Hick Cajun Sausages/€12.39 a kilogram: Highs: Sausages are ideal comfort food, and they don't come much more comforting than these.

Hick Cajun Sausages are huge and bursting with spicy flavour. They're great barbecued and stuffed into a roll, and they also make a wonderful sausage stew - Cajun coddle for the 21st century. Great texture and taste.

Lows: The size can be a bit daunting - it certainly rules them out of the breakfast market - and because of their sheer enormousness the skin can occasionally play more than the bit part you'd want. And they don't come cheap.

Verdict: The king of sausages.

Star rating:  4 stars

Tesco Finest Irish Pork Sausages Flavoured with Basil & Garlic

€6.69 a kilogram

Highs: The surprise of the bunch, they're full flavoured and have a great texture. They wouldn't be out of place on the fanciest of breakfast plates. Mind you, you'd want to like garlic. It goes remarkably well with the pork, although it beats the hint of basil senseless.

Lows: They leave a slightly worrying amount of fat in the pan. Granted, nobody ever said sausages were good for you, but if the grease left behind congeals so heavily in the pan, imagine what it's doing to your arteries. Actually, best not imagine that at all.

Verdict: Good but not great.

Star rating: 3 stars

Superquinn Pork Sausages

€6.12 a kilogram

Highs: Not strictly gourmet at all, but included because of rave reports and because they celebrated their 25th birthday this summer. A good old-fashioned, good-value sausage, it has a great, firm and meaty texture and tastes exactly how you'd imagine a traditional prize-winning butcher's sausage from bygone days would.

Lows: Not much in the way of criticism of its taste, but what's with all the packaging? All the sausages sampled use excessive amounts of plastic; these, because they make so much of being traditional, surely should be packaged as such.

Verdict: Legendary, for a sausage.

Star rating: 3 stars

Marks & Spencer Pork & Bramley Apple Sausages

8.73 a kilogram

Highs: Since the pesto-fication of Ireland the sausage has undergone a dramatic metamorphosis. No more do the abattoir floor's vilest scrapings go into the mix (we hope). Instead it comes infused with all manner of fruits, herbs and spices, to deliver a gastronomic feast wrapped in sheep's intestines. So it is with the M&S sausage. Hunks of apple fight hard with the pork for the taste buds' attention. It promises much and delivers, to a point.

Lows: The colour is strangely anaemic and the texture is too gooey, thanks, no doubt, to the apple in the mix.

Verdict: Shame about the texture.

Star rating: 2 stars

5 stars= Steak your life on it; 4 stars=Fit to Burst; 3 stars=Happy in its skin; 2 stars=Old Banger; 1 star=offal