So what do you want in a sausage? Are you content with a cellulose or collagen tube filled with anonymous, homogenous mystery-meat paste containing who knows what?

If you’re like us, you demand sausages filled with real ingredients that you can see, taste, feel and smell. Not to mention the texture — and when you bite through that natural sausage casing, a really good “snag” should hit you with a burst of flavour and aroma.

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For a long time, our sausage benchmark was set by Tony’s Super Meats in Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia. I remember Tony entered the annual Sausage King contest for the first time a few years back and blitzed the competition with his continental creations.

When my Canadian colleague Judy Schultz and her collaborator Mary Bailey raved about Spolumbo’s sausages from Calgary, Lenny and I were sure to bite.

We visited Cowtown during the annual Stampede rodeo festival and the city was a sea of cowboy hats. At Spolumbo’s we were helped by Tim — a visiting Aussie like us, and from Brisbane, our neck of the woods.

You can try Spolumbo’s sausages on the spot as a hot dog, and we did. My expectations were exceeded.

Maybe I’m a purist, but specialty flavours like their “Cajun” and “Maple Breakfast” don’t appeal to me. It just seems a bit contrived. I’ll always go for the simple Italian, Greek or German-style snag.

It’s important to get sausages that are made with “natural casing”. That is, the cleaned intestine of a butchered beast. Might sound gross, but it’s the only way to go. You can often tell by looking at the skin of the sausage — natural casings appear to have crease marks.

Here’s a sausage tip. When cooking up premium sausages in natural casing, parboil them for a few seconds first. That is, dunk them briefly in boiling water. Not essential, but it seals the casing and helps keep the delicious juices inside. A real-live chef showed me that!

Watch the video for more secrets. We brought home quite a haul of Spolumbo’s sausages, so expect to see at least one more episode featuring them.

— Waz.

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