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Who doesn’t love a sausage roll? Every Christmas and birthday, Gran makes a big tray of sausage rolls and I find a comfy seat and shovel roll after roll into my mouth. I often head to the supermarket (I can’t make pastry) and buy a pack of eight to snack on during the week, trying my best to limit myself to one a day. It’s hard.
I aim to get the pack with the highest percentage of pork I can find, switching supermarkets depending on where I’m doing my weekly shop. In this article, I take a look at the sausage roll ranges in Aldi, Tesco, and Sainsbury’s. How much pork is in their essential, mid, and premium ranges and how does the meat content change the cost?
Essential range sausage rolls
For this section, let’s take a look at the ingredients in supermarket essential-range sausage rolls. Being able to read and understand food labels is key to finding out how much pork is in each roll. Each pack contains 8 sausage rolls and are all sold for 99p.
- Aldi Everyday Essentials Sausage Rolls – 17% pork
- Tesco Eastman’s Sausage Rolls – 16% pork
- Sainsbury’s Stamford Street Co. – 17% British pork
Since meat is the dearest ingredient in a sausage roll, it’s to be expected that the pork content will be low. All of these give you the same value for money.
Mid-range sausage rolls
Let’s now look at the next range up: own-brand. Each pack contains 6 sausage rolls, however prices are varied.
- Aldi Crestwood Sausage Rolls – 29% British pork, pack price = £1.69
- Tesco Sausage Rolls – 27% pork, pack price = £1.95
- Sainsbury’s Sausage Rolls – 27% British pork, pack price = £1.69
Here, the value of each pack is slightly different. You get 2% less pork per roll at Sainsbury’s for the same price as Aldi’s mid-range offering, which contains 29% British pork.
Premium range sausage rolls
- Aldi Specially Selected Premium Sausage Rolls – 18% British pork shoulder & 12% British pork belly, pack price = £2.49
- Tesco Finest Sausage Rolls – 39% pork, pack price = £3
- Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Sausage Rolls – 35% British pork, pack price = £3
It’s not until you get to the premium ranges that Tesco takes the value for money crown. Of course, you can’t have a sausage roll that’s 100% pork – there’s pastry, seasonings, breadcrumbs, egg, and other ingredients you need to consider. Following Mary Berry’s sausage roll recipe, and weighing out the spoons of fresh parsley and Dijon mustard, as well as the egg, garlic cloves, and onion I used, I ended up with a sausage roll containing 51% pork. For the sake of simplicity in my calculations, I found a butcher selling 100% pork mince which I hammered a fair bit to give it more of a sausage meat consistency (£4 for 500g).
Making a 51% pork sausage cost me around the same as going to M&S and buying their 53% pork Handcrafted Sausage Rolls. I’d need three packs to match the number I made, £9.75 in total.
Homemade and M&S were around the same value for money, for my first batch of sausage rolls. The 2nd batch, however, were much cheaper, as aside from the pork, I already had most of the ingredients in my cupboard. The time it took to make them and wash up took considerably longer than popping to the shops. It was all a bit tit-for-tat.
Which supermarket sausage roll is the best value for money?
Looking at the pork percentages and prices above, the winner is the Aldi Specially Selected Sausage rolls which give the best value for money on their pork content. The cheaper the sausage roll, the lower the percentage of pork. And as a general rule of thumb, this can be applied to every pre-prepared meat product. The lower the price, the less meat it contains. Shop on a budget, but shop wisely.
