Sausages and Flies

In a twist on the old saying about not wanting to see how sausages and laws are made--i.e., just appreciate the finished product--the process of making sausages by hand at Daegaya Meat Camp was mildly entertaining, but the resulting batch of sausages was, to put it mildly, rather unpleasant.

The following is an account of my experience at Daegaya Meat Camp from 17 (Saturday) to 18 (Sunday) July 2010. Please see additional related posts (It's Actually Called "Meat Camp," Daegaya Meat Camp, Getting to Daegaya Meat Camp) for additional thoughts and information.

The weekend was a reunion of sorts, attended by 15 friends and family with whom I'd gone camping on several occasions in the past but hadn't seen in the field for over a year. (My wife ditched at the last minute, opting to stay at home with Dominic--a wise choice in retrospect.) Expectations were high, owing more to the scale of the event than the prospect of making our own meat. Some of us were so excited that half the group arrived on Friday night only to discover that the torrential monsoon rains had flooded the site in ankle-deep water. Fortunately, the camp is on the grounds of a defunct school with the classrooms of the original building available for lodging. So, the reward for their enthusiasm was a night of indoor camping, unable to light a barbeque and forced to sleep in musty prepitched tents like refugees. As I lay down to sleep the following night, however, after the flood waters had subsided to allow us to set up our own tents outdoors, the stifling heat and the swarming bugs made the electric fans and screen doors within seem like a really good idea.

The heat was one thing. When I arrived on Saturday afternoon, with the grounds soaked from the rains, evaporation from the midday sun created a sauna in the midst of a swamp. We discovered later that living was bearable, even somewhat pleasant with the occasional breeze, in the shade under an enormous tree on the side of the campsite. Why we didn't set up there in the first place is beyond me (maybe for easier access to electricity near the school building).

Another thing was the bugs. Flies. Flies. Flies. Of biblical proportions. None of us had ever seen anything like it. Our main tarp, a white Coleman Weathermaster, had been rendered black with the flies that had attached themselves to the inner surface. Along our chairs, on the tables. Even after we'd disposed of our trash and stowed the food in the coolers, they were everywhere. Goosebumps just thinking about it. Coincidentally, and I'm not making this up to provide literary irony here, the newspaper I'd brought to read that day featured an article about the troubled life of William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies. I now regret not taking photos of it but, at the time, the notion of recording the torture for posterity didn't register. The evening shift, after the flies had gone home for the day, was taken over by the mosquitos. Not as bad, either in number or aggressiveness, as I've encountered elsewhere but enough that I awoke the next morning with over a dozen bites on my legs. This despite the fact that the tent had been sealed (admittedly, the living-room-style tent, a Kovea Castle, doesn't have an attached floor to provide a complete seal), we'd fumigated the interior with a full can of bug spray, and I'd hung a mosquito net for myself from the tent roof (I suspect that my legs had poked out during the night). Apparently, the owner had sprayed some sort of repellent in the ground, but it had been washed away by the rain.

The heat and bugs would've been forgivable had the main purpose of our trip, the sausages, turned out okay. However, as I alluded to above, the making part was interesting, if only for the novelty of it, but the eating part left much to be desired. The photos below show the procedure, step by step.

(1) An array of spices and condiments, but the recipes didn't make proper use of the ingredients.

(2) In an air-conditioned kitchen facility, a renovated classroom in the school building, the tutorial begins with a 30-minute lecture on the history and "science" behind sausage-making. At this point, given the instructor's seemingly vast store of knowledge and overly finite attention to detail, we assume that we're getting our money's worth.

(3) 1.5 kg of pork shoulder, about 20% fat content. On one hand, the use of pure fresh meat is appealing in contrast to the left-over and otherwise unusable bits and pieces of pig that are usually used to make sausages. On the other hand, those bits and pieces are largely what makes sausages so tasty--and why we usually don't want to know what goes in them.

(4) For the first batch, the meat grinder was set on fine, resulting in a near paste. When I wondered aloud whether this would remove a significant amount of bite in the sausage, the instructor changed the setting for the second batch. Nevertheless, in the end, the texture of both batches was unsavory, crumbly, like sawdust. In addition to technique, the type of meat, as noted above, may also have been a factor.

(5) The instructor claimed, based on more appeals to "science," that a mixer is necessary to create a proper binding effect. Maybe he was right. I don't want to imagine how much worse the sausages would've been like without the mixer. The flavoring ingredients are added at this stage.

(6) The casings are made of artificially produced collagen. Part of me was disappointed that we weren't using natural intestines, but everything about the experience was designed to eliminate the more unseemly aspects of sausage-making.

(7) With the meat scooped into a press machine, and the casing tied off on one end and attached on the other end to a nozzle at the base of the machine, one person turns a crank while another guides the meat into the casing and twists the growing tube at intervals to make links.

(8) Finally, we have two finished batches of sausages: the pink batch on the left being "English bangers" and the reddish batch being "Spanish chorizo." That's what the instructor called them.

Talk about lipstick on a pig. Not only did they fail to resemble bangers or chorizo, they failed to resemble any kind of sausage per se. Authenticity aside, they just tasted lousy. After we'd cooked them on indirect heating on a Weber grill to a perfect internal temperature of 68 degrees centigrade, as per instructions, the consensus was unanimous upon tasting. Some members of the group, unaware of what bangers or chorizo are supposed to taste like, and perhaps not wanting to appear dismissive or ignorant, commented cautiously that the sausages weren't quite what they'd been expecting. Others noted that the flavor was unlike anything they'd experienced. After a few minutes of this, I simply declared the situation a disaster. Everyone seemed relieved that their instincts were confirmed correct.

Despite all the negativity evident in this review, I wouldn't say the entire experience was a complete waste. If only for the novelty of getting make sausages by hand, an additional story to tell, Daegaya Meat Camp is worth visiting once. For anyone planning on going, I'd recommend avoiding the hot and rainy season, packing copious amounts of bug spray, sleeping in a hermetically sealed tent, and preparing a proper sausage recipe in advance.