ANDOUILLE PORK SAUSAGE

Product

Andouille Pork Sausage
Louisiana style sausage smoked and seasoned with garlic, onion, and spices
Three 12 oz packs, 2 links per pack, fully cooked
Red Wattle or Berkshire

We sent a fresh batch of all Red Wattle pork shoulder to The Mayor, a small-batch sausage maker in Richmond, Virginia, who adapted their andouille sausage recipe for us.

Try these quintessential smoked and spicy Louisiana links, famed for being at the heart of Creole cuisine between a bun or in our new shrimp jambalaya - see the recipe here!

At Heritage, we pay respect to New Orleans by going full-throttle Red Wattle, championing the pig breed that arrived to this land in the 1800s through the Gulf by way of New Caledonia, and has long been a part of the Creole and Cajun cuisines that are widely represented in the flavors of this world-famous food city.

The Red Wattle has also come to represent the foundation of our business. We first started raising the Red Wattle 20 years ago with the help of Larry Sorrel, who drove thousands of miles to pick up all the breeding boars and sows he could find. At the time, we called the taste “racy” and “charmingly inconsistent,” as if the breed were bred to nimbly accommodate the various influences which inspire.

As with our entire array of sausages, we ship our end cuts from the best cuts of the pig directly to the maker, in this case Kyle who produces a heritage line exclusively for us and for a few of his local Richmond, Virginia markets.  We first met Kyle as a chef in New York City, most recently at Michelin starred The Breslin, where he was a big supporter of Heritage Foods and a proponent of nose-to-tail whole animal butchery. Kyle moved South a few years back and is now a Richmond based chef and butcher, specializing in local, farm fresh cuisine.

The Mayor is a small batch sausage company using sustainable meats. The Mayor name is a family tradition, spanning generations and continents. Originally Kyle’s Grandmother’s maiden name, it has been kept alive and passed down in the form of a middle name for Kyle’s father, himself, and now his son.

Stay tuned for new flavors of Heritage sausage from this talented producer who has followed in the footsteps of so many great chefs and left the big city to take their talents to smaller towns, thus elevating the quality of American gastronomy coast-to-coast and everywhere in between.

Ingredients: pork, water, pork liver, and less than 2% of the following: salt, spices, dried onion, dehydrated roasted garlic, celery powder, dried vinegar.

• Humanely raised on pasture 
• 100% antibiotic free
• Raised by independent family farmers
• Heritage breeds have more marbling resulting in more tender and juicy meat

Farms

When Heritage Foods started in 2001 we set out to sell heritage Thanksgiving turkeys. For three years our turkey project grew, but naturally mating turkey is a seasonal food and two of the three farmers we worked with to raise birds were looking for a more regular source of income if they were to continue working with us. So we committed to selling pork, which can be produced year round, as long as the breeds came from historic genetic lines, just like the turkeys. Now, 20 years later, Heritage Foods still works with those two original farms, as well as a few others, who together introduced the word “heritage pork” to menus across the country by providing center of the plate pork dishes to hundreds of America’s best restaurants from coast-to-coast as well as thousands of homes through the Heritage Foods mail order division.

Lazy S. Farms
La Plata, Missouri

We met Larry and Madonna Sorell in 2002, as growers for Frank Reese and the Heritage Turkey Project. As their turkey flock grew in size, so did the Sorell’s importance to Heritage Foods.

When you see Red Wattle pork on a menu, what you are seeing is a five-state, twelve farm network founded by Larry and Madonna, dedicated to raising a storied breed that was once upon a time nearly extinct. Larry and Madonna are the heroes of this story, avatars of the heritage food movement, true believers who were destined to become the Guardians of the Red Wattle. They are proof positive of the ethos that when it comes to endangered livestock, “you have to eat them to save them.”

In the beginning, back in 2004 when the Heritage Foods wholesale business began selling pigs, a market for the Red Wattle pig was built on a handshake agreement with chefs Zach Allen and Mark Ladner, then at Lupa Restaurant in NYC. They recognized the high-quality and undiminished taste that came from a Red Wattle pig humanely raised on-pasture and antibiotic free, using traditional farming methods. The deal with Ladner, and the partnership with Larry and his Lazy S Farms, were part of the origins of Heritage Foods.

“We traveled 18,000 miles to get started,” Larry says matter-of-factly about a Heritage Foods Odyssey whose mission was to search out rare Red Wattle sows and collect a viable genetic lineage of this incredible pig whose American legacy goes back to 18th century New Orleans. "When we began, we had two Red Wattle gilts and a boar, and we had to travel all over the United States to start a herd."

“Now I’ve kinda retired from raising animals, but we have a dozen Amish growers working with us, and I pick up the hogs and pay for them, and then bring them to the processor, Paradise Locker. I drive a tractor trailer and go around picking up three hundred pounders, fifty to eighty head a week. We have farms in Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa... that’s a lot of traveling. We may have four or five pick-ups every week. You wear out a truck pretty fast.”

Larry, now over eighty, does less of the driving, but he still keeps all the relationships going, which isn’t easy considering the Amish don’t have phones inside their homes! “I’ll have to quit sometime but right now it’s going pretty good. The driving is easy. The hard job is you gotta keep Amish families happy, picking up their hogs, coordinating, monitoring the size of the animals, and making sure we have the right amount — each week we round up 50 to 100 pigs. And we’ve been doing it for almost 20 years now.”

Thanks to Larry and Madonna’s work, the Red Wattle was upgraded to Threatened status from Critical on The Livestock Conservancy’s watch list, a great achievement for the cause of biodiversity, one of the most important issues of our time.

Breed

Red Wattle

Threatened: Fewer than 1,000 annual registrations in the United States.

Origin: 18th Century Louisiana by way of New Caledonia.

Flavor Profile: Described as a cross between pork and beef, Red Wattle is floral and robust, concentrated and bold.

Producers: A consortium of 18 Amish families in Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, and Kansas.

History: French colonists brought these hogs to New Orleans as a favored meat breed. The Red Wattle eventually would populate the forests of Texas where they were rounded up and brought to the great slaughterhouses of Chicago. Recognized by their signature wattles that hang from the jowl, the Red Wattle resembles Kunekune pigs of New Zealand.

Cooking

This is a fully cooked product. To heat, see below guidelines.

Grilling: Remove sausage from its packaging and pat it dry. Fire up your grill and lower to medium heat. Use a knife to score the sausages so they do not burst on the grill. Place the sausages on the grill and cook for 8-10 minutes, turning occasionally to ensure even cooking.

Oven Roasting: Preheat the oven to 375ºF. Remove sausage from its packaging and pat it dry. Place it on a rack in a roasting pan and place the pan in the oven. Roast for 15-20 minutes and flip sausages halfway through cooking to ensure even browning on both sides.