S Barnetson's of East Dereham - Pork Sausage

And so we travel to East Dereham - so far untouched by the Rate My Sausage frying pan. I visited on a Saturday, and found a farmers’ market underway. But the first Dereham banger to be taste-tested is the Pork Sausage from a nice little butchery called S Barnetson, which you can find on Norwich Street.

Meat Content:

This is not shown on price labels, tut tut. The sausages taste “quite” meat-filled and the pork here is sweetly flavoursome, but I can’t give you the correct figure as it just wasn’t shown (that’s not strictly legal, chaps). There’s no sense of being clubbed with a log of pig, as you experience with some other sausages, but equally and importantly, these chaps definitely deserve the label of “pork sausages”.


Flavour:

Homely. Warm. Cosy. Unchallenging, nice, pleasant enough, this is a Tim Henman of a banger. I doubt you’ll be disappointed but I’m not sure you’ll be raving about them either.

Texture:

Just dry enough to crumble quite well when sliced. The pork is minced quite roughly, just the way I like it! There are pieces of fat clearly visible in the sausage – this is not a bad thing, and made frying good fun – two squirts of escaping goodness nearly cleared the rim of the pan. Quite irregular in shape before cooking, and ended up in a variety of sizes and forms afterwards – as we’ve said before, we wish we had included this as an extra points-winner. Nice work.


Shrinkage:

Average weight uncooked - 52g
Average weight cooked - 40g

Shrinkage - 23%

It’s quite high. But it added fun to the frying.

Value For Money:

Barnetson’s sausage price labels were solely in a foreign language to me – Imperial measures. How old fashioned! Not to say illegal (second count, please be careful chaps). Maybe £2.99 per lb means something to you? But for me it was not a helpful way to display the cost, and I’d have to spend some mental energy converting that into an approximate figure in metric that actually means something to me. With time, and a calculator:

£1.37 for four sausages weighing 207g - this works out as a price of £6.58 per kg, or 34p per snorker.

Fair value for money.