Lincolnshire Sausage Season #8 of 13 - Redhill Farm Free Range Pork

Have you heard of Fifty Shades Of Grey? Maybe not the kind of thing you’d talk about in front of the vicar or your nan, but it was a global sensation. Well take a look at the photo of the two chaps behind the Redhill Farm Free Range Pork stall. On the right is Terry, co-owner and married to boss Jane. On the left is part-time rock god and expert sausage-maker Steve Shelley.

Steve is an interesting character who juggles the butcher business with aspirations towards Hollywood – and the breaking news is that he will be starring in the 2018 blockbuster “Fifty Shades Of Pork”. Script and plot details are very hard to unearth, but I can confirm that it is certainly not “Babe 3 – When The Cash Runs Out”. Oh no, this movie is going to be high quality as shown by the choice of Steve’s co-star, Kerry Katona.

Enough of the showbiz fluff, I am not Perez Hilton after all. Let’s press on to the real meat of this review, Steve’s lovely porky Lincolnshire sausage. This is not the first time we have reviewed these bangers and usually our revisits are a purely public service to confirm if a truly dreadful product – Iceland sausages, Tesco Everyday Value sausages, etc – is still terrible. On this occasion this was a wholly selfish visit as we’ve never had a poor product from Terry, Jane and the team.

Where To Find Them:

This company has won more awards than Ant & Dec so you will always be assured of great produce, whichever method you choose to find them:

Physically – You can take a road trip to the farm itself which is located near the village of Morton, outside Gainsborough. If using SausNav type in DN21 3DT. There’s a farm shop there which is open from 0900 to 1700 Tuesday to Friday and 0900 to 1500 on Saturdays, Everyone deserves a weekend right? The shop stocks a great range of indulgent, local goodies, including:

·    The Tracklement Co. Mustards & Chutneys

·    Belvoir Cordials & Presses

·    Lincolnshire Poacher Cheeses

·    Kitchen Garden Preserves

·    Free Range Eggs - from their own Maran Free Range Chickens

·    Free Range Chickens

·    Their own Fresh Lamb - Zwartble and Charollais Breeds

·    Their own Home Grown Beef (limited supply) - British Blue

·    Ownsworth's Rapeseed Oil

·    Ivy House Sloe Gin

·    Olives Et Al - Olives, Dressings

·    Moden's Lincolnshire Plum Bread

Redhill Farm Free Range Pork are also ALL OVER the local farmers market scene – we found them in Sleaford – and you can check if they will be in a market place near you soon by clicking this link - Redhill Farm at Farmers Markets

Virtually: They have a nice website that is easy on the eye and easy to navigate: Redhill Farm Free Range Pork

Stanwatch:

As described at the start, Terry and Steve were manning the stall with enthusiasm and knowledge.

Flavour:

FAB! Ingredients are simply the high quality pork, sage, breadcrumbs, rusk, black pepper and salt to preserve and this all adds up to a sweet and smooth taste with no sharp corners. The sage and pepper are well balanced and do not overpower, and the combination is bloomin’ beautiful. Word of warning – these are big sausages and we don’t recommend that you tackle too many in one sitting. But don’t panic, there is as much pork and flavour in one of these sausages as in two of most other butchers’ bangers.

Texture:

Very crumbly at the right moments, which is a good thing. Sometimes the skins fall off which may be viewed as a negative but could also be seen as the sausage showing itself off. The filling falls apart when you push and then clings together like survivors in a Titanic lifeboat. The skins are not snappy, simply functional, to keep the good stuff inside properly contained.

Vital Statistics:

Average Weight Uncooked = 90 grams

Average Weight Cooked = 69 grams

Meat Content = 75-80 %

Value For Money:

£6.09 for 8 sausages, weighing 716 grams. This works out as £8.51 per kg and 76p per banger.

We rate this as Fantastic value for money.

Three Word Verdicts:

Ruth “Much better sensation on the taste buds when cold. When warm skins were non-existent”

The "Aah, Bisto" Factor:

Nice gentle aroma during cooking. We’ve pretty much returned to frying instead of grilling, it’s the Proper Way to do your bangers. These sausages are huge logs of meat and eight of them barely squeezed into the pan. Several ends burst out (which we like), and one split lengthways (which we don’t like so much – makes it look like Jack The Ripper’s been making your breakfast).

And Finally, Esther:

Big, beautiful, bruising bangers that taste terrific! Buy some as soon as you can. And grab some of Steve's collar bacon too!

Table so far:

1= Bycroft's, Boston

1= Southern & Thorpe, Ruskington

3 - Redhill Farm Free Range Pork

4 – Lyell's, Boston

5 – Hambleton Farms, Doddington Hall

6 – Manor Farm, Leasingham

7 – Dunham's, Boston

8 – Sainsburys, Sleaford

Redhill Farm Free Range Pork Competition Winners

The winners of our Redhill Farm Free competition, each winning two packs of their delicious sausages, are the following lucky people:

Lynne H, Hertfordshire

Kavita P, Middlesex

Clair D, West Yorkshire

Congratulations to the winners and thank you to the hundreds of people who entered but weren't fortunate enough to win this time round....look out for another great competition coming up soon!


If you didn't win but would love to try Redhill Farm Free Range Pork's products, just click on this link and browse their website:


Redhill Farm Free Range Pork

@RateMySausage

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!