Meatmasons (The Secret Sausage Shop) - Ugley

The Secret Sausage Shop is at Unit i3, Peek Business Centre, Woodside, Bishops Stortford! Oops that’s given it away then. Come on, a new business trying to establish itself needs to be far from secret, so here’s a loud review on their UGLEY SAUSAGE…

Named after the Essex village of Ugley, just up the B1383 (the old A11 for all those that remember) from Bishops Stortford, these sausages are far from ugly trust us. The nice peeps at the shop tell us that the recipe is one for "an old-time banger", full of flavour, and representing the village. We’re not sure how the villagers feel about being referred to as old-timers and being full of flavour but no doubt in our travels we’ll find out!

One thing though, these UGLEY sausages are all Blythburgh (Suffolk) free range pork shoulder, no belly cuts, just well trimmed shoulder. Michael the secret sausage man was particular in telling us this. He agreed that that pale emulsion leaking out when cooking in the pan is horrid, and you won’t get that from their sausages!

85% Blythburgh free range pork, flavouring, seasoning, rusk, all hand mixed and in what looks like fine collagen skins. Now no doubt at this point our regular readers will say "hang on minute" and "you guys don’t really like other than natural skins" but, we’re assured that there’s good "sausage performance" with these. So, OK, we agreed we’ll give them a go then…

Not bad looking BIG sausages in the raw. Not at all ugly! Good colouring and yes, you can tell the skins aren’t natural from the twists and the "tube-like" straightness. From experience sausages made with collagen skins do seem to grill better than how we normally cook up our samples, but for purely consistency of test, we did pan fry using just a smidgen of oil.

Cooked up we did see some skins splitting to be honest, but thankfully the sausage shape was maintained and those that did have splits still cooked through OK without falling apart. No additional residual oil was noted in the pan. Shrinkage and weight loss were reasonable.

What did surprise us was that the UGLEY's cut easily and the bite was good too. Not rubbery at all. In fact when cutting through there wasn’t any tearing and the slice held shape well. Hmm? Well, we’ll need to try a few more of their sausages made with this type of skin and report back accordingly.

The cooked texture was just on the smooth side of medium and provided a reasonable chew, and yes there was enough retained moisture to provide a good succulence.

Taste-wise a fair herby flavour and light lingering after taste from good seasoning.

Eaten cold later, a touch of brown sauce was needed to be honest, BUT as far as we are concerned, for our first sample from The Secret Sausage Shop, the UGLEY is an OK sausage.


Meatmasons (The Secret Sausage Shop) - Ugley
    (Mar 2017)

Here's the sample details:
150x28mm before cooking, 140x28mm after.
98g before cooking, 85g after.
That's a shrinkage of 6% & weight loss of approx 13%.
6 loose sausages £4.93   (£8.50/kg)

        


Secret Sausage Shop
Unit i3
Peek Business Centre
Woodside
Bishops Stortford
HERTS CM23 5RG

01279 657728
 

www.meatmasons.net

 

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