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Ontario Sausage Championships
By Ivy Knight
[Warning: contains adult language, situations, suggestive dancing, you name it.]
I'm doing a series of tasting competitions this year, industry-only events with no real purpose but to get overworked cooks together for a good time. The prizes are stupid, the judges are required to not take it seriously and the booze on hand is copious. The most recent competition was to determine who would be the Abe Froman of Ontario.
You don't remember Abe Froman? The Sausage King of Chicago?
I asked Kevin Brauch to emcee and some of the city's best sommeliers to act as judges, then I invited some of my favourite chefs in the city, as well as a few ringers from out of town who had been recommended by James Chatto. Splendido, Vertical, Healthy Butcher, the Drake Hotel, Amuse-Bouche and Jamie Kennedy Wine Bar were all represented along with Niagara on the Lake's Stone Road Grill, Prince Edward County's Bloomfield Carriage House and Burlington's Spencer's at the Waterfront. Then, to keep it interesting, a few independent sausage makers were asked to join the fray - Sera Atheunis of the newly formed Sausage Party Sausage Company and Angelo Bean of Ontalia.
Zoltan Szabo, Paul de Campo, Anne Martin, Jamie Drummond and Odel Caritey agreed to be judges. I got an email from Anthony Walsh, who I had asked to compete, saying "You should have a chef as a judge along with the winers. Our palates are significantly more sophisticated. Not to mention our ability to grasp what this sort of food should say." I agreed and asked him to judge this one rather than compete.
Kevin took on the task of getting us some local brewers willing to donate a few cold ones to go along with the sausages. I was in charge of getting the hottest burlesque dancer I could find. What's a sausage party without beer and boobs?
Luckily I happen to know the hottest burlesque dancer in the city and she loves beer. Anastasia (from the Skin Tight Outta Sight burlesque troupe) agreed to perform for beer and meat. Settle down boys, this dreamy broad is taken.
I was working with no budget and everyone involved would be donating their time, skills and products to the event including some friends who would man the grills, other friends who would act as servers and Jeremy Kozlik of Kozlick's Great Canadian Mustard who would provide the perfect compliment to grilled sausages. All we needed was a great venue, and luckily we found Café Taste. Jeremy Day's café is a beautiful place east of Brock on Queen that's devoted to Ontario wines. It's one of Kevin's favourite spots. "They have a surprisingly big wine list for such a small place. For me, it's one of the Top 10 'buy the glass' wine lists in the city."
Jeremy's mission is to take the intimidation and pretension out of wine service. He explains, "Café Taste is 'opulence for the common man'. It's a rustic setting where you should feel like you're in a living room. A living room with a kick-ass wine list." It's also a great spot to learn about wine through one of his informal classes and is a haven for a wine idiot like myself.
Our grill masters were Renee Bellefueille (formerly Jamie Kennedy's Pastry Chef, now working the savoury side of things at The Drake, where I'm now working under Chef Anthony Rose, too) and Trish Donnelly (formerly Head Chef at Mildred Pierce now practicing her samurai sword skills at The Healthy Butcher and doing an amazing Sunday brunch at Domani on Roncesvalles.) I've written before about how much I hate brunch, but Kerry and I went to Trish's brunch at Domani and were floored, it was the only brunch I've ever enjoyed in my life. Maybe because the menu is refreshingly original and you can get a table. would be grilling on two propane barbecues on the Café Taste patio. I crossed my fingers and said a prayer to Shannon Hoon for no rain.
Well, of course it rained. But Jeremy and some of the brewers put up patio umbrellas and a tent and we fired up the grills. There was no stage so Anastasia danced through the crowd. The place was packed to the roof but everyone was having a blast. It was a house party for the restaurant industry. Trish, Renee and another chef, Annik LeGoaix (formerly of the AGO) grilled non-stop, while my friends Ashley Shortall (the raven-haired vixen who turned me into a tea pansy in "Afternoon Tea"), Pat Conway and Marshall Bowman (who flew in from Vancouver because he heard there would be free beer) ran out platters of sliced sausages for everyone to try, barely making it to the middle of the room before having to head back for a refill. The sausages were all assigned a number so tasters wouldn't be biased by some of the big names competing. We had a sausage made with morels and ramps from Chris Haworth at Spencer's on the Waterfront, an American-style Hunter sausage with bacon, mustard and nutmeg from Sera Atheunis, a pear and stilton sausage from the Healthy Butcher (where it's know as the 'Paris Hilton'). Both Ryan Crawford of Stone Road Grille and Giacomo Pasquini of Vertical brought sausages made with fennel, my favourite flavour with pork. Scott Kapitan, from Bloomfield Carriage House, used fennel as well, along with maple syrup, cream, allspice and three different kinds of peppercorns (Szechuan, black and long black). Mark Cutrara's Cowbell offering combined honey, garlic and cider with Mennonite-raised Berkshire, while Angelo Bean got his Berkshire from Paul and Audra Unrhu's farm in Durham, Ontario and sexed it up with a concentrate of Henry of Pelham 2006 Riesling. Jamie Kennedy Wine Bar's Tobey Nemeth got her Berkshire from Shane Forsythe in Georgian Bay and added mustard seed from Anton Kozlik, milk, garlic and Hungarian paprika to her sausage (not just any paprika - hers was a gift from John Szabo, brought back to Canada from his grandparent's backyard in Hungary.) before smoking it to give it a real ballpark flavour, if they have ballpark dogs in heaven that is.
Chefs live by their own rules, so there had to be a few rebels:
Jason Innis showed up from Amuse Bouche with a merguez sausage. He used a harissa paste he made with a spicy blend of del arbol and guajillo chilies, caraway seed and garlic. It was the best pork merguez I had ever tasted because the bastard made it with lamb! I only had one rule for these brats: USE PORK!
David Lee and his Sous Chef Geoff O'Connor showed up bearing four different types of sausage from Splendido's kitchen. They brought a chorizo, a boudin, a merguez and a Chinese-style sausage David's grandfather taught him to make. The merguez was made with pork as were the rest, including the traditional boudin that also contained pork fat, pork blood and cream. The Chinese sausage had pork liver as well as ginger and coriander. So as not to completely confuse the crowd he just sent out the boudin and the Chinese, leaving the other two for some lucky person to take home at the end of the night.
Finally, the Drake Hotel's Anthony Rose (the most rebellious chef I've ever met) refused to use a traditional casing and instead stuffed little pig heads with his sausage filling. He took the heads and boned out the skull leaving an intact piglet 'mask' which he stuffed with the face meat, ears and tongue. Wait, first he took that meat and cooked it in duck fat then he stuffed it back into the face, wrapped that in cheese cloth and poached the whole thing once more in duck fat. Vive la resistance!
Everyone tasted and compared while the brewers kept them topped up with icy cold beer. We had the very generous boys from Creemore, Mill Street., Great Lakes, Cameron's and Steam Whistle on hand. Non beer drinkers opted to order a glass from Jeremy's Ontario-only wine list.
Meanwhile we had platters of grilled pork sausages sending smoky, succulent vapours through the crowd. I couldn't detect any one favourite, they all seemed to be disappearing with equal speed.
"This is the only type of sausage party I'd want to host." yelled Kevin as he welcomed the crowd, "I'd be pretty pissed off if I were in Toronto eating out tonight only to find that most of the city's top chefs were playing hooky to attend Ivy & Kevin's Sausage, Beer and Burlesque Party!" He then introduced Anastasia for her first number and Jeremy cranked the music. She glided through the crowd in a red lace flamenco dress and began to dance, then, with a flick of her wrist, the dress was on the floor and she stood before us in fishnets and a few strategically placed red silk hankies. She danced a little more and sent the hankies flying, one landing on Peter's shoulder. Now in sequined, tasselled pasties she had the tassels rotate in one direction, then the other, around and around until her grand finale that had the crowd screaming it's head off. Everyone took a deep breath and a long drink of beer, some guys discreetly adjusting their sausages and then it was time to hit the weenies again.
Kevin and I announced that it was time for everyone in the crowd to put their people's choice top three picks in the ballot box. Overseen by Anthony Walsh and Zoltan Szabo, the judges sequestered themselves to debate over the top three for judge's choice. While Anastasia performed one more routine, the votes were double-counted and tallied by the accounting firm of Brauch, Szabo and Day (the latter being Jeremy's brother Kyle Day who jumped in to help).
Pretty soon it was time to announce the winners, we started with the judge's picks:
1st - Angelo Bean - the Sausage King of Ontario
2nd - David Lee
3rd - Tobey Nemeth
Then the people's choice picks were:
1st - Tobey Nemeth - the Sausage Queen of Ontario
2nd - David Lee
3rd - a tie between Stone Road Grille and the Healthy Butcher
The awards were handed out (The awards were some old trophies and medals with plastic hot dogs Crazy-Glued to them. They were made by Anastasia's stage manager, the very gifted Matt Harsant. Tobey's is on display behind the bar at JK, go marvel at it's opulence.) while Trish, Renee and Anick sent out one last platter piled high. There were lots of extra sausages leftover so I sent everyone who helped out home with a few, as well as a bottle each of Kozlick's mustard.
Everyone continued to drink the excellent Ontario wines from the bar and the Ontario beers from the brewer's stations as well as some delicious Chamomile Infused Grappa and a very fine Clas Azul 100% Blue Agave Tequila (brought by Fred and Gerard at Tre Amici Wines) being poured from the patio bar.
Basically, we all got loaded. Things got a bit blurry from that point on, which in my books says one thing:
The night was a total fucking success.
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