35 thoughts on “Hang Your Head”

  3. scottser

    i often wonder how denny are still going. sossies, rashers, puddn and ham are all a bit mank. i’d only get a denny product if i had to get a fry in from the local spar and they’d sod all left.

      1. Custo

        Personally I like to rear and slaughter my own pig and only eat that.

        Or at least buy an organic free range cured Hungarian ham hock and slice it with an heirloom Bavarian hunting knife.

        Anything less and you may as well eat out of a bin.

    2. Soundings

      Typical, you usually find they hide the fat on your sirloin steak in the same way. Transparent packaging should be mandatory.

  5. Bejayziz

    Go to your local butcher or tesco, buy a kilo of ham…cook it, carve it…..loads of ham that doesnt taste like crap in your fridge for when you feel like eating it, dont understand why people buy that rank pre cut ham when it’s so simple to cook a ham

    2. smoothlikemurphys

      The ‘Medium Ham’ in Aldi is pretty good actually, and extremely reasonable. Stick it in the pot and boil, then simmer for 45 minutes per KG and knock yourself out with a couple of hamilicious meals.

      Pre-pack ham slices are A)Expensive, B)Not great quality, and C) Something your kids have been trained into liking as some sort of sanitised version of the real thing

  8. Murtles

    That there is one of those fancy schmancy resealable packs. How do we know OP/any of her kids didn’t open it, scoff a few slices and but it back before photographing (just hoping it wasn’t a shop grazer that opened it and stuck their greasy mitts into it befoer putting it back on the shelf).

  9. bisted

    *cough*…got 4 extra slices in a Denny 5-pack….dropped last two on kitchen floor and lost race with dog….karma.

    2. Frilly Keane

      We’ve all lost that race Bisto

      Anyways

      I stopped buying Denny products that time when Irish Hang products were removed from the shelves and that Denny crowd had stickers ” Only Pork Sourced From Poland Used In This Product”

  11. KerrryEmployee

    Just to give a bit of background…!
    The factory itself is not a “Denny” factory, Denny is a just brand, one of many that go through the factory. They do Aldi, Tesco Ireland, some Tesco UK SKUs, Musgraves various brands (Centra, Super Valu) and Ballyfree. They did Superquinn when there still was one. They also do foodservice products (think petrol station sausages) and bulk hams (where the nice man in the deli has to slice it himself)

    While its not accurate to say the products are all the same, the raw ingredients are (excluding SQ, which was exclusively “Stall & Tether Free pork” which is the pig version of free range, I don’t recall is the SuperValu kept up the free-range requirement). Everyone else would have had different recipes, different fat content / salt content / cooked for longer to make it drier etc, but they mostly share the same ingredients and process.

    While there, the New Product Development team would constantly be working on new products, or revising existing products. There is a whopping load of product coming out of there, lots of special varieties for the BBQ season, then Christmas hams etc. They are constantly bidding for work from the multiples or delisting products etc.

    A few things I learned:
    People will buy anything with a red sticker on it: 33% extra free or buy-one-get-one-free are fairly straight forward but the company love a “bumper” or “family” pack as there is no obvious impact on price for the customer just the feeling of a good deal.
    Rashers are high in salt, but largely as nature intended and I’m happy to eat any brand – look past the packaging on that one for sure.
    Sausages can be very high in fat – the higher fat content often taste nicer, but obviously are cheaper to make. The supermarkets are insanely strict on what goes in there, the fall-out is always splashed all over the media and after the news story dies down, Kerry Foods are still left dealing with Tesco’s scowl! If you can live with the high-fat nature, they are not the worst…
    Pudding, Corned beef, “Billy Roll”, Luncheon sausage and anything else that you can’t see a meaty “grain” of original muscle tissue in, is utter junk. It won’t kill you but jesus there’s a reason why this stuff comes in a log at the deli counter, you never get to read the ingredients. It stinks being made, and looks like foam for a lot of its production life-cycle.
    Golden rule: the stronger the added flavour/colour, the more they are trying to hide! That’s any brand, not just the ones made in this site. I would happily go with 95% of the products, absolutely no way for puddings though. We all know its made from pigs blood, but seriously, puddings are just junk-waste products that are heavily flavoured to make them palatable. Pig skin, lots of fat, dried pigs blood (it goes in as a powder, the exact amount per batch is measured out with a little trowel!) Boil the bejaysus out of it and pump it into a skin. This part of the factory also stinks.

    Like I said, I would happy sit down and eat a Dennys breakfast excluding pudding
    You have no idea how paranoid the marketing folks and the management are about their brand.
    To be fair, its easy bash the meat industry with urban myths or anecdotes, but this site, and the vast majority are paranoid about brand damage. That applies to the Brannan’s Aldi own label brand or the Denny brand. All the food is X-rayed looking for metal, and all the pens and sticking-plasters etc on the site are special issue with metal in them. Absolutely no pencils – the X-Rays won’t see them.

    The site is a Kerry Foods site, and has the designation P501 EC. You will see this on the back of ANY product from that site, regardless of whether you find it in a Aldi or SuperValu banded product.

    In the picture above, I know the meat looks sorry down there in the corner, but these are weighted products. There is a weighing-scales-cum-conveyer-belt at the end of the production line and it doesn’t let anything under 90g (or 454g or whatever you’re buying) by it. In this regard, the customer always wins, I’d say 90% of packets are over-weight a little, though its obviously priced to allow for that :-)

    I agree with the comments above though, Its an exceptionally expensive way of buying ham.

    I shop in Lidl myself, having worked in the food industry for a while, the whole idea of consumer choice is largely fiction. Tesco will sell you a zillion varieties of the same product. Lidl or Aldi can stock all the essentials in a fraction of the foot-print. I genuinely believe they get a lot of footfall based on them being “nippy” places. Tesco is a day out, and you’re tired and hungry by the end… you know….where the snacks are… Ain’t nothing left to chance!

    The site:
    https://www.google.ie/maps/place/Shillelagh,+Co.+Wicklow/@52.7524698,-6.5311038,633m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x4867f112f6cb242d:0xa00c7a9973223d0

    1. Frilly Keane

      Thank you
      Ya bollox ya

      I’ve just gotten out of bed and left 2 sticks’a puddin’ inta the bin.

      Big mouth

    3. Mick Flavin

      Very good post, thanks.
      I’m still going to enjoy Clonakilty white pudding though. I wouldn’t care if it were made with cancerous hog penises/penii: I like how it tastes.

      1. Mani

        It is a testament to my love of black and white pudding that while I was reading his graphic post all I could think was ‘I’d murder a Kanturk pudding sandwich’*

        *Incidentally, if your’e in that part of cork and at the local nightclub, this means something entirely different.

  12. kerryview

    What in God’s name does ‘made in wicklow’ mean ? How do you make a pig? As far as I know most of Denny’s pork is not even Irish (if at all). A lump of Irish cow pat is definitely 100% all natural.

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