Rate My Sausage LOVES Meridian Meats. A small independent butcher. Home to Young Butcher Of The Year. Fantastic Lincolnshire sausage, as we reviewed here:
It’s a shop with an established Good Rep at RMS. When I was there I couldn’t resist their Tomato Sausage. I remember tomato sausage from my nipper-hood - they didn’t seem to be very meaty but they DID taste delicious, and I wanted to find that taste sensation again. Could Meridian take me back to late seventies Sundays, in front of the 40 over cricket, watching Joel Garner, Viv Richards and Ian Botham playing for Somerset and scaring everyone else? Sundays were BLOODY boring back then.
Anyway, how did Meridian do with my childhood favourite?
Meat Content:
70% is the claim but these sausages seemed quite paste-y. The pork content is stated as 70% but it’s hard to tell if that’s right....the overwhelming texture isn’t meat, it’s....softer. Probably because of the tomato content I expect. Give ‘em the benefit of the doubt.
Flavour:
A Ronseal of a sausage – it does exactly what it says on the tin. A tomato sausage that tastes predominantly of....wait for it....tomato! A real blast from the past for me. There’s a lot of sharp salt though, which really detracted from the nostalgic tomato taste. Is there more salt to preserve the tomato? It takes over, and joins up with Mister Pepper to leave your mouth tingling and you reaching for a drink of water. What a shame.
Texture:
These sausages look coarse – you know that’s what we like. But the truth was that the texture was finer, blander, softer, and provided more disappointment. It was almost...almost....appropriate to use the word “mushy”. I am going to take a punt that this batch was an apprentice’s first go at the Tomato recipe.
Shrinkage:
Average weight uncooked - 67g
Average weight cooked - 55g
Shrinkage - 18%
I was expecting a lot of disappearing sausage, which one often finds when there’s a lot of vegetable included in the recipe, so just 18% was a pleasant surprise.
Value For Money:
£1.77 for four sausages weighing 266g - this works out as a price of £6.65 per kg, or 44p per snorker.
This particular sausage? Well.....there’s potential. Looks tomato-ey. Tastes a bit tomato-ey. Buy something else.
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