Guest Review - Elspeth Velten - Whole Foods Pork Irish Style Bangers

I recently went to Whole Foods in search of English sausage to make bangers and mash. Do you know Whole Foods? It is a natural and organic grocery store over here in the US. I know there are a few locations over in London, but nothing close to the size and selection we have over here. They had a great selection of sausage, but most of them are Italian or with add-ins such as spinach, feta, artichoke, roasted red pepper, etc.

I found only this package of "Pork Irish Style Bangers." It's funny how anything remotely English in the US is marketed as being Irish. The sausages were 8 in a pack for a little less than $7. We lined these babies up on a pan and threw them in the oven at 400 degrees F. They cooked fully and had a nice dark color after about 40 minutes and a few turn-overs here and there. They plumped up width-wise but did shrink down a bit in length.

Upon first bite we could tell that these were quality bangers. The finely ground meat packed a firm texture into thin casings that had the perfect snap. The bangers were not herby but they had a delicious salty sweetness and were quite juicy.

I would definitely go for these again! They were acceptable American-born stand-ins with some mash and onion gravy and my craving for bangers and mash has been satiated… for now.

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Elspeth Velten lives and works in New York, and writes an effortlessly stylish food blog, about one million times better written than what this one is wrote.  Pop over, have a look, and bookmark it immediately:

http://elspeth-tostayortogo.blogspot.co.uk/

Thanks Elspeth!

Redhill Farm Free Range Pork - Gainsborough - Lincolnshire Sausage

Redhill Farm Free Range Pork is a brand I’d never heard of before one of my fab sisters provided Rate My Sausage with four of their Lincolnshire sausages, purchased at Sleaford farmers’ market.  Redhill Farm Free Range Pork run a small shop on their farm but they sell most of their produce at farmers’ markets in and around Lincolnshire – you can check the locations for yourself by visiting their website:  REDHILL-FARM-FREE-RANGE-PORK

You’ll see that they describe their own Lincolnshire sausages thus, “Real Lincolnshire Sausages with hand rubbed English sage as the only added ingredient. 80% min. meat content.  The ideal breakfast sausage or sausage sandwich, but also good for casseroles and used by San Pietro Restaurant to make a great bolognaise sauce.”

This is a very worthwhile sausage-maker, and I’ve scoured the Internet looking for something negative to add to their review – with no luck, which is unusual in itself.  There really is nothing bad (I was hoping for a grumble or two to balance out what will otherwise come across as a glowing write-up), so I’ll just have to fill the space with some of the awards that Redhill Farm Free Range Pork have won instead:

1 *Star Gold Great Taste Award 2011

BBC Good Food Magazine - Top 3 Sausages in the UK

Lincolnshire’s Favourite Sausage – Lincoln Sausage Festival 2010

Guardian Newspaper 10 Best Sausages in the UK 2008

There are many more, but I think you get the picture.  Enough chit-chat, let’s rate their sausages!

Meat Content:

My first impression was that despite the quoted figure of 80% pork, they did seem a little on the light side, meat-wise.  That was plain wrong wrong wrong!  The home-reared pork is here in abundance, with the high standards of the farming process contributing to this delicious banger.  Chunky, choice and challenging to eat more than two.  Three Shredded Wheat would be a walk in the park in comparison.  High quality pork is the starting point of a good sausage, and there’s little doubt that Redhill Farm Free Range Pork’s meat is top notch.

Flavour:

Beautifully Lincolnshire!  There’s an instant hit of mild spiciness, then warm sage, cosily wrapped up in the succulent chopped pork.  I was born in Lincoln, and brought up eating proper, local, Lincolnshire bangers made in, well, Lincoln (must visit there soon to buy some bangers) – Redhill Farm Free Range Pork capture the Lincolnshire sausage flavour perfectly.  Slightly warm, plenty of sage, great pork meat – a winner!  Compare and contrast with the frankly bloody awful Tesco version of the Lincolnshire sausage that we tried a few weeks ago, and you’ll see that there is just no comparison: Tesco-Lincolnshire-Sausage-Review

Texture:

Big, bold, bossy bangers.  Huge lumps of pork that maintain a delicateness to allow the filling to tap-dance all over your taste buds and then rumble down the gullet.  Crumbled into chunky morsels, and were wonderfully coarse inside – fabulous.  All the ingredients are on show when you carve through them – we like!

Shrinkage: 

Average weight uncooked - 94g

Average weight cooked - 69g

Shrinkage - 26%

I have an issue with the company over this figure.  Not only is 26% too high, but I believe their website is extremely misleading (to put it politely).  To quote “with a high meat content varying between 80% - 100% meat, that doesn’t shrink at all when cooked”.  This is patently untrue, all sausages shrink in varying amounts.  Sadly the high percentage that these bangers lost really dragged its score downwards.  If you want to add a generous slant on the shrinking thing, maybe Redhill Farm mean that the Actual Meat in the sausages doesn’t shrink – but that’s semantics.

Value For Money:

£2.53 for four sausages, weighing 375g - this works out as a price of £6.75 per kg, or 63p per snorker.  These are the most expensive sausages we’ve tried in 2012, but as they were given to me by my sis they didn’t cost me a penny!  63p is a high price, but these Lincolnshire sausages are very good quality.  Let’s settle on “very good” value for money.

And Finally Esther:

I asked managing director Jane Tomlinson if she would like to add anything to the review, and she generously took time out from her Sunday to say, “I grew up making real Lincolnshire sausages with my mother at the kitchen table for our family meals - adding cups of pork and fat, cups of breadcrumbs, chopping sage, washing out skins and filling them using an old hand mincer that I still have today.  Although now we produce our sausages at Redhill Farm on a slightly larger scale we still cut all the meat by hand, mix the dry ingredients for our own recipe, use natural skins and hand-link them to create the best Lincolnshire sausages.  Naturally the people of Lincolnshire are very particular about their sausages so it is the most sincere endorsement for our Lincolnshire sausages that they were chosen as Lincolnshire's favourite sausage - and we are proud to be known affectionately at farmers' markets as the stall with the queue!” 

Thank you Jane – you don’t get that kind of personal treatment from Barry Tesco do you!

C H Cook - West Walton - Plain Pork Sausage

C H Cook can be found in a small village called West Walton, which lies about three miles from Wisbech in Cambridgeshire.  It’s definitely a one horse town, but they don’t make their sausages out of horses – I hope!  The welcome was warm but the shop itself was quite a disappointment.  It’s either an all round village store that’s taken the butcher under its wing, or a traditional butcher who has diversified into general groceries....and adopted the Londis brand name.  It feels a little sad.  Look at the picture of the shop and it looks drab, unloved, almost neglected.  It’s clear that Cook’s rely hugely on the trade of the villagers, and don’t feel the need to do very much to make the place look appealing.  Shame, really.

But this is Rate My Sausage, not Rate My Frontage (although if Keeley, 22, from Coventry would like us to rate her frontage, we’ll gladly comply) so I won’t say any more on the subject.  Let’s just press on to the business of the day, Cook’s sausages....

Meat Content:

70%.  Fair to middling.  Average.  OK.  There’s sufficient meat to have to chew properly, and you certainly couldn’t suck the filling of Cook’s sausages through a straw, as you can with the Bloody Awful Richmonds or Walls.  Reasonably meaty.

Flavour:

Initial thoughts – very sweet, hint of peppery afterglow when it’s gone down the hatch, pleasantly OK.  I suppose I was expecting too much from a banger named “Plain Pork”, and they’re acceptable as they are.  But there’s some spark missing, there’s no soul mixed in, and the result is like comparing the Jackson Five with JLS (ask your grand-daughter).  Not nasty, would do the job perfectly well at breakfast time.

Texture:

Could be worse.  That’s not a ringing endorsement I suppose, but Cook’s have produced a mostly smooth filling with hints of crumble and a nugget or two or gristle (we like gristly bits!).  Close but no cigar; the texture of their Plain Pork sausages is “fine” – nobody will be offended by them, but when you push the flat of the fork down on it you’re presented with what are pretty much squirts of porky play dough.  We’d prefer the pork to be less mucked about with.

Shrinkage: 

Average weight uncooked - 59g

Average weight cooked - 52g

Shrinkage - 12%

Fabulous shrink score for the Cooksters!  I wonder how?  Nice work.

Value For Money:

£1.16 for four sausages, weighing 234g - this works out as a price of £4.95 per kg, or 29p per snorker.  These are much better than major retailer crap, and are cheap too.  But simply because there’s not quite enough going on here, I’d rate Cook’s Plain Pork sausages as “good” value for money.

And Finally Esther:

The tone of this review, upon reading it back, is somewhat underwhelming.  These sausages are not world beaters, but they’ll make you a nice meal choice, especially at 29p each.  Give them a try!

Guest Review - Sue Imgrund - Nürnberger Rostbratwürstchen

Germany is a sausage-lovers paradise with an amazing variety of types to seek out and try. But I thought I’d start with something really quite commonplace – a humble little sausage that is nevertheless a winner.

Nürnberger Bratwürstchen are a speciality from the town of Nürnberg and their main characteristic is that they are tiny little things – not much bigger than what we Brits would call a cocktail sausage. The idea is to eat anything from six upwards in one sitting.

“ja!” is the Own Brand of one of the big supermarket chains here and is rather like one of those “basics” or “no frills” brands that the UK supermarkets do. But despite being “basic”, note from the packaging that these sausages came out top in a test of 19 types according to the German consumer bible Stiftung Warentest – a kind of German “Which?”

One traditional way to serve these little sausages is with Sauerkraut and a scoop of mashed potato. My son, aged ten, is more keen to eat them with baked beans, but that’s his English genes showing. They are also great for when you’re trying to rustle up a full English breakfast over here.

If you’re interested in the stats, here they are:

 Cost €1.89 for 300g or 14 sausages. That’s about 1.64 GBP or 12p per sausage.

Cost per kg is €6.30 or 5.47 GBP.

The ingredients are:

Pork 95%

Bacon fat

Salt

Herbs (mainly marjoram)

Spices

Sugar

Diphosphate (sorry, not good at translating chemicals from German)

Saitling (as far as I know, the skin, which is probably sheep intestine)

There’s 31.3g fat per 100g and 351kcal per 100g but I don’t have a clue about whether that’s good or bad – these things don’t interest me!

All in all, delicious, meaty, good value little sausages, perfect for a mid-week meal.

Overall rating – not just “ja!” but “jawohl!”

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Sue has just published her first novel, a rip-roaring adventure yarn set in 1962, which will enchant and excite your 7 to 15 year old children!  Read all about the book here:  http://www.burmeon.com/

Best of all you can win a signed copy of the book, just by following these steps:

1.  Send an email to sausage-blog@live.com
2.  Put "Competition" in the subject line
3.  Tell us your first name, initial of your surname, and the county you live in.
4  That's it!

Only one entry per email address, open to UK residents only.  Entries must be received on or before April 25, emails received after that date will not be entered in the draw.  The winner will be chosen at random from all entries at noon on Thursday 26 April, and we will contact you by email. If you don't hear from RMS on that date then you haven't won, sorry.

Good luck!


Edit on 4 May2012 - the winner of Sue's book was John M from Kent.  Thanks for entering!

M&M Rutland - Melton Constable - Marmite Sausage

Regular readers of Rate My Sausage will know the name Rutland already.  And if you’re new, you’ll probably hear it again sometime, as M&M Rutland create some of the best quality and innovatively flavoured sausages around.  When I last visited I just Had to pick up some of their Marmite sausages – hey, good quality sausages that taste of Marmite, what could possibly go wrong?

As with many of Rutland’s more unusual varieties of bangers, the Marmites won’t be to everyone’s taste, but they are bound to have some that tickle your own taste buds.  Curried parsnip anybody?  Pizza flavour?  If you’re not the adventurous kind then stick to their more mainstream sausages, you’re guaranteed good quality, and that’s a Rate My Sausage promise!

But on to the review in hand – how do their Marmite bangers rate?  Read on to find out:

Meat Content:

Very acceptable.  I didn’t note the figure when I was in the shop (tut tut), but a follow up email confirmed it to be 90%.  The pork flavour is, as you’d expect, swamped by the Marmite, but there is obviously a very generous amount of good quality pig meat present.  Have a look at the picture of the sign on the counter to reassure yourself about the provenance of the pork.

Flavour:

With most Rate My Sausage reviews I’m trying to identify what is in the banger – with these Marmite Sausages that is obviously not necessary!  The headline flavour is Marmite, duuuh.  If you’re a lover of the leftover brewing waste then you will almost certainly adore these, as if they were your childhood imaginary best friend, and you’ll think “They rock!”  If you don’t like Marmite, don’t bother with them, as they’ll make you think “I have just eaten Jack Duckworth’s sweat-encrusted socks”.  Softie.  The taste will be completely familiar to the pro-Marmite brigade, but for the uninitiated there’s rich, almost over-powering savouriness, very smoky, barky flavours, and a not-well-hidden hint of real ale.  Delicious!

Texture:

I split one link lengthways and opened it out.  Pushed the knife into the filling, and it went in with some slight resistance, dislodging lovely juicy crumbs of meat aside.  When I took the knife out, the sausage returned to its original shape.  I then used a fork to probe this manly banger, and the insides didn’t return back afterwards....it’s apparent that these are well minced, lovingly produced sausages.  Don’t be put off by the slightly suspicious stripey appearance in the pan – usually this is a sure sign of an absolutely terrible, low-quality sausage, but in this case is due to the high level of preservatives naturally occurring in Marmite. Ha!  “Naturally occurring” in a by-product of industrial-scale beer production!  Oxymoron of the week.

Shrinkage: 

Average weight uncooked - 58g

Average weight cooked - 50g

Shrinkage - 14%

A very good stat for a good sausage.

Value For Money:

£2.30 for four sausages weighing 230g - this works out as a price of £9.98 per kg, or 58p per snorker.  A quality product and a premium price, but in my opinion worth paying.  This is a niche sausage which is very rarely made anywhere in the UK, and therefore its rarity alone would make me feel comfortable with the price.  When you add in the excellence of the banger then the figures become more than acceptable.

The Bisto Factor:

Nothing really noticeable while cooking but when you slice through the casing, oh my word, super savoury Marmite-y aromas flood out.  “Mmmmm, Marmite!”

Special Guest – Sarah Wigglenose – Writes:

Whilst sausages are not something on our menu every week, we do like a good sausage.  We are also very fond, as a family, of Marmite.  It would seem therefore, that a Marmite sausage would be the best ever combination of factors.  

We cooked them from defrosted.  The smell of Marmite erupted from the packaging as soon as they were opened and they felt firm as they went under the grill.  The darker colour of the Marmite-ness meant that it was difficult to know when they were cooked, so I resorted to cutting one in half to see how they were going.  They took slightly longer than supermarket sausages, I would imagine due to their denseness.

When they were ready, they met the rest of fry-up, and silence ensued as we thought about them.  The Boy was pretty clear.  "I don't like them, do you want mine Mr?"  Mr was prepared to give that a go at the end of the fry-up, as the plates were "generously sized".  Mr felt that the sausages were good.  The Marmite didn't overpower the sausage flavour, and the meat content came through in the taste.  I enjoyed them.  Although I found them filling, I decided that this was due to high quality as opposed to them being full of rusk and other such filler as used by the cheap sausage manufacturers. 

Over all, the adults of the family enjoyed them.  They were a welcome addition to a fry-up, but too strongly flavoured for the Boy's palate.

Sausage Of The Year 2011

Rate My Sausage's "Sausage Of The Year for 2011 is Pickup's Pork Sausage.

Pickup's were one of the great butchers that we found at Blackburn Market.  Of their Pork Sausages we wrote "Tangy and tart with a sour tone present.  Does that sound unpleasant?  It’s not meant to.  The pork contained in Pickup’s prime pieces is exceptionally sweet, and when it’s mixed with the seasoning and flavouring here the combination is a winner.  Savoury and sweet flavours go together beautifully in many dishes and cuisines, and Pickups have created a match made in sausagey heaven.  If these sausages had their own Twitter account it would be “At Hashtag Bloody Underscore Gorgeous”

Well done Pickup's!

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The runner-up for 2011 is J H Betts of March, and their Pork Sausage.

"Good variation in shape and size. Splashed apart, these bangers defiantly offered up juicy, itsy bitsy morsels of sausagey splendidness. Superb! The natural casings are very evident.  These are thinnish, average length sausages, with a very good filling. Juicy, yielding, uplifting, utterly wonderful. Top marks!"

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The third place banger for 2011 is Frank Littler's Pork Sausage.

Frank had taken a stand against Blackburn council's market rent increases and opened a shop in the nearby village of Mellor.  "Oh wow, these sausages are fantastic!  Meat, oh yes, there’s more yummy meat here than on Real Madrid’s massage table.  It’s rare breed pork, reared on a farm at Balderstone, and you can really tell the difference.  First impression was WOW, second and third impressions confirmed this – what a find.  More meat here than in the raffle at Heckmondwike Working Men’s Club."

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And in fourth place for 2011 is J W Sargeant of Stowbridge, with their Regular Pork Sausage.

"Coarse and crumbly, and therefore (in my opinion) the mutt’s! Good sizzlers, decent amounts of fat expanded under the skin and squirted through during cooking. Sargeant’s Regular Pork sausages are very “break-up-able” when you put some pressure on the knife but otherwise stick together beautifully. Coarsely minced, well bound, just the way I like ‘em."

R M Plater - Wisbech - Gloucester Old Spot Sausage

Have you seen the TV advert featuring two lumberjacks a-runnin’ and a-jumpin’ on a log?  Of course you have.  What you probably don’t realise is that their foothold is not a felled tree, it is in fact one of Plater’s Gloucester Old Spot sausages.  A small-ish example, but a sausage nevertheless.    Plater’s is a small shop in the market town of Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, and it’s one of the friendliest places that our sausagey quest has taken us to.  It’s ever so slightly tricky to find but soooo worth it.

They have their own website, which includes their opening hours so you can plan your visit.  Check out their claim to make over 20 varieties of sausages: Platers-Website

On to the sausages....let’s give them a jolly good rating:

Meat Content:

These are huge and scary sausages!  It would appear on initial viewing that Plater’s have simply sawn the legs off a Gloucester Old Spot pig and stuck them straight into sausage skins, with zero processing in between.  There are no trotters peeping out of the skins though, so perhaps I’m mistaken.  The quoted figure is 72% but I suspect that Barry, the resident sausage maker, may be understating a little.

Flavour:

Now you’re talking; these sausages are the real deal.  The first mouthful whisked me straight back to my childhood in the (whisper it) mid-seventies.  Prosaically speaking the flavour is an initial peppery slap followed by a mouth-filling herbiness, underpinned with the fulsomely grand porkiness.  The British Pig Association describe the Gloucester Old Spot breed thus; “a large meaty animal with a broad and deep body”, and this also almost unerringly describes Plater’s sausages made from the same breed.  Maybe the reason for the nostalgic flavour is their use of bread as a binding agent instead of the ubiquitous rusk.

Texture:

Sometimes appearances can be deceiving, sometimes not.  You’d think that these huge, rugged logs of prime pig would provide a compact, chunky texture throughout the bangers.  You’d be right.  As the kids say these days, “O M G”.  The sausages are indeed robust and firm, and yet give way “just so” when you want them to –you certainly couldn’t use them as the legs for a meat-based coffee table, say.  All four examples cooked differently, which is something we like, but there was some sticky...”stuff”....on a couple that wasn’t particularly endearing. 

Shrinkage: 

Average weight uncooked - 94g

Average weight cooked - 69g

Shrinkage - 27%

Losing over a quarter of the weight that you pay for is just not on, no matter how good the end product is (again, maybe something to do with bread instead of rusk?).  Big black mark next to these otherwise fantastic snorkers.  What a pity.

Value For Money:

£2.44 for 4 sausages, weighing 375g - this works out as a price of £6.50 per kg, or 61p per snorker.

As we’ve said before, “you gets what you pays for”.  I’d like to see the price of these bangers fall slightly but 61p is reasonable value for money.  It can’t be understated that the reason each sausage costs 61p is that they’re mahoosive and contain a lot of flavour and a lot of pork.  Four of these tasty monsters will cost a little less than a pack of supermarket atrocities, and you’ll enjoy them a million times more.

Opening Hours:

We love the crazy opening hours adopted by many of these excellent butchers, and Plater’s don’t disappoint.  Pop over to their website and have a look:  Platers-Opening-Hours

And Finally Esther:

Before you go, can you name the product that the splashing lumberjacks are promoting?  Everybody likes the advert, but nobody knows what it’s for.  The answer, my friends, is multivitamins produced by Berocca.  See, you didn’t know!  You do now.

EU To Implement Straight Sausage Regulations

Is nothing sacred, or safe from meddling European beaurocrats?

Hidden in a dense and dry EU Common Agricultural Policy amendment, set to become law with effect from July 2012, is an almost-unbelievable diktat regarding the straightness of sausages.  The document starts inoffensively:

"Making the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) more equivalent will be vital for environmental as well as economic reasons, Dublin professor Chip O’Larter told the EP's agricultural committee. The Commission proposes to reform the CAP in order to introduce more sustainable practices by giving farmers and meat-product-producers financial incentives to change the way they operate. Professor O’Larter, of Trinity College in Dublin, said in a report he presented to the committee on 19 March that doing so was urgently needed."


Most importantly, the next paragraph follows, several pages later:

"With regard to sausages of all varieties there shall be no variance in alignment within each unit of more than 5 degrees between ends.  To this end natural sausage casings will be added to the Prohibited Foodstuffs code, and synthetic casings should be substituted in all cases.  Research led by Dr Otto Dogg at Heidelberg University has demonstrated that they have proved to act in a more predictable manner, therefore reducing the number of mis-shaped wurst and sausages.  Only manufacturers working under Protected Geographical Status markers will be exempt from this legislation."


So prepare to say goodbye to the wonderful, funny-shaped banger that we know and love, and say Bonjour to strictly regimented, straight sausages instead.


I'll be writing to my MEP about this scandal, please leave your own comments below for me to include in my letter.  You can read the entire report here:  European-Article-1968-1-07-2012


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I wrote to my seven MEPs thus:  "Dear Andrew Duff, Robert Sturdy, Geoffrey Van Orden, Stuart Agnew, Richard Howitt, David Campbell Bannerman and Vicky Ford,

I am writing to you to ask your opinion on an upcoming EU rule that

affects my hobby - sausages! I write the UK's second best sausages

website, reviewing and promoting local butchers' sausages, and today I

have written an article explaining the forthcoming "straight sausage"

decision.

Please feel free to check the piece here:

http://bangersandsausages.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/eu-to-implement-straight-sausage.html

Would you support a campaign opposing this change if I started one?

Thank you for taking the time to read my letter,

Yours sincerely,"

And wonderfully:

Vicky Ford MEP replied, "Yes.  But its such a ludicrous idea that I can't believe its a serious suggestion. So will check with colleagues on agriculture committee first."

David Campbell Bannerman MEP replied, "Thank you for our email, you should be receiving a response from me shortly."


Andrew Duff MEP replied, "Banning bendy sausages is an outrageous imposition on the dignity of the British sausage-making industry and I will fight this proposal to the very end. 

Many years of sausage-eating has convinced me that the ideal curvature of the British sausage is one of 11.5 degrees, and no bureaucrat will persuade me otherwise.

I would however be willing to negotiate with fellow MEPs on a bend range of between 5 and 15 degrees, on the condition that exceptions be made for some regional varieties of sausage. The Cumberland in particular benefits from an even greater bend, and is almost impossible to straighten out.

 Whether the sausages bend downward towards the pan, or sideways, will also be a factor in my final decision."


A political advisor to Stuart Agnew MEP replied, "Thank you for your email dated 1st April 2012, addressed to Stuart Agnew MEP. I am replying on his behalf. 

This strikes me to be a first rate April Fool gag and I compliment you on

your ingenuity. The thought of Vicky Ford MEP asking colleagues on the Agri

Committee about bendy sausages has me very amused."




And thank you to Kilian Bourke, a Lib Dem county councillor in Cambs, who took the trouble to use Twitter to pose the question.  It's what you'd expect from the Euro-sceptic Lib-Dems, well done mate, let's shit-can the EU!




A massive thank you to all the public figures who I have caused to waste time on a blatantly spurious April Fool's joke, I'll give you all the benefit of the doubt to claim that you knew All Along.....and to those who couldn't be arsed to do anything, I hope you get voted out as soon as possible.  Long live democracy!