Sausage Review - we review sausages

Picked up a pack of what looked like well filled county style porkers at the rather nice "Sparrows End" farm shop just north of Newport (Essex) on the Saffron Walden road...

We'd spent the day shopping in Saffron Walden, and thought we'd call in to the farm shop on the way home to see what foodie delights we could gather in for our tea. Well to cut a long story short, these sausages got put in the freezer when we got home and we forgot about them! Well that is, until we had a bit of a tidy out of said freezer to make room for some other produce of the "sausage" type. I'm used to getting regular "rollockings" for my sausage purchasing obsession BTW....

I wasn't aware of HG Walter sausages and the fact that the company is a London based independent family run butchery business which supplies many very up-market establishments and restaurants. For their sausages they source predominantly from small farms rearing free range native breeds fed a natural cereal diet free from growth hormones. Hampshire cross Duroc pigs from the South Downs/Brighton coast being mentioned specifically.

HG Walter list the price at £7.95 / 500g pack of 6 sausages, however I think we paid about the same perhaps at the farm shop. I cannot find the till receipt, so I will check next time we are over Saffron Walden way and call in to the farm shop.

The labelling indicates 74% pork from belly, shoulder and pork fat which sounds pretty fair. The natural hog casings (skins) looked good in the raw too but what caught our attention was the ingredients of white pepper, coriander and ginger! Yes please...

Cutting to the chase though, we were a bit disappointed to be honest with these. The skins once cooked up were rather tough and the contents rather firm and solid. Now we always sample by consistently pan frying as we've said before, but this time one of the team only ate a single sausage as she said it was so firm she found it hard going to eat any more. I had to agree unfortunately.

The texture was indeed very firm and chewing was a bit of a task. The flavour was on the salty side and as hard as we tried we really didn't get the white pepper, coriander or the ginger unfortunately.

I kept one back to be eaten when cold. It was a rather bland very solid pork sausage experience which was a shame really as these looked the business in the packaging and with the interesting ingredients labelled as used.

Weight loss and shrinkage were minimal, but at £15.90 / Kg, these are somewhat quite expensive.

So, these Countrystyle sausages are for us, just an OK sausage, but not something we would purchase again.


HG Walter (London, W14) - Countrystyle (Nov 2022)

Here's the sample details:
110x28mm before cooking, 105x30mm after.
79g before cooking, 73g after.
That's a shrinkage of approx 4% & weight loss of approx 7%.
6 pack sausages (500g) £7.95 (£15.90/kg).


  
 

HG Walter
51 Palliser Road,
Barons Court
London
W14 9EB

020 7385 64669

www.hgwalter.com