Sausage Review - we review sausages

OGB (Germany) - Porktastic Hotdog

We received some samples recently to try. We don't review hotdog style sausages normally, but that's not to say we don't eat them of course. So why not a review? The only thing is comparing a Premium German sausage and a good old British sausage can be like comparing apples and oranges to be honest...

The kind people over at OGB UK sent us a couple of packs including this particular variety. They label it as "Pork Hotdog - Porktastic - Hot Dog Heaven" on their web site and also reference them as a skinless Vienna.

Now we have just tried some bockwurst and unfortunately found the skins quite rubbery, so a similar sausage, but skinless this time does sound interesting.

On reading the labelling you do notice that these hotdogs are containing quite a few "E's". Namely E621, E631 and E627 which are all flavour enhancers like MSG. There's also colourings added, and additionally it just says "smoke". Now our take on this is these haven't actually been "smoked" but rather have a liquid smoke flavouring added to the mix to give it the flavour of smoke. Nothing wrong with this but just to make you aware.

German sausage tends to be of a higher meat percentage than the good old British sausage, and in this case they just label them as 85% pork. This is likely to be EU pork given the German production, so it's actual source isn't clear.

Cooked up (we pan fried as normal) yes there was a hotdog aroma that was not bad to be honest. No split skins, as there's not skins to split. Nicely browned outside and quite succulent inside given the firmness of the cooked sausage.

They cut nicely and yes were a pretty fair example of a hotdog sausage. A good bite and chew with a smoky flavour, however...

We don't use salt in anyway in our diet these days like we used to so that may be why we may be sensitive to salty flavours. These sausages were salty. The labelling says 2g / 100g, so each sausage is likely to have approximately 1.8g of salt in it. British sausage production uses salt of course to flavour and to help extract the proteins from the meat to bind the ground meat fillings together. Probably say 1-1.5g / 100g in British sausage in comparison, so why are these sausages so salty. We suspect that the preservative used is a salt too.

Now don't get us wrong. These sausages were very eatable of course, just a bit saltier than we'd be used too. If you're going to eat them BBQ style in a long roll dolloped with mustard, or with chips and sprinkled with curry powder then fine but eaten with mash or boiled new spuds etc., then they don't work so well.
 

OGB (Germany) - Vienna Hotdog   (Sep 2024)

Here's the sample details:
210x20mm before cooking, 195x20mm after.
79g before cooking, 67g after.
That's a shrinkage of 7% & weight loss of approx 15%.
Price unavailable
 

 

 

www.ogb-uk.de