Sausage Review - we review sausages

Heck - Pork Chipolatas

Let's be blunt about this. We're not big on sausages with those un-natural collagen skins. As far as we have tested and sampled they all suffer from skin failure!

We'd received an email from a less than satisfied consumer and as a reader of SausageReview, he brought to our attention his views on these Heck Chipolatas saying that he didn't go much at all on the taste.

On the face of it 97% UK pork does sound OK, but the beef collagen cases when we tested today led to skin failue on not one but all 10 sausages. We followed the cooking instructions as written on the pack to the letter, yet still, disintegrating skins all over. The meaty contents as it cooked up just couldn't be contained by the skins and there were bursts at each end, and splits where the skins had gone rubbery and just peeled off the meat. It says " Pan-fry for best results" and thats just what we did.

Now the cooked meat texture was very OK, and the taste, well, was OK too. Nothing outstanding though, just OK. The seasoning wasn't great and they could have done with a touch more.

The bottom line, just a very average gluten free supermarket sausage to be frank spoilt by the skins. Nothing special at all, so 2.5 "banger marks" would be the absolute upper limit on these.

£3.15 for 10 is OK if you are budget concious but these are not premium by any stretch of the imagination but let's say it anyway, these sausages have terrible skins! If these were produced with natural skins with a touch more seasoning they would have been marked higher by us for sure. We like a chipolata, but not these.

So why do producers use collagen skins/cases? Well we are told it helps the producer when using machinery to create consistent sized product that's uniform, reduces the cost of production in turn, and provides cost benefits to the producer. We are seeing more and more producers switching to collagen, so there you go.


Would we buy again, very unlikely.


Heck - Pork Chipolatas (Dec 2024)

Here's the sample details:
100x20mm before cooking, 110x18mm after.
33g before cooking, 28g after.
That's a shrinkage of 1% & weight loss of approx 15%.
10 sausages in a 340g pack £3.15 (£9.26/kg)

 

 

"Thank you Wayne Butler for the heads up on these, but apologies too that we didn't experience what you found yourself"

www.heckfood.co.uk