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Sausages and dough are a tasty combination, which is why they have long been used together to make favourite snacks in many parts of the world. One famous example is, of course, the hot dog, the sausage-in-bread that German immigrant Charles Feltman developed and sold with huge success on Coney Island on the East Coast of the USA.
Pastry-wrapped sausage rolls – known and much loved in the USA as "pigs in a blanket" and in Denmark as Pølsehorn – are, on the other hand, a Viennese creation: Leopold Lahner, a descendent of the butcher who invented the wiener sausage hundreds of years earlier, produced them first in 1905. In Germany, they are made in many regions with various sausage fillings and under different names, but the most common name is Würstchen im Schlafrock (literally translated as “sausages in a dressing gown”).
Coiling cassette for sausage rolls
It is no surprise that bakeries want to make these pigs in a blanket on a grand scale – like one Danish company, for example, who approached the experts at FRITSCH for a solution for producing Pølsehorn semi-automatically along with their other products.
The challenges for the development team were, first, that sausages come in irregular shapes and, second, that each sausage has to be fixed in place on the dough piece for it to be wrapped perfectly. “So that the customer could produce this special product on a LAMINATOR 700 with a MULTIFLEX L 700, we made modifications to the CSV compact vacuum coiler, which is also used for producing filled croissants. Onto the coiling cassette with catch rakes, we added motorised moulding belts that will hold the sausage so that it doesn’t roll away, and remains straight while being wrapped,” explains Alfred Ströbel, dough technologist at FRITSCH.
“The basis for this solution was created years ago when we added the catch rakes to the croissant coiler for a Swiss producer so that they could coil croissants around whole chocolate bars,” says Uwe Benz, Sales Director Line Solutions.
Sausage rolls made with croissant dough
Because cylindrical and irregularly shaped sausages can roll away more easily than standardized chocolate bars, with their straight edge to lie on, the new production solution would have to feature yet another securing mechanism. And that is exactly where the counter-running fixing belt comes in, keeping a steady hold on the sausage while the vacuum secures the dough piece in place. “Additionally, chains on the coiling mats and on the folding-in net serve as weights to keep a certain pressure on the dough piece so that the sausage becomes tightly coiled in the dough,” Uwe Benz explains.
With this advancement on the coiling cassette for the CSV compact, producers can wrap products in diverse shapes and sizes. For pigs in a blanket, the sausages don’t have to conform to any standards – even irregularly shaped sausages can be wrapped easily with this coiling cassette.
“Thus, the developers of FRITSCH have once again proven that innovations don’t always have to be highly complex or necessitate new machines, but rather that even simple solutions can offer the customer an appreciable added value. This new development presents a simple solution for coiling filled products for artisanal bakers as well,“ says Michael Gier, Head of the FRITSCH World of Bakery.
“Thus, the developers of FRITSCH have once again proven that innovations don’t always have to be highly complex or necessitate new machines, but rather that even simple solutions can offer the customer an appreciable added value. This new development presents a simple solution for coiling filled products for artisanal bakers as well.”
Michael Gier, Head of the FRITSCH World of Bakery
