Halal Sausages in Australia: What Is Actually In Them

Most people asking whether a sausage is halal are thinking about the meat. The meat is rarely the problem.

The casing is the part nobody checks

A traditional sausage casing is intestine. Usually pig.

That is the whole issue, and it sits one layer below where most people look. You can have beef or chicken inside a casing that makes the entire thing not halal, and nothing on the front of the pack will tell you. Labels talk about what the sausage is, not what it is wrapped in.

There are three kinds of casing in use in Australia:

Natural casing, which is animal intestine. Fine if it is from a halal slaughtered animal, and not fine otherwise. This is the one to ask about.

Collagen casing, made from processed hide. Usually beef, sometimes pork. Again, it depends entirely on the source animal.

Cellulose or synthetic casing, which is plant based and removed before the sausage is sold. Common on skinless sausages.

A skinless sausage sidesteps the casing question entirely, which is one reason they are worth knowing about.

What else goes in

Beyond the meat and the casing, a commercial sausage normally contains fat, a filler, water, salt and a preservative.

The filler is usually rusk, breadcrumb or a starch. Legally in Australia a sausage can contain a substantial proportion of non meat ingredients, which is why the meat content percentage on the label matters more than the picture on the front.

The ingredient worth looking for is wine or alcohol based flavouring, which appears in some European style sausages and in a lot of marinades. It is not always obvious.

The other is gelatine, which can appear in some processed meat products and carries exactly the same source question as the casing does.

How to read an Australian label

Four things, in this order.

Meat content percentage. It has to be declared. A sausage at 80 percent is a different product from one at 50 percent.

The ingredient list, in full. Ingredients are listed by weight, largest first. If a filler appears near the top, that tells you something.

Any numbered additive. Australian labels use code numbers for additives, and a few of those can be animal derived. If you want certainty rather than probability, the numbers are where to look.

What it does not say. A label that says nothing about the casing is not telling you the casing is fine. It is telling you nothing.

What to ask a butcher

Three questions cover it.

What animal is the casing from, and was it halal slaughtered? Is there any alcohol in the seasoning or marinade? What is the meat content percentage?

A butcher who sells halal regularly will have those answers immediately. Hesitation on the casing question is itself an answer.

What we sell

Two lines. Chicken Plain Sausages at $17.99 a kilo. Mild, no strong seasoning, which makes them more useful than a heavily spiced sausage because they go into more things. Breakfast, obviously, but also sliced into a pasta sauce, or split and grilled.

Beef Sausages at $10.99 a kilo. Made from Australian beef and seasoned for a stronger, meatier flavour, and the cheaper of the two. The product page states no pork casings, which is the question this whole post is about.

Both sausage lines sit in the meats collection.

Questions people ask

Are all sausages in Australia pork? No, but pork is the default assumption in a mainstream supermarket, and the casing is frequently pork even when the filling is not.

Is a skinless sausage automatically halal? No. It removes the casing question, which is the most common problem, but the meat and the seasoning still matter.

Why are halal sausages harder to find than halal mince? Because a sausage is a processed product with more inputs. Mince is one ingredient. A sausage is meat, fat, filler, casing, seasoning and preservative, and every one of those is a separate question.

Can I just make them myself? You can, and skinless is far easier than stuffing a casing. Mince, fat, salt, whatever seasoning you like, formed by hand. No casing means no casing question.