THE Wingecarribee is on the road to royalty.
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Simon's Gourmet Butchery was crowned the region's sausage king, winning five of the six categories at the Sausage King awards Southern region final recently.
The butchery took the best poultry, best pork, best Australian lamb, best gourmet open and best Australian tasty categories in the competition run by Australian Meat Industry Council.
Butcher Simon Pyne said winning the award for best Australian tasty, which were plain snags made from 80 per cent beef and 20 per cent lamb, was particularly pleasing because they were the most popular and widely available sausage on the market.
"Tasty is great to win. It doesn't matter where you go Australia-wide, when you ask for a tasty sausage that's the plainest one they've got," he said. "It's quite prestigious as far as butchery circles go."
The butchery will progress to the Sausage King state final in Darling Harbour on October 20, with the winners of 14 other NSW regional finals.
From there, winners will battle for the national crown in Perth.
Mr Pyne said they won the open gourmet category with the most "out there" sausages they had made - rabbit, bacon, roasted leek and provolone cheese.
"People are willing to try anything, especially the ones that are 'out there'," he said. "A lot of the flavoured things like that we do in chipolata form and they can do as entrees."
The butchery also scored second place in the category, with a quail, hoi sin, garlic and five-spice sausage.
Other winning snags included honey and sweet chili chicken, lamb madras and traditional pork.
He said coming up with fresh ideas for new snags was a matter of trial and error.
"Generally on a weekly basis we do 24 to 28 varieties and we rotate them around, so basically we've got fresh ones coming through all the time with different flavours," Mr Pyne said.