Picture the scene - you pick up a pack of plump, meaty and on the face of it great value sausages at the supermarket. You get home, put them in the pan and watch them shrink before your eyes sitting in a puddle of released water and fat.

You’ve just experienced a phenomenon the meatindustry calls cook-out.

Cook-out in all forms of meat is not unusual, but understanding what it is, why it happens and the amount you see may change your perspective on value. So, let’s start with the basics.

What is Cook-Out?

Cook-out (sometimes referred to as cooking loss or shrinkage), refers to the weight and volume meat – in this instance a sausage - loses during cooking. Often expressed as a percentage of its raw weight, cook-out happens when the proteins and fat within a sausage contract due to heat. The loss of fluid (water, juices, and fat) from the meat during cooking that you see in your pan, alters the structure of the sausage which causes the sausage to contract both in width and in length as it cooks.

How to calculate Cook-Out

Cook-out is calculated using the followingequation:

Cook-Out % = ((Raw weight − Cooked weight) ÷Raw weight) × 100

So, if a 100g sausage comes out of the panweighing 75g, that's a 25% cook-out. You've paid for 100g and received 75g ofedible product.

What Cook-Out Means for You as a Consumer

Fundamentally cook-out is a value-for-money issue. For example, if you spend £3.50 on a 400g pack of sausages with a 25% cook-out, you're effectively paying for 300g of cooked sausage. Buy a pack with a 15% cook-out for the same price and you receive 340g of cooked product. That's a 13% difference in actual food from the same shelf, at the same price.

Beyond this though it’s important to be awarethat high cook-out can also impact your cooking in other ways. For example, thetexture and appearance of sausage may suffer i.e. it may be smaller and dryer,and your pans performance could suffer.

Why Does Cook-Out Vary So Much Between Sausages?

Under The Products Containing Meat etc. (England) Regulations 2014, a product labelled as a pork sausage must contain a minimum of 42% pork meat. This means that the remaining 58% can legally be water, fat, rusk, cereals, soya, and other fillers. For reference a generic "sausage" not qualified by the name of a specific meat can contain as little as 32% meat. This is in stark contrast to a well-made butcher's sausage which will depending on the recipe typically contains 70–80%+ meat.

However, when it comes to sausages quantity of meat is not the only factor to take into consideration; ingredient quality and formulation play a critical role and effect on the final product.  

In simple terms: more quality meat =stronger protein network = less water lost = lower cook-out.

Sausage Cook-Out Industry Benchmarks

Although there are no hard and fast rules on what constitutes good versus bad cook-out the below is widely recognised for fresh pork sausages:

Under 15% - Excellent - characteristic of high-quality, high-meat sausages
15-20% - Acceptable - mid-range products
20-25% - Poor - significant water and filler content
25%+ - Very Poor - typically associated with budget products and high added water

Putting cook-out to the test

We believe that consumers deservetransparency. So, we purchased a range of branded and supermarket own-labelsausages and subjected them all to a standardised cook-out test under identicalcontrolled conditions.

Each pack was weighed raw. Each sausage wascooked under the same method, at the same temperature, for the same duration.Each was weighed again immediately after cooking with cook-out percentages calculatedfor each sausage and then averaged.

We are currently undertaking cook-out tests on both BRANDED and OWN LABEL premium plain pork sausages and will update this article with our results in due course.

Numbers don’t lie

Our cook-out test probably wouldn't stand up to scientific scrutiny, but in our experience numbers don’t lie. It’s the ultimate honesty test for a sausage and price is not always a proxy for quality.

We’ve been making sausages since 1935 to our original family recipes which combine selected cuts of high-quality pork, theright balance of seasoning, and no unnecessary fillers or added water beyond what the formulation genuinely requires.