These porks from Padmore & Sons were rather pale in the raw but the natural skins looked OK and the meat seemed firm enough, so in the pan they went.  First impressions were good with them taking on a slight bend as they heated through, however quite quickly, sausage eruptions happened from the ends on a few as the skins tightened.  I'd put a small amount of oil in the pan as we always do and this appeared to be completely absorbed in to the sausages.

Cooked up they looked very good, nice and brown.  The bite though revealed that the skins were quite rubbery and the texture rather soft.  Taste-wise rather mild. I would have said bland but there was some taste but if honest we were expecting a bit more spice and flavour.  However what let these down the most was the amount of minced gristle we encountered.  OK we accept there's occasionally some, but in this particular purchase there was quite a bit.  A couple of bods here declined seconds which is unusual.

Weight loss and shrinkage in cooking were both reasonable, and pricewise very reasonable. Perhaps we were unlucky with the small amount we bought this time, but our marking does reflect what we found in this sampling unfortunately.  Not something we would buy again.

Now in comparison, we also bought some Cumberland sausages which performed much better in our sampling, which will be published shortly...

Padmore & Sons (Ongar) - Pork    (Sep 2013)

Here's the sample details:
115x28mm before cooking, 108x32mm after.
75g before cooking, 73g after average.
That's a shrinkage of approx 0% & weight loss of approx 6%.
6 sausages £2.52 (£5.59/kg)

Padmore & Sons
103 High Street
Ongar
Essex
CM5 9DX