Sausage Review - we review sausages

Cheerbrook (Nantwich) - Plum & Ginger

Got some lovely sausages in recently by mail order from those nice people at Cheerbrook, Cheshire's Farm Shop, in Nantwich...winners of the Best On-Farm Butchery Award 2014 at the prestigious FARMA (National Farmers’ Retail & Markets Association) Awards...

Now you must know our methods by now, even if we do get sausages donated to us for free, we will still be honest in our reviews and we'll always give an unbiased opinion!

I will say, we've not had any sausages in by mail order before, so if the high standards of packing and delivery that Cheerbrook utilise is anything to go by then ordering and delivery this way is excellent!  The sausages were made on the Thursday, dispatched and arrived very prompt on the Friday morning in a good sized polystyrene cool box with gel bubble cold packs, and each packet of sausages within were double wrapped and labelled. Needless to say the sausages arrived after their nearly 180 mile road trip in first class condition.

With friends and family with us on the Friday evening we arranged a impromptu "sausage fest" with comments and our review based on the collective opinion.

The Plum & Ginger came out tops I will hasten to add and found favour with all our "tasters".  These sausages had a lovely aroma going in to the pan, and cooked up really well. No residual oil in the pan over the very small amount we used to cook which is a good indicator of the quality of ingredients that have gone into the sausage. Good sized at around 100g a go (as all our samples received were).  A bit of shrinkage and weight loss through cooking OK, but not what you would call excessive.

With their quality skins and a medium texture of obviously well prepared and minced meat (69% free range pork) combined with the slight sweetness of plum and the underlying tone of ginger (and spring onion) producing a "stonkingly good" taste experience. Rusk in these rather than breadcrumbs and with the small bits of prune, just add to the texture...trust me! The lingering taste on the tongue afterwards is the sign of a properly seasoned sausage too as far as I am concerned. We even had requests for seconds for these from the troops... unfortunately all were gone, all too soon!

• "The texture is just right.  I was expecting to have to chew a bit, but these are "nicely crumbly" when you bite them.  Excellent..."
   
• "Where did you get these from again? I'm really impressed with the Plum and Ginger ones.  I thought they would be very sweet but they're just right..."
   
• "I thought that they (the plum & ginger) would be too "Chinese flavoured" with all that plum sauce, but I really enjoyed them.  I bet they're excellent with mash and onions..."
   
• "Something different. I really like them. Enough said"

As you can see, some happy troops (and hangers on) voicing opinion...from a personal perspective we've tried (and written about) an immense variety of sausages over the years, and I would definitely buy more of these. 

You really ought to try Cheerbrook's Pork Plum and Ginger sausages yourself...come on, just do it!  Tell them Sausage Review sent you...


Reviews for the other top class Cheerbrook samples (Pork, Moroccan, Pork & Leek, and Pork, Tomato & Basil) to follow shortly...


Cheerbrook (Nantwich) - Plum & Ginger   (Aug2014)

Here's the sample details:
125x32mm before cooking, 122x30mm after.
98g before cooking, 87g after.
That's a shrinkage of 8% & weight loss of approx 11%.
4 sausages £2.87   (£7.25/kg)

 

 

www.cheerbrook.co.uk