If you’re like every other red-blooded barbecue-loving carnivore, you’ve probably been tempted sausage gravy biscuits try every sausage you’ve ever seen. The problem is that would be a terrible exercise in indigestion. Well, we’ve got some great news for you.
A couple of notes before we begin: There are a bazillion sausage brands available in America alone, and lots of them are “popular. If we left your favorite brand off this list, please forgive us. We tried to stick with the ones that are available in big chain supermarkets, and we excluded anything you wouldn’t cook on the grill like breakfast sausages and ground sausage. It’s also worth mentioning that there are as many different sausage varieties as there are sausage brands, and while trying only Italian sausage or only andouille would have made the most fair comparison, it just wasn’t possible given the massive number of varieties and the fact that every brand doesn’t do every one of them.
With that in mind, here we go. Sadly, one of these sausages had to be handed the title “worst of the worst,” and unfortunately it’s Hempler’s Andouille. It had a flavor that could only be described as nutty. And not nutty in a nice “hint of a nuttiness” sort of way, but nutty in a bowl of peanuts sort of way. In fact, we actually had to go back to the packaging to see if we’d accidentally purchased a plant-based sausage.
But here’s the thing: We’ve had plant based sausage before, and even the people who make plant-based sausage know it isn’t supposed to taste like nuts. Hempler’s Andouille is a pork sausage, and the label clearly states that there is only pork, salt, spices, and garlic, plus the ubiquitous dextrose and sodium nitrate. So unless one of those “spices” is cashew, we’re not sure how it got its flavor. Anyway, we couldn’t put this one very high on the list, for obvious reasons. Tyson’s Mild Italian Chicken Sausage is a facsimile of the pork Italian sausages you can buy in the fresh meat department at the supermarket. This was a lot less greasy than a pork sausage, which is a plus, but in giving up the extra fat, it also lost some of that rich, deep flavor that you expect when you cook up the standard pork version. As a chicken-based copy of a pork Italian sausage it can only come so far in terms of “meatiness.
Most chicken sausages make up for that with the spice profile, but Tyson just didn’t succeed in doing that. Tyson’s sausage has fennel in it, but it wasn’t so detectable that you can’t taste anything else. To be fair, Tyson is really more of a chicken nugget brand than a sausage brand, so it’s almost like these were a bit of an afterthought. We also found them in the frozen section, which means they may have suffered a little bit depending on how long they were on ice. This might be a good time to say that hot dogs do have their place in American cuisine — at school picnics and baseball games. We’re not trying to put down hot dogs if they happen to be your thing, but they are not in the same category as sausage, and therefore, one should not be like the other.
When they’re indistinguishable from an Oscar Mayer wiener, though, there’s a problem. While the Signature Select smoked sausage smelled on point, we cannot say the same about the taste. It’s almost as if the smokiness was just painted on the outside and it burned off in the fire. Anyway, “smoked” was one of the selling points of this sausage, and the fact that we just couldn’t taste any smoke was pretty disappointing. To be fair, you don’t really expect name-brand quality from a store-brand sausage or store-brand anything else for that matter, but it would have been nice to actually taste the flavor that was promised on the package.
The Hillshire Farm Polska Kielbasa we tried didn’t taste anything like the Signature Select sausage, which is really this sausage’s major accomplishment. Obviously, a kielbasa shouldn’t taste like a generic store-brand smoked sausage. Still, the consistency was pretty similar. This sausage is made with turkey, beef, and pork, but one wonders what the point of the turkey is because it just tastes like any other pork and beef sausage. Other ingredients include soy, corn syrup, and MSG, plus all the usual nitrates you expect to find in a sausage.