Soujouk from hamburger

Question

Can Armenian soujouk be made from regular OTC hamburger? Every recipe I've seen calls for multiple grinding of high quality beef from an experienced butcher. Not having access to this process I've made 10 lb batches 5 times with no problems using regular ground beef hamburger experimenting with different proportions of fat 80, 90, 93 percent. The meat is always refrigerated. I purchase 10 lbs of hamburger, add the spices, knead it well, refrigerate overnight, bag it in linen and hang to dry in another refrigerator for approximately 5 weeks. Slice, eat and enjoy. My concern is this may be unsafe. While I love the outcome and the taste I am worried about playing Russian roulette with my health. I have no education in food safety or preparation. Thank you for any suggestions. Ten pounds are drying in the refrigerator now. Continue, or throw it out?

Answer 1

Without claiming to dive too deeply into food safety education, I don’t think it’s a good idea to use pre-ground store-bought hamburger for the following reasons:

A significant source of risk with regards to meat is surface contamination (ignoring intra-muscular parasites). This typically happens during processing and handling. If there is contamination, it will generally stay on the surface of the meat, not penetrate it. So even on the off-chance that there’s something unwanted in a piece of meat (and we are within the recommended time-temperature safety boundaries re. bacterial growth and toxin formation), searing the surface will kill all questionable bacteria on the surface - and when serving raw meat like steak tartare, we can never eliminate all risk.

When hamburger is ground, the original surface area gets incorporated deeply into the resulting mince and the overall surface area is increased immensely. Potential contamination can get carried deeply inside the lump of meat, where it can grow (albeit very slowly if chilled properly), including the anaerobic nasties like C. botulinum. This is why fully cooking hamburger is recommended for food safety reasons.

If you use this hamburger from a commercial setting for your sausage, you are already starting out with an ingredient that’s not safe to consume raw. The further processing of cold curing will not turn an unsafe ingredient into a safe one. It’s up to you whether you want to consume your product. We can’t say whether it actually contains bacteria etc., food safety only deals with statistics and whether for a given product and given parameters, an item can be considered safe or not.

In raw sausage making, you typically start with large chunks of fresh meat (“safer” as described above and from a trustworthy source) and mince/grind it yourself, then immediately add (curing) salt, which will prevent bacterial growth (not adding salt is really playing Russian roulette with regards to food safety). So for your next attempt, you should rethink your choice of ingredients and remember that all raw sausage has a small remaining risk (as there is no heating step involved), so it’s not recommended for vulnerable groups like pregnant or immune compromised people, small children or the elderly.