AN award-winning Nantwich farm butchery has undertaken its first ‘royal’ commission – a birthday surprise fit for a king.

Only a fortnight after hitting the headlines with its heart-shaped Valentine steaks, the Great Tasting Meat Company has produced a birthday cake decorated with sausages instead of candles.

The sausage-meat confection was made as a surprise birthday treat for Britain’s proclaimed Sausage King Stephen Plume, who has just celebrated his 31st birthday.

Stephen, a school teacher in Norfolk, spends much of his spare time touring the country on his motorbike taste-testing artisan sausages – earning himself the reputation as the Sausage King.

“We invited him to come up to our farm shop on his birthday to sample our prize-winning sausages but his school commitments just made it impossible,” said farm shop owner, farmer Andrew Jackson.

“So we got our heads together and decided the only answer was to make a sausage cake and send it down to him as a surprise.

“The cake base is made from our finest grass-fed free range rare breed pigs and the candles are our special cracked black pepper pork sausages.”

Over the years the Great Tasting Meat Company has won many top awards including the supreme national champion title for the best beef burgers in Britain at the butchery trade shown at the NEC, Birmingham.

“We have produced several superb and original varieties of award-winning sausages but this is the first time we have ever used them to decorate a birthday cake,” said Andrew.

The Gate Farm Shop in Wettenhall Road, Poole, near Nantwich is open from Tuesday to Saturday, 9am-6pm.

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Not only is he a great bloke he is also enthusiastic about the market as a whole and how best he can support it.  I met him most recently at the Champion of Champions competition where he gave a nice speech and presented the prizes.

Over at RMS they seem to be impressed with Black Farmer sausages.

I was delighted to read that they found them to be very meaty.  They also do excellent gluten free options which seem to be a big hit.

The Black Farmer sausages are a great example of a premium product available in the supermarket at a fair price for both the consumer and The Black Farmer himself.

I couldn’t resist slipping this photo of him and I at Champion of Champions.  I’m looking forward to working with him in the future.

Today was the start of the rest of my life in terms of pork pies when I happened to meet two of the Bray’s Cottage ladies at Norwich Farmer’s market.  In the same way as I think you can tell a lot about a butcher by their “standard” pork sausage I took the same approach with a “standard” pie although I was very tempted by some of the more exotic offerings.

You know when you see a Bray’s Cottage pie it is going to be special and this is confirmed when you cut into it.  The pastry is very short and crunchy and err well, perfect for the perfect pie.  The meat inside is perfectly formed!

To say the taste of the pie was a revelation is an understatement.  This is probably the finest pork pie I have ever tasted.  Of course my usual munch is sausages but this pie really was first rate.  Home reared Saddleback pigs provide the meat and the cuts are those you would normally associate with joints and chops and other nice treats.  They also mix in some bacon and some onion marmalade for that perfect pie flavour.

If I was touring the UK looking for pies not sausages I might stop my search now and move to Holt!

To find stockists click here.

I’ve chosen their “Taste The Difference British Pork & Caramelised Red Onion Sausage” as the first offering from the retail sector of the banger world. This is part of their premium product range, comparable to Tesco’s “Finest” or Morrison‘s “The Best”. The Sainsbury’s website tells us that all the meat in their sausages is produced in the UK, “including back fat (we are the only company that does this)”.

Texture:
All six sausages were exactly the same size and shape - will this be commonplace for the retail sector bangers? I think that when your sausages vary in length, thickness, and especially shape, it adds to the whole eating experience. I prefer idiosyncratic sausages, not “robotages” ™. Stood up manfully to the six slice test.

Shrinkage:
Average weight uncooked - 66g
Average weight cooked - 45g
Shrinkage - 32%

The biggest shrinker so far, but the opposition’s been very tough.

Value For Money:
These sausages come in a pack of six weighing 400g, at a cost of £2.59 - this works out as a price of £6.50 per kg, or 43p per snorker.

Dribble Factor: These sausages smelled fantastic while they were cooking, I could almost taste the onion flavours, and the cooking time seemed an eternity. If you’re looking for sausages that really boost your appetite before you eat them, these are highly recommended.

Giffen‘s is a small butchery, which can be found only fifty metres from the previously reported Bowers‘, on Gaywood Road in King‘s Lynn. I think they are trying to move to a more traditional set-up and the shop looks great inside with super high-fronted glass cabinets - when I moved to Lynn the shop was called “Meat Supermarket“ and seemed to mainly offer large bargain bundles of meat.

The butcher suggested that I try their made-on -premises Old English sausages, so I made the purchase. He also informed me that “everyone who buys them has no complaints about them”

Bowers’ is a small traditional butcher shop, which can be found on Gaywood Road in King’s Lynn, close to the famous Gaywood clock tower. You will always be afforded a warm welcome here, and the smell of the shop will tickle your tastebuds before you’ve even bought your meat. There is often a queue in Bowers’ which will allow you time to peruse the black and white photographs of Victorian King’s Lynn which cover the walls.

I’ve chosen Bowers’ Traditional Norfolk Pork Sausages as the first banger to go under the microscope and into the frying pan for three reasons:

1. Bower’s is the closest butcher my home here in Norfolk,
2. The “default” sausage we’ll be trying will be of the pork variety, and therefore,
3. A Norfolk, pork, sausage has to be the starting point.

Meat Content: No “official” figure from the butcher, but this sausage is Very Meaty. You need to bite into it, which marks it out as a solid piece of dead pig!

Flavour: Delicious! There is a major amount of pork in this sausage, and it is backed up with a spicy additions from the maker. It’s the first sausage to be tested at 2-Sox Towers, and it’s an extremely tasty one. Lovely and porky, and flavoured just so, this is a very good sausage.

Texture: Slicing through a banger and seeing what happens helps define its quality. A cross section of this beauty shows a high proportion of meat and very little filler. When you put a slice in your mouth it tastes like almost solid meat - this may be a defining factor in future tests. Stands the test of Six Piece Slicing without crumbling.

Shrinkage: Average weight uncooked - 77g, Average weight cooked - 59g, Shrinkage - 23%

Value For Money: These sausages cost £6.60 per kg. As these are large bangers, that works out at 51p each. The excellent flavour makes these sausages Well Worth Every Penny.

Sausage King’s note: I hope you enjoyed this review as much as I did although I am pretty hungry now!  If you like this review check out the Rate My Sausage website to see more.  If you think I should definitely include Bowers on my motorbike powered adventures get in touch and let me know.

Not only are they locally based to me in Norfolk but they are hunting for great sausages just like I am.  They have also kindly offered to share their findings with The Sausage King and Sausagefans.com websites!

Viva la sausage!

Regular readers of this website may remember that one of my first Sausage King Adventures was to R J Hirst in Lincolnshire.  To say I was blown away by the quality of everything they have on offer in their shop is an understatement.  Their sausages are really amazing as is everything else they sell.  People were coming in all day to stock up on sausages and having tasted them I can see why.

Russell and Sadie have worked really hard to build up the reputation of the business.  I am delighted to say that this has now been recognised and Tastes of Lincolnshire have voted them Best Producer for 2010 for the whole county!

I can’t wait to get back up to Lincolnshire to see Russell and Sadie and make some sausages!

On Monday my search took me to Wisbech which is a market town in Norfolk and home to The FruitPig Company. I knew when I first met Matt Cockin of The FruitPig Company he was going to change the world of meat. So far he hasn’t let me down and I’ve had several opportunities to try his products including Norwich Battle of the Bangers and at The Dabbling Duck at Massingham.  I figured that if his bacon was anything to go by his ham would be worthy of centre spot on my table.

The FruitPig Company prepares and delivers rare breed, pedigree, free range pork to some of the finest eateries and deli’s in Norfolk.  Despite the snow and very low temperatures I braved the roads to make the trip to their HQ.

As it is the school holidays Matt has roped in his rugby star (England squad potential) son, Ben to help with the Christmas rush. I was really grateful to them for allowing me to visit in their busiest period.  As ever Matt’s passion is infectious and you can’t help but get involved as he talks around joints and things they are working on.

And then, as if the visit wasn’t already a lot of fun we cracked open the ham and tried it.  Wow.  The flavour is amazing.  I can say *is* because unlike some of the other bits I bought back from The FruitPig Company I have managed, so far, to resist sampling more of the ham.

I haven’t however, managed to resist the (unrolled) pancetta which is absolutely first rate.

In his (relatively) short time in butchery Matt seems to have picked up an in-exhaustible amount of knowledge about what might work with what cut of meat and his pancetta, unsurprisingly, is already a hit with many chefs around the UK.  His black pudding (which I have also been powerless to resist) is also excellent.

As soon as I get change in the new year I will be back off to see Matt and The FruitPig Company to get involved in making some of his magical sausages.

The 23-year-old man ate a meal at the restaurant, in Benxi, Heilongjang province, before grabbing the owner’s daughter.

He put a knife to her neck and demanded cash from the till - but the restaurateur and other diners overpowered him.

They called the police - but when officers arrived the man, named He, jumped to his feet and revealed his ‘explosive’ belt.

Police managed to restrain He and took him outside to an open space - and called bomb disposal experts, reports the Huashang Morning Post.

“When they experts arrived, they laughed out loud as they quickly realised the explosives were actually sausages,” said a police spokesman.

He said he staged the robbery because he was depressed after splitting up with his girlfriend. He told police he had been “inspired” by the shape of the sausages.

He said: “I needed some excitement in my life and to that extent it was a success.”