By Graeme Wilson
IF you’re on a flight to Melbourne next March and find yourself seated next to a bloke in a stiped apron with a cold esky clutched to his chest, you’re flying with award-winning Cleveland butcher George Alderson.
George and his talented team from George’s Gourmet Meats have produced Queensland’s Best Gourmet Sausage for the 2025 State Sausage King Awards, qualifying for the national titles next year.
While some finalists in the Australian Meat Industry Council event will take their ingredients south to make their sausages in enemy territory, George will prepare his winning Canadian Pork and Maple sweet-meets-savoury showstoppers at his Cleveland Central store and then guard them with his life on the flight down.
“A lot of butchers have friends in the industry interstate but unfortunately we don’t have that sort of connection down there, so we’ll make them here and take them on a plane for the judging,” George said.
“I’ve been advised not to let them be stored under the plane so they will be in a styro box with ice packs, and I will keep them in my sight the entire flight just to make sure nothing bad happens.”
The winning sausages, which outsell the store’s next most popular by two-to-one, were finessed over time using only the finest ingredients, including meat from Bangalow Sweet Pork in Northern NSW.
All that hard work obviously paid off when the taste test was performed by the panel of discerning judges.
“We’d earlier done a Beef, Maple and Bacon one that I thought was maybe a bit too sweet, so we thought we’d tweak it up a bit and keep the maple flavour but with a better savoury/sweet balance,” George said.
Fresh sage, seeded mustard and cracked black pepper are blended with pork shoulder, belly and leg in top-secret proportions to produce the winning snag.
“I’m happy to let people know the ingredients but not the ratios,” George said.
“With social media, everyone tends to see what flavours everyone else is doing, but if you like the idea of it, you’ve then got to work at tweaking it to make it your own.”
That tweaking is where the real magic happens.
George’s Gourmet Meats also cleaned up in the Regional (Brisbane River to NSW border) Finals recently, taking first in the Traditional Pork category, second in the Traditional Beef, and second in the Open Lamb (with a Lamb, Chilli and Ginger creation).
While George says a few butchers still give their sausages little thought and make them using whatever scraps of meat are left over, most modern butchers understand that a butchery is often judged on the quality of its sausages.
“There are still shops where they don’t really care very much, it’s always an apprentice’s job, and whatever you’ve got left you throw in – but we’re pretty pedantic about our snags,” he said. “I was always taught from early on in my time in butchering that you could judge a shop by its snags.”
For this reason, and unlike some other butchers, George believes everyone working in the store needs to take turns at producing their sausages, with more than 60 flavours on rotation.
“A lot of butchers think they’re too good to make snags and it’s a job for the apprentices, but I’ve come from shops where the owner is the only one making the snags because he’s that pedantic,” George said.
“I’ve instilled in my boys that no one is too good to do anything in our shop, and snags are a very important part of what we do.”
