Bland sausages raise Wayne to king status
Disdain of eating sausages with no flavour has spurned a local butcher to a record five gold medals in the recent Australia Meat Industry Council – Sausage King awards.
Garfield Country Style Meats won the record haul of gold medals at the South East Victoria regional awards for its sausage and ham products.
Now claiming the crown of best sausages in the region are butcher Wayne Claridge’s chicken malay satay sausages, pure pork sausages and sweet herb and rosemary lamb sausages.
He also won gold for best ham on the bone and best ham off the bone.
“It’s fantastic,” said proprietor John Preston. “We don’t really do it for the awards, just for the advertisement. Especially being from a small country town.”
A stint living in Port Hedland about 20 years ago with only supermarket sausages on offer is what inspires Mr Claridge.
“I just got sick of eating plain sausages with no flavour. Then I decided to do something about it.”
It was in Trafalgar that Mr Claridge first claimed the sausage king title for his unique flavour creations. At the time, butchers tended to stick to more traditional flavours with few stepping “out of the square”.
“Now there’s no limits, even snags with truffles. I make six or seven different flavours each week, and they always sell. I’m always playing around with something.”
With its five golds, Garfield Country Style Meats will now compete at the AMIC Victorian awards later this year.
Responding to recent warnings of salty sausages putting our health at risk, Mr Claridge said we’ve been eating snags for hundreds of years without affect.
After analysing salt content in processed meat products at Australia’s four major supermarkets, The George Institute for Global Health found the average sausage contains more than one-quarter of our daily recommended salt intake.
“We don’t add anything like that in ours,” said Mr Claridge. “We have a good base to start with. It’s all fresh, we don’t add preservatives, salt or MSG.”