Shambles Sausage & Pie Co (York) - Shambles SausageWe like to do a Christmas Market each year. This year we visited the City of York. Busy old place as it happens, especially in and around Shambles. Many references to Harry Potter and similar here which is Ok I suppose. However we stumbled upon a rather neat little shop, The Shambles Sausage & Pie Co...
Shambles it would appear from a bit of research was in days of old previously called "shamel" which refered to a street with stalls or benches on which meat was displayed.
Well, lovely little shop this. Little best describes it. With the amount of "visitors" to Shambles that queue in the very narrow roadway outside the shop for the "Ghost Merchants shop" opposite, you can't really get in the shop when it's busy and no doubt would struggle to get back out again with your purchases, so you have to order your sausages and pies at a wooden counter setup in the doorway.
These Shambles sausages aren't made on the premises, but rather in their factory facility, which I can understand. It's a very small shop.
The shop assistant told me that the free range pork is locally sourced, the sausages are close to 90% meat, and the flavouring is sage with a bit of mustard, all loaded in to proper natural skins. Oo err yes please!
We didn't have a chance to cook these whilst in York so in to a cool bag with them and an ice block for the 3 or so hours run home it had to be.
On inspection when back at SausageReview, they did seem rather soft to handle. Big sausages though. So in the pan they went...
Now we are, and I suppose it's because we sample so many, quite critical about how sausages cook up. These looked OK to start with but as they warmed through and started cooking we noticed the skins were what can best be described as "sweating". What I mean by this is that little beads of that pale emulsion or ooze were appearing on the skins. We don't prick the sausages, so this must be the skins just leaking very slightly. This wasn't splits by the way.
As the cooking continued, the pale emulsion did burn in the pan and did stick to the skins and the sausages became difficult to turn as they were in fact sticking to the bottom of the pan. To rescue this I got another pan ready and transferred all the sausages to it. However although the sausages didn't stick to this pan, the burnt residue was still on the skins and was very difficult to scrape off, which ultimately did affect the taste unfortunately.
Now OK yes, if you were to oven bake, air fry or grill you may get a different result of course.
So, the texture of the cooked up sausage was very crumbly and open. The skins were a little on the rubbery side, and when you tried to cut the sausages, they just ripped open and loose filling easily fell out..
On the brightside though, the seasoning was spot on, and the taste of the sage and mustard was very good. However the if you got a burnt bit, the taste was affected as previously said.
I kept one back which I had really scraped to get the burnt residue off, to try when cold , and I have to say that it was really very good. The texture had firmed up and mustard and sage were still there. Lovely.
So would we buy the Shamble Sausages again? Probably not. Sorry
We did also buy a bag full of pies...Hunters Pies (Pork/Chicken/Sausage in a cold crust), York Eggs (similar to a Scotch egg but additionally wrapped in bacon), and a couple of proper Pork Pies. We can confirm that those were delightful and yes we would visit for pies again when next up at York.
Note: Although none of the Harry Potter films were filmed in York, we read that the medieval street Shambles is said to have inspired Diagon Alley.
Shambles Sausage & Pie Co (York) - Shambles Sausage 
(Nov 2024)
Here's the sample details:
120x32mm before cooking, 118x30mm after.
99g before cooking, 82g after.
That's a shrinkage of approx 8% & weight loss of approx 10%
6 loose sausages (660g) £6.27 (£9.50/kg)
45 Shambles
York
YO1 7LX
Telephone: 07488 370552
Open: Tuesday through till Saturday : 8am - 4.00pm
www.shamblessausageandpie.co.uk
