City snarler wins gold
Creating New Zealand’s top sausage requires good ingredients and pride in your product, champion butcher Chris Nicol says.
He and his team at New World Te Rapa in Hamilton use angus chuck steak sourced from Wilson Hellaby that had a meat to fat ratio of around 15 per cent fat.
The meat goes through the mincer once and they then hand mix it with binding ingredients and seasonings. This gives the sausage a coarser texture, he said.
The end product, is an angus beef sausage that was a joint winner of the supreme champion award in the Devro Great New Zealand Sausage Competition along with a beef and mushroom sausage from Westmere Butchery in Auckland.
Nicol said it was his first supreme champion win and called it ‘‘an unbelievable feeling’’.
‘‘It’s come at a tough time for us, we’ve been short of staff and we’ve needed people to step up and they did.’’
With sausage flavours becoming more sophisticated and exotic, winning the top award with a simple beef variety made it even better, he said.
‘‘You can take shortcuts when you make sausages, but if you use quality ingredients and put the time and effort into it and if you hand mix it and use the right meat to fat ratio you’re going to come up with a good product.
‘‘You have nothing to hide behind when you make a beef sausage. It has to be quality.’’ Many people did not realise supermarket butchers made their own sausages, thinking instead that it was pre-made at another location and brought in. Their winning entry was chosen among 480 entries from more than 90 stores in 13 categories.
News had already spread of the supermarket’s success with a constant stream of customers eager to try the award winning sausage for themselves.
To keep up with demand and as part of a promotion for National Sausage Day on October 19, Nicol’s team were making 200kg of sausages. At 12 sausages made per kilogram of meat, he predicted they should be able to make 2400 sausages to supply them into Saturday.
‘‘On a normal week we would probably make 20kg.’’
The key to successfully cooking a sausage was adding them to the frying pan when it was still cold. Dropping the sausage into a hot surface risked splitting its skin and all of its fat and meat came out, he said.
Westmere Butchery owner David Rossiter, with 45 years experience, called winning the award ‘‘a dream come true’’.
‘‘We’ll be celebrating for sure.’’