Sausage Review - we review sausages

Mr Allard's (Stowupland) - Pork Chipolata

We’ll be up front about this review and come clean. This should have been completed in 2015 when we purchased the sausages from a stall at our local Christmas food fair but what with all the other foodie delights bought at the time, the pack found it’s way in to the freezer only to be discovered a month later it seems! Excuses we know, but let’s hope a short cold spell didn’t effect their condition!

Mr Allard’s Farm Butchery is located at Walnut Tree Farm, Stowupland, Stowmarket, Suffolk which also has a Farm Shop, Cafe and Post Office, now open 7 days a week.

The farm produces outdoor reared pork product from it’s own herd of white cross pigs and has been established for many years. We see from the web site that all pigs are kept to the very highest welfare standards and are regularly inspected by a local vet to guarantee the highest standards are met. The operation is also Freedom Food accredited.

Sausages of many flavours are available from the butchery but we thought we would just try their plain pork chipolatas to see if their pork was indeed up to scratch!

Now having 65% minimum meat content stated on the label doesn’t excite enormously to be honest, but it is a MINIMUM figure after all. From the pack (see photo below) even with a freeze and then carefully thawed, the colour and condition retained looked very good. Infact on opening the pack the sausages thankfully didn’t show any effects of being frozen, and what we liked was that they varied slightly in length and breadth indicating to us that they have been run off by hand.

So, cooked up.

I was hoping for something special, but all we can say is they were OK. The skins did brown well and certainly held the contents together adequately, and there was some snap too, however they lacked the full “snappiness” we’ve come to like with chipolatas. Yes agreed we’re fussy I suppose, but having tasted many, many examples, you get to like what you like in a quality sausage, I suppose.

Texture-wise close to medium, with a good succulence for a chipolata. Taste-wise we thought that they could do with a bit more pepper and nutmeg. In fact they had a slight sweetness to them which was good for me but others here said it was not what they had expected.

Value-wise, at £8/kg these are bordering on top end prices for chipolatas. Yes OK chipolatas are more expensive than regular “bangers” in general, but we’d say they would be worth a purchase if you were Stowmarket way.

We’re concerned that you’ll see this review as a downer on Mr Allard’s Chipolatas, but please, we were very happy with them in our sausage and mash dinner and we’d buy them again if honest. It’s just there are so many “everyday” sausages out there, perhaps we need to try some more of the other product from Walnut Tree Farm to get a wider perspective.


Mr Allard's (Stowupland) - Pork Chipolata (Jan 2016)

Here's the sample details:
125x20mm before cooking, 120x20mm after.
38g before cooking, 32g after.
That's a shrinkage of approx 4% & weight loss of approx 15%.
11 sausages in a 448g pack £3.61  (£8.06/kg)

 

 

www.mrallardsfarmbutchery.com

Walnut Tree Farm,
Rendall Lane,
Stowupland,
Stowmarket,
Suffolk
IP14 4BD

01449 615006