Meat to please you: Veteran butcher Peter Hommelhoff is winning fans with his recipe for Vegemite and cheese sausages. Picture: Tommy Ritchie
Andrew Mathieson
WHEN loyal customers offer a word of advice, Drysdale butcher Peter Hommelhoff listens – especially to members of the blue-rinse set.
The ladies who slowly shuffle into Hommy’s Quality Meats to order their favourite snags, the same cuts of meat every week and enough mince to make their pensions last came up with a new twist on an Australian favourite.
“A lot of old ladies used to say that because we marinate our pork ribs with Chinese honey and barbecue flavour, they would put Vegemite on theirs at home,” Peter explains.
Rather than turn up his nose, Peter spent the next eight months scratching his head perfecting Vegemite and cheese beef sausages.
The idea of sausages combining Vegemite and cheese, more at home between slices of bread than mixed with ground meat, is not new. Peter admits that a company launched a similar recipe four years ago.
Amateur foodies had also tried home-made versions.
“People who made their own got jars of Vegemite, put them in hot water and melted them with cheese and flour but it was just too strong,” Peter says.
“I modified one recipe after about half a dozen good batches and a lot of trial and error using the mix and Vegemite powder. I blended it in with different sorts of tasty cheese until we got the right flavour.”
A lot of butchers have failed to perfect the recipe, including one from Queensland who rang Peter saying he struggled to sell them after nearly five years of trying.
“The secret is not to be too salty,” Peter reveals.
He hints further that the cheese should give off some moisture to the beef.
But the sausage secrets will stay with Peter, much like the secret spices did with Colonel Sanders.
“I really can’t say too much,” he grins, “it’s just the right mixture of cheese with the Vegemite.
“You just don’t want one to take over the other – it will ruin it.
“And you’ve got to have lean beef because if you use 75 to 80 per cent beef, it doesn’t work.”
At first glance, people would squirm at the sound of his sausage concoction. But most nod with approval after taking a bite.
“But if you don’t like Vegemite, there’s no point to it,” Peter warns
His shop has already sold hundreds of kilos of Vegemite and cheese sausages since they went on the market last month.
If anyone should have a bit of good sauce on sausages, it would be 57-year-old Peter and his fourth-generation-butcher son Matthew.
Growing up in his family’s Wycheproof butcher shop built 80 years ago, Peter would clean the machines out the back after school between finishing homework.
It gave the laconic country kid a taste for the industry.
“When I was about 10 I had to wash up the big, old silent cutter, which in those days was a sausage mixer,” he remembers.
“I used to clean it up when it still would have the sausage and I would lick and eat the sausage off – it was bloody beautiful.”
Peter’s grandfather and father, both smallgoods manufacturers, kept German recipe books aside from 150 years ago to continue producing their favourite award-winning hams and Strassburgs.
Starting an apprenticeship in 1969, Peter was taught how to “break” meat the old-fashioned way for legs of lamb, loin chops and forequarter roasts.
“In my day you never hand a bandsaw, you hand-sawed a chop,” he says.
“We worked 16 hours a day.”
Now butchering takes less than half the time.
In those early years un-refrigerated meat hung from rails, sawdust covered floors and wing-ribbed roast was as fancy as it got.
“We would go out and kill after work in the abattoirs,” Peter recalls.
“We killed our lambs or beef at night and would be up at five the next morning to drag them into the shop.”
