Tuesday 5 January 2010

Bower’s Traditional Norfolk Pork Sausage

Bowers’ is a small traditional butcher shop, which can be found on Gaywood Road in King’s Lynn, close to the famous Gaywood clock tower. You will always be afforded a warm welcome here, and the smell of the shop will tickle your tastebuds before you’ve even bought your meat. There is often a queue in Bowers’ which will allow you time to peruse the black and white photographs of Victorian King’s Lynn which cover the walls.



I’ve chosen Bowers’ Traditional Norfolk Pork Sausages as the first banger to go under the microscope and into the frying pan for three reasons:

1 - Bower's is the closest butcher my home here in Norfolk,
2 - The “default” sausage we’ll be trying will be of the pork variety, and therefore,
3 - A Norfolk, pork, sausage has to be the starting point.




Meat Content:No “official” figure from the butcher, but this sausage is Very Meaty. You need to bite into it, which marks it out as a solid piece of dead pig!
Flavour:Delicious! There is a major amount of pork in this sausage, and it is backed up with a spicy additions from the maker. It’s the first sausage to be tested at 2-Sox Towers, and it’s an extremely tasty one. Lovely and porky, and flavoured just so, this is a very good sausage.
Texture:Slicing through a banger and seeing what happens helps define its quality. A cross section of this beauty shows a high proportion of meat and very little filler. When you put a slice in your mouth it tastes like almost solid meat - this may be a defining factor in future tests. Stands the test of Six Piece Slicing without crumbling.
Shrinkage:
Average weight uncooked - 77g
Average weight cooked - 59g
Shrinkage - 23%

Value For Money:These sausages cost £6.60 per kg. As these are large bangers, that works out at 51p each. The excellent flavour makes these sausages Well Worth Every Penny.


1 comment:

Affer said...

Great opening test! I like the shrinkage data - significant - and the Six Piece Slicing test is clever!
As to the banger itself: yum!!