Vienna sausage

It is a small spicy frankfurter, often served as an hors d’oeuvre or snack.

The Vienna sausage is one of those foods brought to American by immigrants and then naturalized into an iconic item.

In 1893, Samuel Ladanyi and Emil Reichel, both immigrants from Austria-Hungary, founded the Vienna Sausage Company at 1215 S. With the manufacturing facility in the rear, they sold sausage in the storefront.

Vienna sausages are made by grinding meat such as chicken, beef, turkey or pork to a paste consistency: mixing the meat with salt and spices.

The word sausage comes today by way of the Middle English sausige and the Old French saussiche, all from the Latin word salsus, meaning ‘salted’.

Although the product is still widely sold, famously to hikers and fisherman, Vienna sausage consumptions has declined since it heyday from the 1940s to the 1970s.

In North America the term Vienna sausage has most often come to mean only smaller and much shorter smoked and canned wieners, rather than hot dogs.

The sausages are used in Filipino pancits, and there is even popular Cuban dish consisting of Viennas cooked with rice and flavored with Cuban spices.
Vienna sausage

Ingredients in frankfurters

Frankfurters is a ready to eat sausage or it may be boiled, fried or grilled for serving.

Frankfurters are comminuted, semisolid sausages prepared form one or more kinds of raw skeletal muscle meat or raw skeletal muscle meat and raw or cooked poultry meat.  Most sausages sold as frankfurters in America are made of a mixture of pork and beef, unlike the original frankfurters which consist only of pork.

It seasoned and cured, using one or more of the curing agents in accordance with a regulation.

Since the pH in a frankfurter is approximately 5.5 to 6.0, calcium citrate is the preferred calcium donor salt.

Carrageenan is added in order to give optimal texture and good sliceability. It extent shelf life and act as a dehydrating salt or humectant in uncured hams.

Other ingredients include: paprika, white pepper, coriander, nutmeg. Certain recipes contain seasonal herbs e.g. in spring: parsley, sorrel, chervil, burnet, lemon balm, borages, chives and watercress.

The finished products shall not contain more than 30% fat.

Water or ice, or both may be used to facilitate chopping or mixing or to solve the curing ingredients but the sausage shall contain no more than 40% of combination of fat and added water.
Ingredients in frankfurters