How do you like to serve sausages?

We are fussy about food – particularly when you can’t see the actual content, as in sausages and burgers, so don’t buy cheap but from trusted sources. We can vouch for M&S 97% pork, and in response to a previous banger discussion had this assurance “To ensure a consistent, high quality product we only use cuts of boneless, rindless pork meat from the shoulder, loin, legs & forend. Rindless pork cutting fat will also be present. Connective tissue is not used in any of the sausage products we sell.” We also like their Venison sausage – a bit more flavour.
But back to topic, a favourite way of eating is pretty conventional – fried, grilled or oven-cooked but with onion gravy (caramalised onions, stock, slightly thickened, a little red wine if you like) and mash. Accompanied by mustard.
In the early 1950s Davys in Sheffield made tomato sausage – I presume lowish-meat content but flavoured with tomato puree – a great family favourite when food was not so great. We particularly liked the contents that burst out of the end of the sausages and browned a little more – not good for us I’m sure, but tasty. They left prodigious amounts of fat in the frying pan – the best place for it. Only ever seen those again once in recent times – at Waitrose I think. I expect if we did find them they would be a big disappointment.

I loved the Tesco finest pork and stilton sausages but they don’t seem to do them any more 🙁

I, too, can recommend the M&S 97% pork sausages, they are quite excellent. Another good source is Donald Russell, a Scottish butcher which supplies mail order via the internet. It was from this company that I learnt an interesting way of cooking sausages. The method is to boil them for 10 minutes from defrost or 20 minutes from frozen then dry them and either fry or BBQ for 5 to 8 minutes. I was rather taken aback at the idea of boiling sausages but tried it and found the method to be an excellent way of cooking them.

Having just read the Sausage Review in the July Which? magazine I was wondering how non-supermarket national brands – like Wall’s and Richmond – compare with those tested. The Test Lab tried nine retailers’ own-label bangers plus four from small independent producers [which to my surprise didn’t score particularly highly]. But where on the scale are the bigger national brands that are not only sold by the supermarkets but also heavily through the franchised convenience stores [like Londis, Premier, Budgens, Happy Shopper, Spar and similar]? Not everyone can shop at a big supermarket and although there’s probably a Tesco in every postcode area, unfortunately their Finest British Outdoor-Bred 97% Pork Sausages only came seventh out of thirteen tested. I guess that a lot of the sausages served in cafés and B&B’s are not from the top of the tasting table either I can only asssume that the national brands are towards the bottom of the scale but a significant proportion of the population is condemned to eating them. In the interests of a better breakfast and putting a decent toad in the hole it’s time for the big names to improve their product. Living in a major Outdoor Sausage Breeding area as we do, we want to see these fine animals turned into something nicer than a tube of gristle.