Iceland - Everywhere - Sausage

Our quest to review every sausage on the planet (yes, it’s im possible) sometimes leads us to large-scale retailers who can sometimes offer questionable sausages.  This week Dad’s been to Iceland, where we picked up a bag of FORTY sausages for TWO pounds.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Can a sausage that costs five pence really be any good?  You’d think not.

Iceland is a massive chain of frozen goods shops selling low-cost products on a huge scale.  Also much beloved by celebrities.  Well, "a" "celebrity".  Kerry Katona.  Oh dear.

My tasting notes, such as they are, read:

Meat Content:

Is there any?

Flavour:

Minimal.  Like eating wallpaper paste.

Texture:

Mush.  Skin hardens unpleasantly but encapsulates the squishy crap inside.

Now, while I feel that these descriptions do actually do this foul product justice, I need to elaborate.  These are The Most Disgusting “Sausages” That It Has Been My Misfortune To Taste.  Ever.  More foul than Miss Rhode Island Red UK 2013.  Less good taste than Peter Griffin after fourteen Pawtuckets.  As nausea-inducing as watching Lorraine Kelly pole dancing while riding on Great Yarmouth Rollercoaster, simultaneously drinking Malibu and Tia Maria and thinking about sex with Madonna.  Absolutely disgusting, in every way.

There is probably a worse sausage on sale somewhere (and if you know of one please tell us) but it would have to be absolutely, utterly cosmically shite.  The taste, such as exists, is all salt with no other flavour discernible.  The texture is not texture as such, merely plop. And the meat content is ridiculously, taking-the-piss low.  The worst sausage.  Abysmal multiplied by pathetic to the power of cack.

Shrinkage: 

Average weight uncooked - 33g

Average weight cooked - 28g

Shrinkage - 14%

Weighed the least, each, ever!  By some margin.  But then the main ingredient, namely “feck all”, weighs next to nothing.  The shrink figure of 14% regretfully scores high in our famously idiosyncratic points system, but the reason these bangers haven’t shrunk much is that there’s almost nothing natural in them to shrink.

Value For Money:

40 sausages cost £2.00.  Obviously I didn’t cook them all, so here are the stats, intrapolated (is that the correct antonym of extrapolate?)....

£0.40 for eight sausages, weighing 265g - this works out as a price of £1.51 per kg, or 5p per snorker.

Evan at 5p each this is catastrophically bad value for money. Avoid at all costs.

Through A Child’s Eyes:

Junior Sidekick didn’t taste this particular glimpse of hell but he can offer some insight.  He was at a friend’s house for tea recently and bangers and mash was served.  On the way home I asked how it was and he wasn’t very positive....and then he lowered his voice a la Les Dawson/Roy Barraclough old ladies sketch and whispered “They were ICELAND sausages”, in that tone which said “They were bloody awful Dad.”

The Imaginatively Titled Next Day Cold Sausage Test:

The pics show the Iceland embarrassments on the left alongside some real sausages.  Please draw your own conclusions.

Opening Hours:

If Sri Lanka used to be Ceylon, and Myanmar used to be Burma, what did Iceland used to be? Bejam.

Iceland is open at the usual big retailer times, can’t be arsed to promote them and their disgraceful excuses for sausages.

And Finally, Esther:

If you want to experience the Very Bottom Of The Sausage Barrel then buy some.  If you are not a masochist then don’t bother.  Disgusting.