No sausage in Florida!

I recently moved to Florida from Texas and realized I could not get any of the sausages or chorizos that had been a part of my diet for a half century.

The Texas brand sausages that I had depended on were missing from the south Florida supermarkets. This had an unexpectedly profound effect on me. I had taken for granted that I would find sausage in Florida. Doesn't everyone eat sausage?

There was no Kiolbasa brand, (made in my adopted hometown of San Antonio). There were no Opa's Smoked Meats, a respected sausage line from New Braunfels, Texas.
Elgin, Texas, the home of Southside Market and Meyer's brand sausages, had not made it to Florida.
Chorizo San Manuel, the pride of Edinburg, Texas, was another no-show.
I didn't expect to find lesser known Texas brands such as Aurelia's Chorizo from Boerne, but I did expect to find something! And if there were no Texas sausages, surely there was some comparable duplicate made in Florida.

There was not. And the lack of variety at most neighborhood Publix or Winn Dixie supermarkets left me with one terrifying thought, "No, this can't be happening!"

So I got on the Internet and started researching. I came to learn that there were very few sausage makers in Florida. There is a company in Miami that has a Website that sucks. It is called the Dutch Packing Co. and their product is Garcia Brand sausages. I'm assuming by it's name that it is marketed to Hispanics, which tells me something about who Floridian entrepreneurs think eat sausage.

I said the Website sucks and I mean it. Their "About Us" section is still under construction.
Compare the link to Garcia Brand to San Antonio's Kiolbasa and you'll see the difference in sophistication.
Obviously, Kiolbasa wants to sell sausage a lot harder than Garcia.
In fact, go to any of the Websites for Texas sausage I mention and you'll see they are much more savvy at online sales than Garcia.

I was raised in South Texas and if you are from Florida and you do not know South Texas, this is what you need to know. South Texas was developed by pioneers from mainland Europe. The family histories of South Texas go back to Spain and Germany, and also to Poland and the Czech and Slovak peoples.
Anglos may have possessed a disproportionate share of the land and its wealth, but as a cultural force they were never much of an influence.

So German and Polish style sausages, and chorizo (the Spanish-Mexican versions of sausage) were then and continue to this day to be common and popular meats.

Distressed over my predicament, I began complaining to family and friends back home. The few selections in Florida were predominantly national brands from Wisconsin and New York. These were sausages to which my reaction had always been to turn my nose up.

Some of these national brands are really little more than repackaged hot dogs. They are bigger than a hot dog, but they have cereal ingredients and seasonings that leave you with that same baloney taste you get in a hot dog.
Folks who haven't tried Texas sausage obviously wouldn't know what they're missing. But I knew.

They are thicker. The links are shorter and therefore more practical to consume. The beef and pork content is more substantial in a Texas sausage. You can get mesquite smoked sausage in Texas. Try finding mesquite smoked anything in Florida; anything smoked is described as hickory or that infuriatingly nebulous "hardwood smoked" stuff.

What the hell does that even mean? And why would you admit it, actually print it on the packaging? You might as well say you are selling mystery meat!
Texas sausage makers offer sausages with such pleasingly compatible ingredients as cheddar cheese bits or jalapeno bits.
Texas sausage makers compete with each other for a sausage loving market that has a discriminating taste. They don't try to push glorified hot dogs on the public. They know better.

One of the people I complained to was Arthur Cavazos, an old acquaintance from my days as a business reporter at the San Antonio newspaper. Cavazos is in public relations and one of his accounts was Kiolbasa.
He graciously told me he would come to my rescue and send a care package.
The package arrived just before I was about to spend a week-long holiday in San Antonio, so I stuffed it in the freezer, grateful for the goods and looking forward to that valued stash upon my return.

I mentioned to Cavazos that I might start up a blog on sausage. Somebody needs to educate these Floridians on proper sausage cuisine!
And that's where this is heading.
In the weeks to come, I will be consuming and reviewing sausages. And not just Texas sausages. I will look at what is available in Florida, and I will search out sausages from other parts of this broad nation.
So, if you're a sausage lover, drop in once in awhile.
And if you have a favorite sausage, drop me a comment so I can check it out.