These are
not just your usual crap, sloppy supermarket sausages – these are M&S crap,
sloppy supermarket sausages. I bet
Twiggy and Myleene Klass wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole.
I’ve tried
to research who makes M&S’ value sausages (branded as “Simply M&S”) but
been thwarted. Nobody’s owning up to
it. But I think it’s fair to expect them
to be far superior to, say, Tesco’s cheapest bangers. If you bought a similarly priced pack of, for
example’s sake, boxer shorts from each retailer you would expect the M&S undercrackers
to be better quality. Would the same
thing go for the sausages?
Well....no. They’re both
dreadful. If the same applied to their
pants, I’m going commando for life. And
that’s not an image you want at breakfast time.
Meat
Content:
60% only,
and according to the packaging “selected cuts of pork”. Selected for sausages because nobody would
want to eat them in their original form I’m thinking. I know how a real banger made with truly “good”
cuts of pork tastes, and it ain’t anything like these gopping articles.
Flavour:
Prior to
eating I was repeating the mantra “Please don’t be salty mush, please don’t be
salty mush”....and when I tucked in......they were salty mush. Not as utterly sloppy and ploppy as either
the porridge in The Slammer (ask an eight-year-old), or as Richmond’s sausages,
but unpleasantly bland nevertheless. I
was tempted to write just one word in the Flavour section....”Absent”....but
that would be slightly inaccurate. Just
slightly, mind. There’s salt in spades,
there’s squishy grey-toned “stuff”, there’s the remains of the skins – which,
incidentally, took it upon themselves to disappear completely during cooking
and thus made a RIGHT freakin’ mess of my best pan – NOT happy....so flavour –
nothing positive going on no matter how hard I looked. Abysmal.
Texture:
When I was
slicing the sausages for the photos I did feel some vague grainy resistance
which raised my hopes, which were callously dashed when I actually put a slice
into my mouth. There’s really not a lot
of substance here. You barely need to
cut these, the knife almost sinks through the soggy “pork protein” casing of its
own accord (what casing there is left, that is). Rank.
Stripes. Yup....
Shrinkage:
Average
weight uncooked - 58g
Average
weight cooked - 43g
Shrinkage -
26%
Would you
be happy if you bought a pair of M&S slacks and when you came to wear them
later they had shrunk to resemble culottes (thanks to posh-ish female friend
for analogy)? Obviously not!
Value For
Money:
£1.39 for
eight sausages, weighing 461g - this works out as a price of £3.02 per kg, or
17p per snorker. Very cheap, but very
nasty. Very poor value for money, AVOID!
The Bisto
Factor:
No
discernible aroma whatsoever throughout cooking. Disappointing and sad.
Through A
Child’s Eyes:
No chance,
you’re not getting Social Services onto my back for subjecting Junior Sidekick
to these bangers.....
The Imaginatively
Titled Next Day Cold Sausage Test:
I was
actually dreading the Cold Sausage Test, which probably tells you all you need
to know about the quality of the M&S banger. Well just take a look at the pictures, which
show the M&S sausages on the left and some Pork & Leek sausages from
Bowers of King’s Lynn (review right here, next week) on the right. Spot the difference?
Opening
Hours:
Ask your
Nan. Just don’t ask her to buy you any
of their sausages.
And
Finally, Esther:
I was going
to pick two words beginning with the letters M and S to summarise these
sausages, but I couldn’t make my mind up which derogatory ones to choose. Have a go yourself....
