Sausage Review - we review sausages

We were passing the excellent Poplar Nurseries at Marks Tey near Colchester (on the A120) and just couldn't resist to pop in the deli to pick up a pack or two for the freezer...we always have a stock of sausages!...

These sausages looked excellent in the raw and having sampled Totham Bangers before, we knew these would be well made.

Totham Bangers is a family run business in the village of Great Totham, Essex. They make a wide variety of high quality handmade gourmet sausages, burgers, chorizos, using only the finest quality ingredients without any added artificial colourings or flavourings. All their sausages have an average meat content of over 86%, which they say produces a full bodied tasty traditional sausage. All the pork used is from outside reared pigs, and is sourced from within the local area.

These particular sausages are labelled as having 80% pork and 5% bacon.

Now one of the team isn't that struck on salty bacon, so we hoped the bacon inclusion wasn't going to be detrimental to the scoring.

Just like other Totham Bangers sausages, like we've mentioned before, are quite solid in the raw, but given such a high percentage of meat you would expect that. 

Cooked up they browned lovely and the aroma from the pan was delightful.

A texture of just over medium to coarse with a very good bite which is excellent.  Taste-wise we agreed, is was unfortunate the bacon flavour with some additional saltiness was a little OTT for some of us. Which was again a bit disappointing to be honest. Quite a bit of "pinkness" in the sliced sausage too. It was fully cooked and checked as such with a catering thermometer.

Shrinkage and weight-loss figures were pretty fair.  Eaten cold later...probably very nice but unfortunately they all went!

The bottom line:   A very good well made tasty sausage but they are VERY "bacon(ie)".


Totham Bangers - Pork, Leek & Bacon (May 2026)

Here's the sample details:
100x28mm before cooking, 90x30mm after.
70g before cooking, 64g after.
That's a shrinkage of approx 5% & weight loss of approx 8%.
6 sausages in a 420g pack £5.49 (in Poplar Nurseries) that's approx £13/Kg.

www.tothambangers.co.uk