If you’re not a sausage eater, this story might be puzzling: so much time and effort and expense packed into a pig intestine.
But if you are, guten appetit! You’re about to meet the small but thriving community of South Florida sausage makers working in both the emerging world of global cuisine and the ancient tradition of butchering that dates back to Homer, when a blood sausage was deemed a rich reward for a certain epic hero.
While they remain steeped in tradition, sausage makers have joined the artisan food movement that the National Restaurant Association predicted earlier this month would be among the hottest trends in 2012.
Espousing the benefits of their handmade sausage, they point out that making small batches, not using nitrates and using fresh meat, create a gourmet product. Around the country, sausage makers are gaining status: the Fatted Calf Charcuterie in San Franciso was named a 2012 finalist for the Good Food award, Foodspotting has its own blood sausage guide and last year, the Chicago Reader detailed an underground charcuterie movement. Even the EU recognized their worth and last year granted protected status to the Cumberland sausage (think Parma ham and Greek feta cheese) in England.
In South Florida, their numbers remain small and unorganized. An Internet search turned up about a dozen sausage makers either selling retail from their own shops or producing wholesale at plants. There are small traditional shops like Krakus Deli in Pompano Beach and upscale operations such as Laurenzo’s Italian Market in North Miami Beach, the Mediterranean Market on Las Olas and the Meating Place, with two stores in Boca Raton. They are using word of mouth, festivals, web traffic, holiday tradition and fierce customer loyalty to elevate the lowly saussiche which, despite the old epigram, can indeed inspire respect.
Panta Caran, 53, started making sausages after his father died. Born in Serbia, the youngest of 11, and the last living at home, he left to find work to support his mother and landed at a Swiss sausage company. Eventually he settled in Broward County in 1984, where he owned two sausage shops over the years.
In September, he reopened European Homemade Sausage, a familiar name to the wurst and kielbasa crowd, in a small building off U.S. 441 in Hollywood, next to a store selling wheelchairs.
Inside the shop, the decor, if it could be called decorating at all, is minimal. A couple of dollar bills are taped to the wall, metal shelves hold condiments and other essentials near a table and chairs. A chilled deli case is obviously the main attraction, carefully arranged with hundreds of beautifully linked handmade sausages — dry Hungarian sausages, spicy beer sausages, blood and rice sausage, smoked kielbasa, dried and cured bacon and smoked hams — resting one atop the other like jewels in a treasure chest.
It is not unusual for a customer to wander in who has been eating his sausages for 20 years.
Twenty-seven miles away, across the sparkling bay on Key Biscayne, Mark Kuehl has just opened a satellite of the Old Heidelberg Deli. The former commodities broker bought the deli, which has been operating in Fort Lauderdale for more than 15 years, in October 2010 and is carefully nudging it into the 21st Century. Recipes are sometimes updated to include less salt and fat. For the Key Biscayne shop, Kuehl commissioned a lighting architect to design the LEDs that illuminate the sausage and other products.
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