added water in burgers - are there irish limits?

Souterrain

Hi,

My girlfriend bought some burgers at an irish farmers market last weekend, and while they were very juicy they were rather bland. She brought some of the meat to the public analyst lab she works in over in cheshire and found there was 11% added water in the sample.

Is this legal, basically more than 10% of what she paid was for water

Thanks for youre help.

Souterrain

jgr12

Used to work in a butcher shop and the spice mixture for the burgers we made had to be mixed with water, same with the sausages, a certain amount of water is mixed with the rusk during mincing

Gamesnash.ie: Pat

That would be a very common level for most beef burgers.

Corned Beef and Ham can contain up to 50% more water than before the beef / pork as relevant were cured. Wet curing involves pumping salty / flavoured water into them which is why they shrink so much after boilng.

A lot of other products contain a high percentage of water too.

Paulw

Souterrain wrote: »

Is this legal, basically more than 10% of what she paid was for water

Unless it states on the packaging that there is no water, then yeah, any amount if legal (unless it's a lot more than listed). It's very common to add water to products.

matrim

I don't think there is a limit on the amount of water, but I think there has to be a certain amount of beef to call it a beef burger (or whatever meat)

There was an interesting documentary on this by the BBC a while back. It was UK based but very interesting the way it showed what companies can get away with.

Souterrain

Thanks for all the replies. Didnt know it was industry standard practice, and ive jusr realised I made amistake - these are just ordinary butcher burgers.

Actually now that I think about the price of water in this wet country, this was proabably a cheap cheap way to buy water!

Souterrain

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