Sausage Review - Tesco - Finest Cumberland Chipolatas

Tesco Finest - Cumberland Chipolata

I will admit, we wouldn't usually buy these chipolatas, but, our go to maker is closed (it's Sunday and he's closed Mondays) and we needed a fair few small breakfast sausages for the morning. Now these do come in those un-natural plant based skins, so as I wasn't planning a banquet, more of a quick fryup breakfast really with some friends who were calling over, hopefully these will do...

85% prime cuts of British Red Tractor certified pork isn't a bad thing and neither is the promise of the cumberland style seasoning, but the plant based skins did worry me. We've had such an off experience with those other un-natural skins (collagen) I wasn't expecting much from these if I'm being honest given with it being 2 packs for £5 special offer.

Cooking instructions (for best results) only list grilling, oven bake or air fry, so looks like with us pan frying, like we normally sample, may be a bit off piste.

So cooking up, and it was a surprise, the skins didn't actually split or go rubbery and roll off the sausages like we've seen with the collagen ones. Infact apart from the sausages having a bit of a lumpy shape, they did brown, albeit only slightly, but snappy chipolatas these were definitely not. Very soft skins that cut OK, but didn't have much of a bite and chew we'd say. Look they were Ok but not exciting.

Texture wise, on the smooth side, and taste wise yes got sweetness and some nice peppery spice. Cumberland style, so a tick in the box! Mind you by the time they'd had smoked back bacon and mushroom juice up against them, and had egg and baked bean sauce on them from the breakfast I'm sure there were no complaints from our visitors.

In reality, we were a little dissapointed. They were just about Ok. Quite a bit of shrinkage in the cooking to be honest, and weight loss was VERY noticeable.

Yes these were gluten free and may appeal to some, but would we buy again? Probably not to be frank. Cheap and cheerful comes to mind.

Eaten cold, not very appertising and a little bland. Sadly finest they were not.

As an observation: there's a picture of a pan of sausages on the labelling/packaging, but no recommendation to pan fry. Just saying...

Tesco Finest - Cumberland Chipolata (Feb 2026)

Here's the sample details:
100x20mm before cooking, 85x20mm after.
31g before cooking, 25g after.
That's a shrinkage of 15% & weight loss of approx 19%.
12 sausages in a 375g pack £2.50 (£6.67/kg) Tesco special - 2 packs for £5

www.tesco.com

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