Sausages

So, sausages. As mentioned in the last post these are in my category of meat that I'm largely ambivalent about. I used to eat sausages of course, but don't miss them in the slightest. I grew up eating fairly cheap sausages. You could probably get good ones back then too, but I was either living with my folks, or buying my own as cheaply as possible at university so they passed me by. I get the impression the push for quality makes the high-meat content ones much easier to come by now. As it is I eat the occasional veggie sausage, but only Cauldron brand ones because they're actually quite nice, whereas many I've tried, such as Quorn, aren't (other recommendations are welcomed in the comments though). Until now I didn't know how they compare to the real thing though, because it's been so long since I ate meaty ones.

Buying

This is going to be a taste comparison between the bog-standard type of sausage I grew up with, and a really high meat-content one. (Unfortunately I couldn't get hold of any Cauldron veggie sausages at the time for a three-way test.) For better or worse these are the ones I picked (no idea how they stack up in the scheme of things).

The ones on the left are just 42% pork, plenty of water, and 10% pork fat. A pack of 8 weighs 454g and cost £2.00. The ones on the right are 97% pork. A pack of 6 weighs 400 grams and also cost £2.00.

Initial impressions

It's noticeable that the raw budget sossies are a soft uniform pink piggy colour to start with which is familiar and thus vaguely reassuring, but also clearly not at all natural. The premium ones are closer to the colour of a headwound - dark, patchy, bloody and meaty. They're also noticeably bigger and firmer.

Cooking

For this test I fried them in a pan with a tiny bit of oil to start them off. The pink cheap ones start browning quite quickly, and look faintly appetising all the way through cooking - they behave exactly as I expect sossies to. The meaty ones go quite grey at first and don't look particularly good, and then struggle to reach the same inviting brownness as their cheaper brethren. They do look more like real food though - less like a serving suggestion picture. It's noticeable that the low-meat ones have shrunk a lot during cooking too, whereas the premium ones have held up much better.

Presentation

Both sets of sossies go into standard buttered hot dog buns with a squirt of tommy ketchup. Normally I'd throw a load of mustard at these (and some onions preferably), but I don't want to risk overwhelming the sausages too much. Can't have a sossie without tommie k though.

First bite

OK, budget sausage first. Scoff! Blech! Ew! It's soft, spongy - nigh-on liquid by the time you're through the skin. Awful, awful texture. (This reminds me a little of the corned beef experiment where it was softer than I remember, but here it's much worse.) The taste is incredibly bland. It's definitely got a bit of the sausage flavour I remember from years ago, but why's there so little of it? It reminds me of perhaps the last meaty sausage product I bought prior to this test - some dreadful sausage-meat squares that I bought from a budget frozen food shop 20-something years ago whilst skint as a student. They were better.

Next up the premium one. Scoff! Crikey! Texture. There's lots of it. There's perhaps too much of it. It's firm and lumpy and not at all like any sausage I've ever eaten before. Perhaps a little uncomfortably so. But it's sooo much better than the cheap soft one. And the taste is so much better too. It tastes more how I remember sausages should taste (with added herbs) and less like cheap diluted scotch egg meat. I have to admit it's really nice.

Going the distance

I have another pop at the budget one. It's just not nice to eat. This has to be a lot worse than the ones I grew up with otherwise they'd be in a worse category for this blog. The texture's just wrong, and there's so little flavour. One final bite to be sure and I'm done. The rest of these are getting flung in the park over the road. If the foxes that live there are particularly desperate they might appreciate them. (I did return to the last bit of sausage later after it had cooled. It was a little less-unpleasant because it was firmer, probably because the high quantity of fat had set).

The meaty ones are a different matter though. These are really nice. The texture is still a little bit much for me, but the taste is actually really good. There's a little bit of meaty-strangeness both through flavour and oiliness to my previously-veggie palette, but it's not too off-putting, and I'll happily scoff the rest of these.

Comparison

The low-meat ones are bloody awful. The high meat ones are really nice. There is no competition.

Let's throw veggie alternatives into the mix then. There are parallels I'd not spotted before. I now get the impression that Quorn sausages are trying to be low-meat sausage alternatives, and Cauldron sossies are trying to be high-meat sausage alternatives.

It's been a fair while since I've eaten quorn sausages but from memory they're less sausage-flavoured than the low-meat sausages and strangely sweet to boot. Better texture though. Ideally I wouldn't eat either again though, and they're equally unpleasant in different ways, so I'm putting them both joint last.

So, high-meat sossie versus Cauldron veggie sausage - FIGHT! Flavour-wise - and this is from memory on the veggie ones - but I don't think there's much in it - I honestly don't. I'll give the meaty ones a small advantage, but it's mainly for some barely-definable satisfactiony-umami thing that I think is going on rather than the actual up-front flavour. They're herbier too, which is nice, so maybe the veggie ones are missing a trick here. I think the veggie sausage holds up pretty well though. The less-lumpy texture is nicer to me than the meaty one, but that may well be just me being unused to meaty chunks, but again I'll give the vote to the meaty one for a better skin and overall juiciness (the veggie one's skin can be a tad leathery and the not-meat filling a tad dry).


In conclusion

I'm a little surprised. Twofold. I thought the low-meat ones would resonate with me, but they're so nasty they couldn't. I suspect they're much worse than the ones I grew up with. The high-meat ones are so much nicer I almost can't believe any meat eater would choose the others. Value-wise I'd be very surprised if you don't end up with more meat for your money with the premium ones too - the budget ones shrank quite a lot.

However in the scheme of things, once I've scoffed the last of the premium pack I'll happily pick Cauldron veggie sausages instead. The meaty ones were better, but not by enough for me to warrant killing a pig to get. If any meat-eaters reading this are thinking of reducing their meat intake, I'd suggest it's at least worth giving these a pop. You won't catch me endorsing many veggie meat substitutes here, but I reckon those are pretty good.