Akaroa: Home to New Zealand’s best sausage
It should come as no surprise that fine food food is being produced in a town with French heritage.
Despite the assumption, Akaroa butcher Brendan Foster was still shocked to win the supreme award at the Devro Great New Zealand Sausage Competition on October 20, especially as their entry, Boudin Noir, was a form of black pudding.
‘‘I make a real point of sourcing the best [food] we can from the best people,’’ Foster said, sitting outside Akaroa Butchery and Deli.
He bought the business six years ago after travelling the world with his wife.
‘‘We bought the butcher shop, we bought the butcher, he sayed for five months, taught me all he could teach me, then he moved on.
‘‘That evolved into us doing small things ourselves, you know, making sausages and making them with good products with not much in them, not a lot of binder or anything like that, just making them flavoursome with fresh herbs, fresh spices.’’
Foster recently hired Eric Varray, a Frenchman who moved his family to New Zealand seeking a different pace of life. With a career in brewing and charcuterie, the French art of curing and preparing meats, Foster had found a kindred spirit. ‘‘The passion and palate the French have, and the simplicity, you know, two, three, four ingredients, and you let the flavour of the meat shine, or the flavour of the blood shine in the black pudding.’’
In 2016, Foster and his team won best New Zealand ham at the 100% NZ Pork, Bacon and Ham Awards which Foster said ‘‘gave people a bit of trust in you’’.
He decided to enter their black pudding in the Devro Great New Zealand Sausage Competition, which involved putting the usually-jarred product in a casing, and cooking it in new varieties of stock.
‘‘Between me and Eric, we played around with different stocks to cook it in, to give it some salty, bacony, smokey flavour,’’ Foster said.
Rather than using beef blood, Foster pushed the boat out and sourced venison blood from his mate at the Tai-Tapu based Merchant of Venison, which he said gave the black pudding a ‘‘velvety, rich flavour’’.
The team travelled to Auckland for the awards and were ‘‘blown away’’ to win a gold medal and supreme sausage, beating our over 500 entries and impressing the 48 judges.
‘‘Eric kept saying to me, ‘Do you know somebody, is this a jack up?’, and I said, ‘Um, no Eric, I don’t know anyone, I think this is real’.’’
Foster said living and working in Akaroa was a slice of paradise for his young family.
‘‘You get such a diverse range of people here, from supermarket workers to millionaires. Everyone comes together, socialises and interacts with each other. You don’t get that in a lot of places.’’
"We bought the butcher shop, we bought the butcher, he sayed for five months, taught me all he could teach me, then he moved on."
Akaroa butcher Brendan Foster