Learning how the sausage is made

I certainly don’t want to play into any stereotypes, but the German in me was really keen to learn about the making of sausage at the hands of an experienced chef. The nice thing is, after this workshop, I learned it’s nowhere near as difficult as it may seem.

Valley Sausage Co. co-founders Tamara Saslove and Will Thorne-Morris are not just business partners, they also have one of those storied romances that go back to high school.

Will learned his butchery skills in Toronto at the renowned Kensington market meat purveyors, Sanagans Meat Locker. During that same period Tamara was studying to become a registered dietitian at Toronto Metropolitan University (then known as Ryerson).

Once back in Ottawa they hit the ground running and opened Valley Sausage Co. last year.

For this event, they came prepared with four pounds of ground pork for each participant which was sufficient to give each of us a proper amount of time to get the “feel” for sausage making.

There were also two seasoning blends: one for an English banger recipe and the other for chorizo. I mentioned to Will that the banger blend smelled like a German bratwurst and he confirmed that the seasonings were very similar.

Co-founder of Spark Beer, John Sproull was on hand pouring pints of their excellent beer and soon we were set to begin mixing the seasonings into the ground meat.

Before turning it into sausages, the ground meat needs to be very thoroughly chilled both for hygiene and for the piping process. We were instructed to blend our seasonings enough so that the 30 percent fat content would appear more incorporated into the rest of the meat. Once done, we each took turns at the manually operated piping machines. 

There are a variety of sausage casings but the two most commonly used are collagen and hog casings (natural pig intestine). We were using a natural casing and were instructed on how to load it onto the device and then how to force the meat into it using the crank. Embarrassingly, yours truly was less successful than some of the other novices and some of the meat burst through the casing.

Will then led us through the making of the links. Depending on how long each person chose to make theirs, in the end people walked away with between 12 and 16 sausages.

Tamara and Will are offering their next sausage making workshop on Fathers Day at Stray Dog Brewing, but there will be others later in the year. They also receive requests for corporate team building sessions that, for some employees, must be a welcome cathartic experience.

Valley Sausage has an expanding line of products with their nine inch sausage roll having become their best seller. A few of their core sausages include: apple, sage and onion; as well as cheddar jalapeno; with a footlong beef hot dog rounding out the top three of many other recipes.

For their charcuterie they focus on French-style items such as rillettes, terrines and pate as well as tourtiere and chicken pot pie.

All these delicious items are available for Thursday delivery when purchasing through their online store or you can find them at the Hintonburg Market or Zups ByWard. For those who don’t want to think about keeping their freezers stocked, they also offer a three month subscription service in mini and large variants.

A bigger audience will next get to enjoy their products at the Men’s World Curling Championships held here in Ottawa beginning April 1. Longer term plans envision them opening their own retail store.

We may sometimes feel that we’re living in times where so much is artifice and our food is increasingly processed. Yet what I see over and over again are younger people bringing back traditional and artisanal food production methods. Workshops such as this are valuable not just because they’re a fun way of bringing people together but because they teach us that with very little effort, we can live more self-sufficiently and in a healthier way.

I would like to give special thanks to both Valley Sausage Co. and Spark Beer for allowing me to participate in this interesting hands-on event.