Sausages in uk

[kirlywurly]

Hi all,

I have some sausages in my freezer, bought from riverford organic before I started this. I'm really struggling to find complant sausages in the UK. This is the ingredient list:

pork 87%, gluten free pork sausage mix 9% (potato starch, sea salt*, white pepper, ascorbic acid E300*, black pepper, ginger, sage, sugar, nutmeg, thyme, rosemary extract), water*, natural hogs casings*, (* non organic).

Can I use them?

[evaq]

My inner math nerd is stuck at questioning what the remaining 4% of the sausage is comprised of: water? Why even put in the specific percentage ratios if you're not going to put in the complete number content?

 

Unfortunately, the deal breaker in the ingredient list is sugar. I know it's difficult finding sausages without breadcrumbs/flour/gluten or sugar. So you either need to give these away to a deserving home or save them for life post whole 30.

 

Maybe try posting in the "Sourcing Good Food" forum for fellow UK brands/butchers/suggestions? Best of luck!

[ShannonM816]

Do you need your sausages to be encased? In other words, if you got the flavor, would you be okay with it being ground meat? Because you can find recipes for compliant sausage (here in the US, we often have ground breakfast sausage that we shape into patties, rather than having it encased like sausage links. You could try this recipe, leaving out the brown sugar -- and if you don't like hot and spicy, you can either leave out or cut way back on both the red pepper flakes and the cayenne. I made this once, without the sugar, and cut way, way back on both (I probably cut out the pepper flakes and did half the cayenne), and it was fine -- but I think what makes it for me is the sage anyway. 

[kirlywurly]

Thanks both of you.. Yeh I had a little niggle in my head about the sugar and the e300, that's why I didn't use them earlier.

Shannon- I think that's going to be my answer, just make them myself. Thanks for the the recipe recc, il take a look

Thanks guys, knew I could rely on you to help me out

[Tom Denham]

I make my own sausage from ground pork all the time. I add sage, cayenne pepper, salt, and garlic powder and am happy with the result. 

[Hannlib]

I'm in the UK. I haven't ever found any compliant sausages.

I just buy pork mince and season it in a whole variety of ways.

[Ytu]

I bought some Laverstoke Park Cumberland sausages from Ocado. Not cheap but compliant. The rest of their sausage range has added sugar but the Cumberlands don't. (Ingredients: Pork meat (98.5%), spices, hog casing, salt, ground white pepper, ground sage, ground mace)

 

I thought ascorbic acid would be OK though? It's vitamin C. The sugar would be what makes the Riverford ones non-compliant.

 

evaq - I think in the UK they only need to give percentages for the main ingredients (ie if they're called pork and apple sausages you need to say how much pork and how much apple) and the rest are in descending order.

[evaq]

Thanks Ytu! I was mostly teasing (though partly curious) about the ingredient percentages. European labelling is often much more transparent than here in North America. It's refreshing. Also, my brain was occupied by the idea of getting UK sausage.

[Ytu]

I used to be really into tracking micronutrients in sites like Paleotrack and the percentages were handy when trying to log processed foods - I'd make up a "recipe" in the site using the percentages given in the ingredients and estimating the others based on the nutritional breakdown. Yeah, obsessive!

 

Actually this thread has made me wish I'd just made some sausage patties of my own instead of splashing out on the Laverstoke ones, but hey, let's call it my final week treat.