The Corona Diaries Vol. 35: The Meat of the Matter

Besides having your mind broadened, one of the great joys of traveling is tasting a region's cuisine. (Concomitant to this is chatting with locals to inveigle them into fisticuffs with one another over who has the best version of a particular dish.) With this in mind, I would argue that there is a mental or associational aspect to eating that doesn't seem to be remarked upon much: I think it's entirely possible to eat a regional specialty in its hometown that is "objectively" not the best or even mediocre yet feel that it is a feast fit for kings because you're away from home having a good time with good company in an attractive setting.

For instance, I feel that the best shrimp po' boy I have ever had was the one I ate in Louisiana at the Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival in 2002. There was nothing fancy about it at all. It consisted of a piece of French bread smeared with mayonnaise and stuffed with what seemed to be several pounds of shrimp. No remoulade sauce, no lettuce, no tomato, no pickle – just a mayo-laced piece of bread bursting with fried shrimp served to me by a kindly old lady from the local ladies auxiliary.

I don’t doubt that one reason why I think that it reached the pinnacle of po' boy goodness was that the shrimp was much fresher than I generally find in Madison. But it was also that I was on vacation with one of my best friends. I was coming off of a bad relationship and our trip had an element of putting that part of my life behind me to it. Plus, I was down on the bayou surrounded by people who spoke in a funny accent. The time and place made an experience out of eating that po' boy.

I will also note that the po' boy was the first thing I ate at the festival and that a rather large volume of hot sauce (I had applied it generously.) dripped from it onto my white shirt so I spent the rest of that day wandering around with a big red stain on my front where it was visible to all.

A friend of ours, Joe, is from the Detroit area and he sometimes laments his inability to get some of the foods from his hometown here in Madison. I never knew there was such a thing as Detroit-style pizza until he told me of its existence. Rectangular, thick crust, and lots of brick cheese. The cheese must go to the edge of the pan so that it undergoes Maillard reaction and browns to a perfect crisp.

While he has made his own Detroit-style pizza, the formula for Coney sauce eludes him. He loves Detroit-style Coney dogs. During this past summer the butcher near our house, Meat People, had Coney sauce on offer. The Frau bought some and I told Joe about it which prompted him to immediately make a trek across town to get some of his own. While it was the best Coney sauce he'd found yet in Madison, he thought it was about 50% of the way along to being the real deal. It tasted too much like chili – Hormel chili, to be exact.

Shortly after this, he returned to Michigan to visit family and his stepfather blessed with him with dogs and Coney sauce from National Coney Island which makes the ingredients he swears are the most traditional and most tasty. He returned to Madison with a cooler full and pawned some off on us so we were able to enjoy an authentic Coney dog.

Since the only regional hot dog I was familiar with was the Chicago dog, I asked Joe if you dressed this one with anything beyond the Coney sauce. "Do you apply any seasoning to it like you would sprinkle celery salt on a Chicago dog?" I asked. "Diced onion and mustard," was the reply.

I didn't have any yellow mustard so I used Polish brown.

I thought it turned out well aside from getting my moustache saturated with Coney sauce and mustard with each bite. National's Coney sauce tasted less like chili powder than the stuff from the butcher. It's more like ground beef in a brown gravy than chili. Further research is obviously required.

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Among the many things that were canceled last year was the annual convention of the Wisconsin Association of Meat Processors held annually in April. I have been a judge for the convention's product show on and off for a while now. The 2021 version was moved to August and went on despite the Delta variant's spread.

We judges aren't told what categories we'll be judging until we get there but, while driving over to the Marriott on the west side, I found myself hoping not to get whole muscle jerky again. It's not that I don't like jerky but sampling a few dozen strips of dried meat really takes a toll on my jaws.

I met up with my friend Ed who got me into this whole judging thing in the first place back in 2005 or so when we were co-workers. He had a career in the meat processing industry before becoming a health inspector and even had the honor of then governor Tommy Thompson admonishing him in a stern voice over a conference phone, "Thou shalt not hinder commerce in my state!"

Our category assignments were announced and, much to my chagrin, I was assigned whole muscle jerky duty. D'oh! That and specialty smoked/cured bratwurst. I hoped that there weren't too many oddball flavors of sausage. Cheese or cheese & jalapeno I could handle. But I've heard tell of a butcher who puts Gummy Bears into their sausage while another who adds Kool Aid to theirs. I am not sure I could be an impartial judge of such befoulment of all that is good and holy in the culinary world.

We donned our white lab coats and hairnets and headed inside the judging room which the hotel keeps as cool as it can. This was especially nice since it was a very hot and muggy August day outside.

My jaws were given something of a reprieve as, because of Covid, there were only about half as many entries as there have been in non-pandemic years. It seemed they would survive after all. Still, we started with the bratwurst just to be sure we could get through everything.

So how do you judge a sausage? To begin, you examine the exterior. How is the color? Are the links of uniform size and shape? Does the casing have wrinkles? Any air pockets? Once we were done perusing the outside, we cut one open to examine the inside. Again, we looked at color, to start. We kept our eyes peeled for air pockets, fat pockets, and connective tissue. If there were non-meat bits, such as pieces of cheese, were they evenly dispersed throughout?

Lastly, we sliced some sausage and heated the pieces in a microwave for tasting. What was the texture like? Were there off flavors? I judged smoked poultry one year and there were quite a few samples that were oxidized and I just cannot stand oxidized chicken now.

There weren't many goofy sausage flavors to be had, thankfully. As expected, we sampled many cheese-laced brats in addition to a couple Philly cheesesteak sausages and ones made with beer. The oddest entrant was an unholy abomination unto charcuterie: a mac & cheese brat.

I guess that after mac & cheese pizza became a culinary phenomenon, it shouldn't be surprising that the venerable pasta dish would find its way into other foods. My own opinion is that macaroni & cheese has no business being on a pizza and that its presence on dough disqualifies the dish from being actual pizza. To wax philosophical, I think it's really a matter of analytical cognition: the conception of pizza is NOT contained in our intuitions about a mac & cheese pie that we get from our senses because the conception of pizza omits mac & cheese a priori. Of course, objects such as "mac & cheese pizza" can originate purely from the mind and are conceptions of reason. Thusly such pies are mere transcendental illusions. Q.E.D.

At one point in our judging, I turned around to see that behind us was the large diameter luncheon meat table. To my horror, a log of mac & cheese bologna was staring back at me.

There oughta be a law!

The jerky judging wasn't too bad as there were only 11 entrants instead of the usual 30 or so. And just a couple were bone dry and so chewy as to make my jaws ache trying to leech some flavor out of them. A few were the exact opposite: so moist that you had to question whether any attempt was made to dry the meat. Surprisingly, there were no weird flavors. Teriyaki was about as crazy and exotic as it got although there was a flavor called "Hillbilly" which just seemed mildly hot to me. But I saw Hillbilly Jerky seasoning in the trade show room and picked up a bag. (All the stuff is free and comes in food service portions.) I gave it to a co-worker who makes jerky at home and now he has enough seasoning for about 10 pounds of the tasty snack.

Meanwhile, my pal Ed was judging flavored bacon. Bacon is near and dear to my stomach but, alas and alack, I have never had the pleasure of judging either bacon category. The first category is standard unflavored cured bacon while the second is flavored. I am not really sure how people flavor bacon beyond encrusting the slabs in black pepper or injecting maple flavoring. Sitting next to a few slabs of peppered bacon were a couple that appeared to have had barbeque dry rub on them while others had had completely unfamiliar seasonings applied to them.

Since my experience with the food industry is with the preparation of it in a kitchen, I get paired with someone who has meat processing experience for judging. Sometimes it's an old duffer who worked at the Oscar Mayer plant here in Madison for decades. This year my fellow judge was a younger fellow who worked at the university's Meat Science school. Regardless of whom I get paired up with, I always end up learning something about meat processing when I judge. They can identify off flavors whereas I just know something isn't right with the taste. Why does that sausage casing have wrinkles? Well, they didn't fill it all the way. How come this piece of jerky is thicker at one end? More pressure was applied to the meat when it was on the slicer for the thick part. Et cetera and so on.

Here's the Braunschweiger section:

I don't think I could judge that category without ample rye bread and raw onion. It looks like it shared a table with the luncheon or jellied loaf category. There is some head cheese just out of frame.

Although you generally don't swallow the product you're judging and instead spit it out into a cup, you are still chewing on sample after sample of processed meat which means you consume a lot of salt. I drank a lot of water and went to the bathroom several times over the course of the 4 or so hours we spent judging.

It is also worth noting that the leftover product is all donated to local food pantries.

A look at life at the semi-boneless ham table. Note the large hacksaw.

As my fellow judge and I determined, the Grand Champion in the Bratwurst – Specialty (Smoked, Cooked & Cured) category was the Jalapeno and Cheese brat from Peoples Meat Market in Stevens Point. And the Grand Champion in the Jerky – Whole Muscle category was the teriyaki jerky from Lake Geneva Country Meats, Inc.

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Bonus photo time. In keeping with the culinary theme, here's Grabby staring covetously at a spoon of hot pepper peanut butter ice cream from Calliope.