New sausage ideas? He’s on the casing

BUCKING the trend of shrinking services in meat departments, Richard Schwartzberg offers about 10 kinds of fresh sausage a day as meat manager of Bob’s Market in Santa Monica. He makes the obvious breakfast links and Italian sausage (pork and poultry versions), but his selection also features chicken Cajun, French apple, basil-lamb, a rather elegant Mexican chorizo and others from a repertoire of about 15.

Question: You’re an eager sausage guy. How did you get into all this?

Answer: I used to clean up a butcher shop in Studio City after school, and there was an old German butcher there, Fritz, who made sausage. Later there was an Italian guy too. I was 14, and it was kind of neat to see it start as meat scraps and turn into sausage.

Q: How do you make your sausages?

A: We grind the meat as coarse or fine as we need, then we mix in fresh herbs, spices, salt, whatever other flavorings. Then we stuff it in an old hand-crank stuffer. I use pork gut casings, but I’m planning to make a Moroccan lamb merguez and a quail sausage in lamb casings, and an Italian pork sausage with pecorino cheese in it -- the cheese melts as it cooks. That’s a good one, I learned it from the Italian butcher. It was his grandmother’s recipe.

Q: What’s the thrill of sausage?

A: Sausage can be used so many ways. It’s great with pasta, on the grill, at breakfast. Put it in the crock pot with bell peppers. Use it as a stuffing. It’s a convenience food, it’s ready to go.

Q: If you were cooking on a desert island and you could only have one kind of sausage, which would it be?

A: The chicken sweet Italian. It has a flavoring of basil as well as fennel. When I’m trying to sell people on the idea of sausage, I give them a taste of that.

Bob’s Market, 1650 Ocean Park Blvd. (310) 452-2493. Sausages, $3.99 a pound (breakfast links $3.49).