Kosher Food and Drink

Like many kosher foodies, I read Fleishigs. Besides the articles in Fleishigs (most of which are pretty good), the ads are great for spotting new products that we might want to try. My wife was marveling at the shwarma sausages that Meal Mart was advertising in there this issue, and lo and behold, we found them in the local kosher H-E-B on a shopping run. While she evinced skepticism that they were going to be worth the ~$12 we paid, I had confidence that, if nothing else, this was going to make a terrific blog post.

(In case that didn’t make it clear: I bought these with my own money. I received zero consideration from Meal Mart.)

The packaging is pretty much the usual. There’s four sausages to a package. They are definitely not all that healthy for you. As promised, chicken and lamb are prominent in the ingredients list. It has a few hechshers, the most relevant being the OU.

In the interests of expediency, I cooked one in the microwave. I did two rounds of 30 seconds, which produced a fairly warm sausage with a bit of surface warping (which is how it is with every sausage, really).

Inside… it’s a sausage. It does indeed lack the homogeneity found with a typical hot dog, albeit it’s not quite what you’d see from an artisanal sausage, either.

Taste-wise, it is definitely very shwarma-spice forward, and was a touch spicier than I was expecting. I really had trouble tasting the lamb; it is really more of a chicken sausage flavor-wise. The smoke flavor was subtle, which is my preference (smoke flavor should come from smoking food!). There was some grease/fat when I cut open the sausage, but not an undue amount.

Texture was acceptable for a mass-produced sausage. Plan on flossing after you eat one. As you can see, there is a distinct skin/casing that holds the sausage itself together.

I didn’t walk away from these sausages thinking that I’d like to use them in cookouts regularly, but they seem like good options as proteins to spice up rice and/or potatoes. That said, you’d get similar results from simply buying normal sausages and throwing shwarma spice on the food.