79% pork "cassoulet style" with oak smoked bacon, French red wine, garlic and herbs sounds very good, but how good?  Now after a quick bit of research we find that cassoulet is similar to a casserole so we'll assume that the description implies that these sausages would be good in that way.  But how can a sausage really be cassoulet style? We'll park that then...

So on first impression we have 4 long sausages, but wait, move the label and "whoa" this is hiding the fact that there's 8 rather small sausages in the pack, OK yes the label says so, but visually there's 4.  Nothing bad about that but I'm going to need half the pack to myself I pondered.

They cooked up and browned nicely but quite a bit of that pale jelly stuff (like you get out of bacon these days) escaped from them in to the pan. Now we cooked these slow in a regular fry pan with a tiny drop of oil, so what's going on here?  This stuff can't of been just from the 10% added bacon?

Good natural cases and the herby aroma from the pan was fair to be honest.  Medium texture, meaty and a good herby flavour which the troops commented that they did like...3% French red wine in there too!  However given the massive weight loss of 22% per sausage when cooked and that they're £2.99 for 8 in a 366g pack (which is approximately £8.17 for a kilo), these are not a cheap sausage by any stretch of the imagination! 

The single pack was not sufficient for us for a meal given the shrinkage so some rationing had to be conducted at sausage and mash-time unfortunately! Perhaps in a cassoulet with all the rest of the ingredients these would do better?

Worth a try I'd say for the taste, but not sure if we would buy these again.

M&S British Outdoor Bred - Toulouse    (Jun 2013)

Here's the sample details:
75x28mm before cooking, 70x26mm after.
43g before cooking, 29g after.
That's a shrinkage of approx 13% & weight loss of approx 22%.
6 packaged sausages £2.99 (approx £8.17/kg)

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