Tateishi explaining how to make the vegetable paste for the meat-free sausages.
Yoshiaki Tateishi, 71, from Toyohashi city, Aichi Prefecture, has developed meat-free sausages which are made from only vegetables, grains and other non-meat ingredients jointly with Katsuhide Murata, a technical advisor of the Toyohashi Chamber of Commerce and Industry. According to his recipe, the sausages are made mainly from steamed and chopped/impasted vegetables. Tateishi expects to drive the demand from those who can’t eat meat, including Muslims.
The man who was involved in a vegetable processing business until 2014 had a chance to visit supermarkets in the U.S. on business. He saw so many types of sausages including some which were featuring locally-grown ingredients. He was so inspired and came to think that he also want to make sausages unique to Toyohashi, his hometown wich is one of Japan’s largest vegetable producers.
Main ingredients of his sausages are vegetables, fruits, mushrooms, grains, beans and algae. They are steamed at 55 to 99 degrees centigrade. Some of them are chopped while the rest are impasted. Then, they are mixed together with rice flour, konjac mannan and other ingredients as coagulant so that the impasted vegetables are more than 50% of the entire mixture. Then the mixture is fed into the sausage casings.
His sausages are also characterized by its vivid colors. Those made from impasted carrots are red, those made from impasted pumpkins are yellow, and those made from “mozuku” edible seaweed are black, he explained.
Tateishi acquired a patent in September 2016 and is planning to commercialize the sausages in 2017 by finding corporate and private partners. “The sausages made from very new ingredients will surely meet the demands from various customers,” says Tateishi.