Meat Pack

This is not a sponsored post, it is my unpaid thoughts on my experience of the product.

I was fortunate enough to be one of the winners of a £20 voucher to spend on a site called Meatpacks, so I duly went over and had a visit. Now like many of you I live on a limited rather tight budget and I like to spend an average of £1.25 a night for the main meal. I rarely buy pre packed food preferring to cook my own from scratch so that I have much better control of what goes into it, both from an allergy point of view as well as hidden salt and other unnecessary additives.

I am not  a lover of cheap meat, I buy only good quality mince and would rather have one decent sausage on my plate than a pack of 20 for £1 from a freezer shop. But with careful budgeting, throwing in lentils,pearl barley and veg to eek out what I do buy, as well as getting some reduced bargains then I manage to eat fairly well.

Now the first thing I did notice, probably because it is important to my family, was the lack of ingredients for the products  they sell and more importantly the lack of allergy advice information on what contains wheat, gluten, egg, dairy etc. But I pointed this out to customer services and they have since put up what information they had available, and have promised to find out ingredients for the remaining relevant products and display this as well. Cant ask for any better than this.

Our local butcher does a good range of allergy free products and has a book in the shop you can look in with a full listing of ingredients and allergy advise, and his allergy labelling goes as far as breaking down what is in the flavouring they use, because the flavouring they use in their beefburgers contains traces of milk, but that trace is enough to potentially kill my grandson so no matter how little a product contains we as a family are careful to make sure it is 100% safe, and unless a label states dairy free or egg free or whatever then it is not bought for consumption by Bob

I thought their prices for me and my budget were quite high, especially time you added on p&p  but I have heard people rant about how much nicer this type of meat is in comparison to supermarket meat so I decided to use the voucher and try it and make up my mind for myself. I was going to go for the sort of thing we normally eat ( mince, stew, chicken) but decided I would go for a pre made meat pack with posher meats in that I would not normally buy just for (hopefully) a pleasant change. I also ordered  beef and guinness sausages  and pork, honey and mustard sausages as my husband is a sausage lover ( if we were ever to win the lottery he would open a sausage factory and employ a chef to come up with new ideas so he could have a different sausage every day of the year!!) and I again though it would be nice to do a comparison between these and our usual "The best from Morrisons" sausages that I buy once in a blue moon.


They offer a quick delivery, order before 12 noon one day and receive the next, and to make things really easy they take paypal as well as all major cards. Their website was very easy to navigate round and their products are easy to find under the various headings, with weights and prices easy to select and understand. Just select your item, pop it into your basket and checkout when finished.

the defrosted ice packs

inside the insulated box

My meat pack turned up on Friday 13th May. The meat was well packaged, well insulated and had had ice packs placed inside to help keep it cool. The meat was still very cold so this method works well.The meat was all vacuum sealed and dated with a packing date as well as a best before date, and it had all been packaged on 12th May, so as fresh as it comes. The only comment I would have at this stage was somebody had stuck the label for the mince on the steaks and vice-versa, might have been a bit more of a problem had it been two similar products they had mis-labelled but I could see the obvious error and it wont cause a problem at all.

I had received a phone call from the company on Friday morning to say that they had been unable to supply the beef and Guinness sausages as the supplier had been unable to supply them, so we had had just normal beef sausages provided. Had I know this before they came out I would have changed them to a different sort as the idea was to try something different. But when I told the company that they said they would issue me with a refund for the sausages, well cant say any fairer than that.

The meat is freezable so I kept out the beef sausages which will do tea on the Saturday night and the mince which I will cook it before I freeze it, and popped the rest into the freezer.

Sat 14th May - tonights tea was the beef sausages. The list of ingredients list them as 70% beef, and lists the usual rusk etc that is common to all sausages, but has no nutritional info so no idea how much fat etc should be in them. Was looking forward to these, and at nearly 70p a sausage then they should  be startling. Cooked them up in the oven the same way as I cook all my sausages, and upon removing them from the oven the first thing I noticed was there was no fat in the tray, they had not shrunk or split.
 We are usually lazy eaters and rarely use a knife, we usually eat with just a fork, but it was not possible to do this. The sausages were very rubbery and incredibly tough, so I had to go and get a knife to cut them up. Verdict - They were tasteless and rubbery, and didn't taste meaty at all.

Sun 15th May  - tonight I broke my rules about cooking from scratch on a working day and decided to make the English Lamb loin chops. Decided to casserole these. I fried them off in a drop of oil  with some salt and pepper to seal them, removed them from the pan and fried off 3 red onions with some wild garlic, popped the chops back into the pan with some stock and cooked for about 20mins. served them with mashed potatoes and broccoli. verdict - beautiful flavour, very soft meat, tender and juicy, one of the nicest meals I have eaten in a long time.

Monday 16th I cooked up the mince for tonight. My first impression upon opening the packet was there was no texture to the mince at all, I expect mince to look like the picture they have here on their website, but I suppose for want of a better expression this look more like mushy dog food, just nothing definable in structure to see at all. I fried it off the way I do any mince and it did take on some texture, the pieces about the size of a pin head. Certainly when it was fried off with the onions and seasoning and I ate some at that stage it tasted fine. I used half of it for mince and tatties and made the other half into mince stovies. Was disappointed in this I wish I had either had more of it, or had planned on making beefburgers or meatballs with it as I feel it might have been better for that as certainly the flavour was very good but the texture was not. . If there is a next time then I maybe will buy some and let you know.

Thursday 19th Tonight we had the Pork Loin chops. There was 2 in the pack and they were a nice size, a decent thickness, not too thick they are hard to cook through but think enough to have some body about them. There was no bone in the chops so apart from the small piece of fat round the edge they were pure meat. These, like the lamb chops, cooked up beautifully, were tender and flavoursome and very moreish.

Sunday 22nd we decided to use the Sirloin Steaks tonight for a Sunday treat. I popped these into a hot dry frying pan to sear them off, adding some salt and pepper to the top of them when I first turned them over, turned them down and left them to cook for approx 15 mins as I like mine well done. Like the other meat from this pack it was soft, beautiful, tender, flavoursome meat, but at the equivalent of £11.20 for two pieces of meat then they should be.

Monday 23rd. tonight we had the pork sausages  that came in with the meat pack.( There was 8 of them not 16 as shown)  These were fairly plain ordinary sausages. They cooked up all right and certainly were a lot more edible than the beef sausages. They tasted quite artificially rusky rather than meaty, and were quite wet inside when cutting and eating them,  and rather bland to say the least., and I would have expected this sort of taste from cheap sausages. I didn't finish off mine as I didn't like them, but the dog was happy to help out here.
Must admit we had had rolls and morrisons cumberland sausage for lunch the other day as the sausages had been on half price promotion, 454g for £1, and I must admit I'm a Cumberland sausage lover so could not resist them. They are constantly moist and flavoursome with a nice texture and cook up beautifully, and when you work out they are 1/4 of the price that I paid for the pork sausages it makes the meatpack sausages very bad value for money.

My opinion of the meatpack? The actual meat (rather than the made sausages) is top quality, sweet, soft and beautiful meat, but on my budget I could not afford to buy it as any more than a rare treat, and feel I could go round the supermarket looking at high end cuts and getting them at the end of the day when they are reduced, because for me as a person knowing 2 pieces of steak had cost me over £10 just spoils the enjoyment of the meal.

At the time of posting this I still have the piece of pork to eat and the pork and honey sausages, but will eat them in the next week sometime and update my blog accordingly