C,
for meat safety.
This is Vadim. He works in this area.
Right.
This is the pork that I saw at the deboning place.
It's just the frozen stuff, right?
It is, yeah. So we put it in there to flake into little bits
so that when we put it in to be mixed, it doesn't break the machine.
Here we are. Whey-hey!
They must be very strong, fast blades.
Yeah. Very strong.
I think that's lovely. You're making little gammon steaks. Yeah.
What do we do now? Right, so this goes over to the bowl chopper.
The what? The bowl chopper. Bowl chopper? Bowl chopper, yeah.
It's a big bowl.
Now push it straight onto there.
Go on!
Fab. So we're mixing the meat together.
This big bowl spins, so it's moving the meat round
whilst those blades are chopping. Oh! So the arm stays static.
Yeah. Ah!
All that we need to do is just to press the button.
It's going.
Have you ever dropped on the floor?
No. Never did?
Maybe once, right? Maybe...
THEY LAUGH
We're using 97% shoulder meat,
but legally, a pork sausage can contain just 42% meat,
which could include skin and fat.
Rusk can make up the rest.
The blades are now chopping up the meat.
In here is 50% fresh and 50% frozen pork.
Now we stop. Why do you stop?
Why do you stop? Next up we need to put in the seasonings.
Seasoning? Yeah. The stuff I got earlier, right? Yeah, that's right.
Is there no way of doing this quicker?
Unless you want a rubbish sausage, that's how we do it.
Yeah!
Ha-ha-ha!
I love the sudden waterfall of sausage meat.
I love that.
After 15 minutes of mixing,
we've got a 150-kilo batch of roughly minced seasoned meat.
Where does this go, Mica?
Just on here. You're going to need to push it hard.
Push it real good? Yeah.
# Uh uh uh uh uh... # Push it real good!
Oh, my God. Yeah.
The floor's slippery. Right, I need a run-up.
Sorry, I should have listened. I wasn't listening.
Right, now what? So, that is going up there.
So you're going to have to lift it.
Yeah, get out. What button do I push?
This button here.
Excuse me. Excuse me, pointless me being here
if you're going to push the buttons. All right?
You can push it again. I'll push the next button, all right?
This will become 2,250 sausages.
It's, like, undulating, like waves on the sea.
It's a bit like a meat lava lamp.
And it's just one of 130 batches being made today.
There's a big corkscrew pushing all that meat down here
to make a sausage.
The meat moves down the giant funnel.
At the bottom it's finely minced and any remaining gristle
or cartilage is removed.
The meat gets pushed through these little holes and anything that
does not fit in those holes, this swipes it round into this hole.
That is brilliant.
Every day in the UK we cook up almost 8 million sausages,
but one in four us is reducing the amount of meat we eat
and looking for alternative sources of protein.
Cherry is on a meat-free mission.
This might look like meat, but it's a meat alternative.
It's all made from a veggie ingredient invented in the UK
which developed into a multimillion-pound industry.
I've come to meet technical manager Nigel Baines
at Quorn's Middlesbrough factory.
Lovely to meet you. Hi, Cherry.
Nice to meet you. So, where does it all begin?
Well, Cherry, it starts with a tiny little natural fungus.
Fungus? It's very, very tiny. I mean, it's a speck!
This fungus is found in soil and is high in protein.
A speck of it is fermented by feeding it with oxygen,
carbohydrate and water.
Rather like fermenting yeast when you make bread.
What we try to do is make sure that it's growing at its maximum rate.
What's the optimal temperature?
About 28 degrees centigrade.
I understand.
That's my optimal temperature, too.
It's wonderful.
Yes. Holiday temperature.
The mix doubles in size every five hours.
If you just slacken that, you can transfer.
After 24 hours, the mixture is moved to a bigger space.
There it goes. There it goes. There it goes.
A 40-metre-high fermenter with a 165,000-litre capacity.
Over the next four days, they continually feed the solution.
And as it ferments, it forms solid protein.
Then they can start harvesting it.
Wow! Below the silos are 850-litre containers.
Well, this is where the raw material comes out.
If you press that button there.
Whoa! Oh, my goodness me.
We've separated out the liquid and kept the solids,
that's what we want.
This is now called mycoprotein.
Oh, wow. It looks like cake mixture.
Each fermenter will make 60 of these containers every day.
Well, that's staggering!
1,500 tonnes of mycoprotein from one tiny speck.
That's the same as the weight of 250 elephants.
And there's enough in that container
to make more than a quarter of a million sausages.
Nigel, that is mind-blowing. Just that one container.
Yeah. No cows, no field, no cattle feed.
No. Absolutely amazing.
Has this got the Nigel seal of approval?
It has. OK.
It's now ready to go off to our other factory.
The raw ingredient is transferred 16 miles away
to the care of factory manager Brian Hammond.
Hi there. What are we making today?
Today we're making mince.
Mince is the most popular product in their range.
Oh!
Oh! Wow!
The mycoprotein takes the lift.
Goodbye, paste.
And is dropped into a giant mixer.
Just connect it onto there. Just like that?
Using a vacuum pump we add seasoning,
flavourings and egg to bind it all together.
It's blended with water
and then tipped into a machine that slices it up.
So you see it's now got the colour.
Yeah. You see the flecks in there, the brownness?
That's where the malt is still in there.
They look like giant hamburgers.
But meat free, obviously.
The mycoprotein now mimics the taste of meat.
Next it needs to look like it.
The blocks are steamed at 85 degrees and then chilled.
But it doesn't look quite right yet.
So next it's chopped.
Hey-hey. We have mince.
We do. If you take a little bit... Whoo.
It's very fragile.
The soft consistency means it would just squash back together when cooked.
So in here is our freezer and you'll see
that we've taken our delicate mince
and we've got this freezing process... Hello there!
We throw the mycoprotein up in the air -
it allows the cold air to allow each individual piece to be frozen
and stops it from clumping together.
It looks like the front of a gig at Glastonbury,
it looks like the mosh pit!
Ice crystals help further develop the fibrous texture.
Oh, absolutely amazing.
So that is hard now, and brittle,
but without that freezing it would just be gloopy and sticky.
Yeah. And now you have something that can be used in almost anything
you would use mince. Oh, exactly.
With different treatment, as well as mince,
the mycoprotein can be turned into veggie versions
of more than 100 dishes, including nuggets, burgers...
..and bangers.
It's so amazing to know that from such a tiny, tiny starting point,
so many different foodstuffs can be made with different flavours
and textures.
In North Yorkshire, we're in the factory's filling area,
ready to turn 150 kilos of pork mince
into their best-selling bangers.
They have machines to put their sausage meat into skins,
but supervisor Mica is showing me how it used to be done.
By hand.
Looks easy. All you've got to do is hold the end, right?
Hang on a minute. Who on earth is going to want a 20-yard sausage?
So you knot it after.
Oh! Look at that.
Do you reckon you could do it that fast?
No. I think I can do that bit.
I've no idea what's happening with that bit.
That is amazing.
Right. Let's limber up, right?
Using the button there.
Pressing it here, right? Yeah, that's correct.
Whoa, whoa, whoa!
Shall we try again?
You're letting go of the skins too quickly.
That's it.
Filling a sausage requires precise meat flow,
speed and pressure... all at the same time.
Oh, that's better.
That's the best you've done so far.
Right, and now I've got to try and knot it, right? Yeah.
I can't do it. I mean, I literally cannot do it. Oh...
MICA LAUGHS
That is really bad.
Our batch of 2,250 sausages will need over 280 metres of skin.
That's nearly five times the height of the Tyne Bridge.
What is this? It's a collagen skin.
Made out of what? This is beef hide.
Weren't they traditionally made from intestine?
Yeah, they did used to be guts,
but this makes the consistency of the sausage better.
Even a sausage-filling expert can only make 1,500 of them an hour.
And this factory needs to work 24 times faster than that
to keep up with orders.
So this machine is making 600 sausages per minute.
No way. Yeah.
A minute? A minute? Not an hour? Yeah, a minute.
Sausage meat is inside those tubes?
Yeah. The metal tubes. You call them horns, right?
Horns. And that horn is constantly pushing sausage meat out? Yeah.
The skin is loaded onto the hollow horn, which starts spinning.
The meat is pushed through the middle and into the skin,
creating one long rotating sausage.
So there's two horns on the machine, so it can reload really quickly.
This is it, right, here we go.
Skin on the top. That one will get to the end.
Spins it round. Genius stuff!
Then two silicon belts grip the sausage between them.
A quick pinch as the sausage is spinning
creates a twist every 12.5 centimetres.
How good is that?
That is very efficient sausage-making.
It is a bit faster than your sausage-making, isn't it?
But I would have caught up eventually.
It's brilliant!
What's this bit doing?
This is cutting them.
The linked sausages are pulled into the cutter,
which has three spinning blades.
They slice and separate them at a rate of 2,000 a minute.
That's a sausage superhighway!
Look at the speed of them!
It's crazy, isn't it? Oh, this is fabulous.
In just one hour and nine minutes,
we've made bumper-to-bumper sausages.
But what's the best way to cook them for the fullest flavour?
Cherry's in Chester,
putting that burning question to local sausage lovers.
Excuse me.
Can I ask you a question? What is the perfect way to cook a sausage?
Fry it. It's got to be fried.
What about you? Under the grill, it's got to be.
Under the grill. So we've got a grill versus a fry.
Fight it out!
How does one cook them to perfection?
What is the proper way? In the oven. In the oven.
What's the perfect way to cook a sausage?
Oh, fried. Oh, not a grill or an oven? No, definitely fried.
It's a really mixed bag here in Chester.
Some people like to fry, some people swear by grilling.
Some people can't get enough of the oven.
The people of Chester have spoken,
but I need to know what science thinks.
I'm heading to the University of Chester
to run an experiment with food scientist Dr Stuart Farrimond.
Dr Stu. Hey, Cherry.
How do you cook the perfect sausage?
Very good question. We're going to put them to the test.
Cherry, first off, we're going to do a long, slow fry for 25 minutes.
And is there a trick to it?
Plenty of oil, keep it turning, don't let it go black.
So it's quite a high-maintenance method. It is. OK.
Oh, it smells so good.
The next batch go in the oven.
170 degrees C for 25 minutes. Give them a flip halfway through.
I like doing it this way.
It's very lazy. You put them in a pan, boom, done.
Our final set head under the grill.
So, what is the secret to cooking sausages under the grill?
We're getting them on there for 15 minutes and,
like when you fry,
you need to turn them to make sure that they're brown all over,
and the brown is the secret to the flavour.
Oh, it's such a thing of beauty!
There you can see the fat drips down.
More fat in the pan and less in your tummy, whereas actually you can see,
with the frying pan, it's all right there, isn't it?
In their different ways, all our sausages are browning up,
developing their flavour.
What's going on is a very important reaction
called the Maillard reaction,
and on the surface, you can see it's browning
and that's the reaction taking place.
When it gets hot, the building blocks of the proteins,
called the amino acids,
react with traces of sugar and they produce thousands
of different chemicals, the ones that give it meaty flavours.
You can kind of get nutty, caramely flavours.
It's what makes it taste good.
We're dividing up our cooked sausages
and giving some of each type
to the lab to measure their fat content, moistness and texture.
Wow! Mm! Slow and painful!
We've also asked ten sausage fans to rate them
in a controlled taste experiment.
It's a blind test,
so they don't know how each sausage has been cooked.
Good day to you, Sofia.
Hello. So which was your favourite sausage?
418. Why was that?
I love a barbecued sausage
and I love it when they're all brown
and quite dark colour on the outside.
Rob, you've left the most mouse-like portion of sausage on each plate.
I just kept trying bits and bits.
It's so wonderfully...unusual.
This one I liked.
539. But to be fair,
they were all very nice sausages.
There's got to be a winner.
I think it's that one, but who doesn't like a good sausage?
Hi, Jenny. Hello.
Which was the sausage for you?
Definitely this one.
Every side is brown and I do like my sausages to be brown.
That is your one true love.
It is, 418.
Our testers chose 418, the slow-fried sausage,
as their favourite,
with a score of 76 out of 100.
Can science explain why it came out on top?
The lab results are in, and here we have the texture analysis
of the sausage. That was the cutting through the sausage.
So it gives us an idea of how soft, how juicy it is.
Grey is the fried, and you can see the fried one needs
about half the force to cut through it, compared to the other two ways.
So the fried is softer and will give you a more succulent sausage.
Why is so much softer?
The surface hasn't dried out.
It had oil over it the whole time, whereas the other two ways,
they were dry ways of cooking,
so it's got drier and a bit tougher on the outside, as well.
It has a lot more fat in, though, so if we go to the next results,
here's the percentage of fat in the different kinds of sausage.
So when you compare the fried sausage to the oven and the grilled,
that difference, in fact, is huge.
Is a lot of the flavour in the fat?
Yes. The fat conveys a lot of those flavour molecules and also there are
fat-sensitive taste receptors in the mouth.
Kind of melt in your mouth.
The tasters confirmed that the fried has a better texture,
and in terms of overall liking,
they loved the fried much more than the other two.
Frying might not be the healthiest option, but our test confirmed
it delivers flavour from your sausage.
I'll just take one for the road.
So it seems that it's low and slow frying all the way
if you want to get the most flavour from your banger.
It does take more work, but like most things in life,
good things come to those that wait.
In this rural factory,
there are 37,000 sausages an hour heading into the packing area.
It's the biggest part of the building,
with an average of 32 workers across four lines.
Sausage production is an hour and ten minutes in, and they're ready
to be packed.
Let's see how you get on with this.
OK. You're going to need some of these. This looks like a giggle!
Well, you're welcome, you're welcome.
What do we have...? Thank you, thank you very much. This is Solis.
Solis? Yes. If you were my brother, you'd be Solis Wallace!
Solis Wallace. Ah, nice! Yeah!
I've been to many factories that are almost fully automated,
so it's unusual to see so many people hand packing.
Crying out loud, you have to work fast here, don't you?
Yeah. The machine is shooting out 600 sausages a minute
and we're packing ten at a time for the family-sized pack.
Argh! Argh!
Put nice in...
What do you mean, "put nice"?! Solis is very good with his sausages.
That thing there is called the sausage separator.
Solis actually created that himself.
No way! Why did you make a sausage separator?
Well, better system, easier job.
There used to be workers only on one side of the conveyor.
Then Solis drew up his invention
on a beer mat and the factory got it made.
As a result, they've doubled their packing rate.
What was your job in Lithuania?
Mechanic. Mechanic?
I see. That's fantastic!
Have some sausages!
Coming down! Oh!
Georgeta, she's one of our best packers.
Is your surname Sausage?
Georgeta Sausage? Not quite, but I will change it.
What do I have to do to be a good sausage packer?
You have to want to work.
If you don't want to work, you can't be...
Do you ever sing songs on the line?
Yeah, we always sing songs on the line.
The butchers who deboned our pork liked working to hard rock.
What is the best music to pack sausages? Disco music. Disco!
MUSIC: Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel by Tavares
What is the most spoken language in this factory?
Russian. Russian? What other nationalities do we have here?
Latvia, Lithuania, Polish people, yeah. And I'm from Romania.
What is the Romanian for sausage?
Carnat... Carnat...
# Heaven must be missing an angel... #
The company is growing fast
and trying new ways of speeding up production,
including testing this prototype packing robot.
This machine is the first one of its type to be running in a factory.
Really? Yeah.
So, it makes all of our packing automatic.
The sausages go into the machine, collecting them into sixes,
passing them along and putting them into the trays on its own.
I see.
It will be able to pack 1,800 sausages a minute.
40% quicker than by hand.
Hey-hey!
Packs of sausages!
It's amazing.
The company says better productivity means they'll be able to allocate
the packers to other areas...
..but there's one tradition that won't change.
PA SYSTEM CHIMES
Why did you build this factory so close to the airport?
Every day, the whole factory stops for lunch together.
What are we going to have for lunch? Sausages. No way? Yeah.
At 4 degrees C, it feels like
we've been working in a giant fridge.
Oh, it's warm! It's nice and warm!
Yeah. Can I have three sausages, please?
Course you can. You're a Corsican?
Of course you can. Course you can, course you can.
I am hungry!
Give me a factory canteen and a traditional lunch and I am happy.
I'll eat sausages with anything,
and one particularly British way is wrapped around an egg.
I've always wondered, how do you get an egg inside a Scotch egg?
And that's not the only mystery.
No-one knows who invented them.
One theory is that Fortnum and Mason created them
for rich coach travellers.
Another that they were developed from an early Indian dish
called nargisi kofta.
One thing's for certain...
..we love them!
The biggest Scotch egg factory in the UK is in Lincolnshire.
That's a lot of eggs.
Production starts with 20,000 pre-shelled hard-boiled eggs,
being checked over by Andy Dawson.
Hi, Andy. Hi there.
There is something weird about a big bag of eggs.
Bit strange, yeah. Got to put it into here first of all.
Right. Oh, wow!
That is really good fun.
They almost look like ping-pong balls or golf balls.
Golf balls! Then we need to use the ladle.
Any ones that are defective, we'll take out here.
We're looking for eggshells, we are looking for smaller eggs,
broken eggs, like that one. Pull them out.
Yeah, pull them out. And then they go into the bottom.
What happens to the waste eggs? They get used again for mayonnaise.
So nothing gets wasted? No, nothing gets wasted.
What happens next? These are moved along the egg-steppers
and then they get dropped into a little hole there
and that's where the meat comes in.
I feel like this is where the magic is.
A red laser checks if an egg is there,
then a piston pushes it into a tube of sausage meat.
The meat basically forms a sock
and the egg drops into that sock of meat. A meat sock!
Is a meat sock a technical term? No, not really!
The meat sock twists and seals the top and bottom.
It takes just three seconds to wrap an egg.
They start out oval, but tumbling off multiple conveyors
rolls them into a spherical shape.
It goes into the batter machine.
Ooh!
Is that a batter waterfall?
Just flour and water. That's fabulous.
The egg parcels drop onto a conveyor slide filled with crumbs and,
as they roll, they get covered.
What is the crumb made out of?
Depending on the customer, we have different ones.
We have tortilla crumb. Tortilla?
Tortilla crumb. Then we also have seeded,
breaded that goes on certain ones. You could put almost anything on.
Anything. Anything you like.
They look much more like a Scotch egg now.
Yeah. So how many of these do you make?
Approximately, average, 1.4 million a week.
That's around 74 million Scotch eggs made here every year.
Who eats all those Scotch eggs?!
British summer time, everybody loves them.
Now covered in breadcrumbs,
they enter the fryer for about seven minutes at 170 degrees C.
Oh, they're so beautiful!
Fresh out of the fryer.
Yeah. Can I crack one open?
Go for it. Oh, that is a lovely thing.
So there we go, the mystery of the Scotch egg is solved.
It's all down to amazing machines and the magic of a meat sock.
An hour and 20 minutes after we began making sausages,
and our porky parcels have reached the sealing section at the end
of the line.
Mica, explain me, please, what happens in here.
So, this is wrapping them, so it's putting a film round them.
You see the arms? They grab the trays and then it's pushed up
onto a hotplate, and the hotplate
melts a little bit of plastic on the top.
That is how they come out, heat sealed.
That is the film that is so satisfying to...
Pop. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!
Now they have to go through a series of safety checks.
Every tray of sausages passes under a detector to make sure
no metal has slipped into the meat.
Why is it going so fast?
It's like a... It's like a toboggan ride!
Is that the end of the production line? It is for this room.
Thank you, Mica. You're very welcome.
I never knew there was so much to a sausage.
There's still one more test to go, and it happens in the canteen.
Hello. You do the quality check, right?
You're in the right place. Hi. Isabel.
Right, what do we have to do to check quality?
Well, first thing is make sure that it's sealed properly
and it's properly filled. Then the next thing is to smell.
How many sausages do you smell in the course of a day?
More than I ever thought I would.
The sausages are weighed and then shallow-fried.
That's a mildly seasoned, mildly spiced, very meaty, bouncy sausage.
I think that is exactly as it should be.
The interesting thing is that you say it's mild,
because it's quite strong seasoning,
but because these are literally fresh off the line,
they haven't had time to kind of develop,
so it'll be a couple of days before they hit the shelves.
They'll get a stronger flavour? Yeah. Ah!
Brilliant. Thank you very much. You're very welcome.
Traditional bangers like these are the best-sellers in the UK,
but in the US, they're partial to a hot dog.
But just how American are they?
# Hot dog, she's my baby Hot dog, drives me crazy
# You want to see my baby in a hot dog stand... #
A red sausage in a white bun with mustard over the top.
It's an American icon.
But it turns out, it didn't originate in the USA.
American food anthropologist Kaori O'Connor has invited me to sample
the sausage that led to the hot dog.
Oh, yummy! Look at that. Oh, they look nice.
They do look nice, thank you. Yes, yes!
So where exactly did the hot dog really come from?
From the distant past, by way of Germany.
What we've got here is the classic bratwurst.
Very finely processed, mild sausages.
And one of the great things about these sausages,
they're so mild that they are very adaptable.
So how do we get, then, from this sort of German-style sausage
to what we think of as a hot dog,
always, and it's always, in a bun? This is how...
This is the father of the American hot dog, Charles Feltman.
Feltman was one of hundreds of thousands of German immigrants
who sailed into New York in the 19th century.
He arrives in New York about 1856.
He's young, he's 15, and he has to make a living.
What's he going to do? He thinks, "Food, fast food."
Now, in Germany,
the sausage has been a street food from before there were streets,
you know. He said, "Well, there are these sausages.
"What can I do to make them more attractive?"
And he thought, "I can put them in a bun. It's really easy."
And he would slash open the bun, put in a warm hot dog,
put on some mustard and there you are.
He sold them at Coney Island, which was the big resort.
So it's a sort of holiday food, it's cheap.
The Coney Island Red Hot!
And it was the fact that it was hot that sort of first captured
the imagination.
OK, a cold sausage is one thing but a hot sausage, yes,
it's much more appealing.
That explains half the name we know today,
but what about the other half?
Whoa, look at that!
When was the first reference to a hot dog?
We scoured the archives.
OK. And one of the earliest is here.
The Paterson Daily Press, 1892,
and it's a young boy who is so keen to get his hands on it. He says,
"Hey, mister, give me a hot dog, quick!"
The dog part can probably be traced back to a popular German pet.
One of the things the Germans brought over was their dogs.
Notably the dachshund, or sausage dog.
So we're getting an early association between sausage dogs,
dogs and sausages.
Because the sausage is long and narrow, and so was the dachshund.
In 1904, the association of dog and sausage was so close,
Thomas Edison, the inventor of the modern world, did a comic shot,
The Patent Dog Transformer.
I see! This is a complete howl. I love this! I love it.
Dogs go in one end and sausages come out the other.
A comical take on the urban legends
about the kind of meat in cheap sausages.
So that's it, then. The hot dog. All elements assembled.
You don't need much, do you, to make us happy?
This is perfect.
# Hot dog, that's a-what I like. #
At the factory, the sausages
have passed quality check with flying colours.
And they're ready to be boxed up.
Are you Harry?
Yes, nice to meet you. What happens here?
This is the sleeving side, so grab some of these.
Oh, I'm doing it, am I? You can give me a hand if you like. All right, OK.
Harry's been sleeving sausages for two years.
So with your finger, you want to
prop it against your hip like that
and then push it with your finger, like that, and all you have to do is
grab a pack and then just slide it in, just like that.
That's not difficult.
And then just pop it... I can do this, I can do this!
We have just four minutes to sleeve 175 packs before the next batch
rolls off the line.
Cannot get these things to fold up quick enough.
How many packs are you doing in the course of a day?
In a day, tens of thousands. Oh, my word!
And they won't stop coming along, will they?
I can't! I can't do it!
The fast pace is set by the sausage packers on the production line.
You can't stop here, really. What can go wrong?
If the sausages all fall on the floor,
which is what I don't really want.
We're doing it, we're getting in front. Gimme, gimme, gimme.
Look, this is good. This is really good.
We've eventually caught up. This is a job that is easy to do,
but very hard to do quickly.
Now the packs are date-stamped
for a ten-day shelf life and put in display cases of six.
I can keep up with this.
It's this bit here that fascinates me.
That's the box strapper. Box strapper? Box strapper.
What's your name? My name is Greg. Greg.
That's... Let me do it, let me do it, let me do it.
Try... Good!
You must have trapped your finger in...
You're not allowed to use your finger.
Show me. The sensor is working.
It sees your hand.
Oh, yeah, it's OK. It's nothing. It's OK!
I've got it.
It's been just two hours and 28 minutes since our pork shoulders
were deboned,
and we've made it to the final stage.
Distribution.
You must be Izzie, right? I am. Nice to meet you.
I'm Izzie. You're in charge of distribution.
I am. So we have about five lorries that load onto the dock each day.
How many pallets on each lorry?
So we usually get about 26 to 28 pallets,
so you're looking at about 10,000 sausages per pallet.
10,000 sausages per pallet?!
Per pallet. So if you look down the lorry now
we've got roughly 170,000 sausages there, so that's a lot of sausages.
These chilled bangers will be on the shelves
of 10,000 British supermarkets within two days,
and more are bought in London
than anywhere else.
I've enjoyed watching the sausages being made and I am pleased that
they actually contain so few ingredients,
but I am surprised that it's still really a people industry.
It requires enthusiastic and highly skilled people,
especially in the butchery.
But really, what they're making is something that we've all enjoyed
for hundreds and hundreds of years.
That is a sausage.
Next time...
Whoa!
..I get saucy in a Nottinghamshire curry factory...
I kind of want to strip off and get in.
..making a super-sized batch of tikka masala.
That smells good!
And Cherry turns Spice Girl in India.
When I woke up this morning,
I didn't think I'd be standing in a bag of chillies.