Sausage Review - we review sausages

Not our immediate first choice of sausage, given the UN-NATURAL skins, but these found there way into our online order. OK let's give them a go...

I must admit, I got the "whatever have you bought those for" once again from my wife on upacking. Not sure why these were in it. I must have clicked inadvertantly so let's call it that. Easy done.

British pork though all the same but the prospect of these "plant based" casings splitting whilst cooking does fill us with dred. I really have an issue with split and ruptured sausage. It may not affect the taste but it looks blooming rough when you dish up. Not to mention allowing juices to leak when they're cooked.

The packaging recommends to grill, oven bake or air fry, but no mention of pan or shallow frying. Perhaps they know there will be issues. Hmm?

These sausages are, so the packaging says, made by a family run business of over 200 years experience. We are not entirely sure who this is but from a little online digging it looks like the comapny may be: Cranswicks. We could be wrong, so if anyone does know for sure we'd really like to be put straight please.

These finest sausages from Tesco are 90% British pork made from shoulder and belly prime cuts with rice flour and potato starch rather than bran so are GLUTEN FREE for those that need to know.

Cooked up (yes we pan fry as we do with all our samples to keep things consistent) as we suspected all 10 sausages (the whole pack) had split skins to some extent. Surprisingly though the sausages did keep their shape, but we did see a bit of oil and juices leaked in to the pan.

A close textured sausage with a fair bite, and not too bad a chew. Slight sweetness though in taste which was surprising. The caramelised sugar syrup ingredient probably. Got the sage and the general seasoning was OK but we didn't get the coriander ingredient at all.

Given the price, these could be an OK sausage, but only just. There was a noticeable shrinkage and weight loss.

Would we order again, probably not. If they were made with proper natural skins, possibly.

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 - Pork  (Oct 2025)

Here's the sample details:
100x28mm before cooking, 90x28mm after.
66g before cooking, 57g after.
That's a shrinkage of 10% & weight loss of approx 13%.
10 sausages in a 667g pack £4.50 (£6.75/kg)

www.tesco.com