Karl’s Sausage Kitchen – the best of the wurst.

I’ve been driving by Karl’s Sausage Kitchen on Route 1 North Saugus every morning on my way to work for the past four and a half years, but I never took that much notice till Christianb gave me some of their Triple Smoked Bacon. It’s a hunk of pig on a string, smoked to a deep mahogany; it’s very salty, very smoky, with a decidedly hammy flavor. Good stuff. So me and Couplingchaos stopped by the place over the weekend and it’s so great! They got lots of Euro-stuff like candies and condiments and sodas, and a long cold case of delicious meat products, most of them made on the premises. Behind the counter you can see a big room with metal worktables and meathooks, a guy in rubber boots and apron is hosing down the cement floor, this is the real thing, my friend. I picked up a small selection of sausages, bacons, and meats, so far I’ve tried the Bauernwurst which is a traditional farmer’s sausage made with onion, garlic, and marjoram. It’s really, really good, there’s very little greasy or oily mouthfeel like you get with most supermarket sausage*, it’s a delicate, subtle flavor, totally yummy. What I was really excited about was the Zungenwurst, that’s blood tongue sausage. It’s a pressed loaf, like headcheese, but with chunks of ox tongue in a deep red blood and suet binding. If you like blood sausage, you really need to try this, it’s awesome. For those of you not into the funkier cuts of meat, I swear it does not taste that weird. Kidney and liver I’ll admit have a peculiar flavor that not everyone goes for, but tongue and blood-meats have a just-slightly-different-yet-still-pleasing taste, all you need is to not be told what it is, and you’ll probably like it. Anyway, that’s Karl’s. I haven’t tried their blood links or bacon yet, but they’re waiting for me at home in my fridge right now. Mmmm.

*Hillshire Farm Polska Kielbasa: Meat Ingredients (Pork, Beef), Water, Corn Syrup, 2% or Less of: Natural Spices, Natural Flavorings, Salt, Dextrose, Sodium Lactate, Monosodium Glutamate, Sodium Diacetate, Isolated soy Protein, Vitamin C (Ascorbic Acid), Sodium Nitrate. Well, no wonder. One thing I’m noticing more and more is that most industrial-scale food is based around a huge blast of one-dimensional flavor. It’s all SMOKE! or MEAT! or NACHO CHEEZ! or SUGAR! Which is tasty, and gets your attention, hey I still love McDonald’s fries and Doritos and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. But the more small-scale, handcrafted products I try, the more I find that the layered subtleties and interplay of different taste components are almost a new way of appreciating flavor, one I find more satisfying on an emotional level. Which is often the point of all the Fast Food Nation, Omnivore’s Dilemma, etc food sustainability writing. But in this one little sausage link is all that food-earth-civilization consciousness writ small. And meaty.