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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - How sausages are made was always a mysterious thing for me, like the caramel secret to a chocolate lover. So to fulfil my curiosity, I set out on an adventure to uncover the secrets of sausage making at Northern Fancy Meats, which has been serving Yellowknifers since 1980.

Reporter Andrew Livingstone enjoys a day as a butcher. - photo by Tim Wainwright

I really enjoy working here," said 17-year veteran butcher Tim Wainwright. "You get to meet a lot of people and regular customers. I really like the family-oriented aspect of it all."

Wainwright showed me the sausage-making techniques by preparing a batch of breakfast sausage. We started off with two giant containers of pork - mostly pork shoulders, to be exact.

"We use mostly the shoulder of the animal to make our sausage," he said. "It's not as lean as other meats so it's really good."

He piled the meat into the grinder and flicked the switch on and we quickly had two big containers of soon-to-be sausage.

Then we took the two containers of ground pork into the back preparation room. For the breakfast sausages we were making, we needed 15 kg of ground pork.

"We make about five or six different types of sausage a week," Wainwright said.

"It depends on what we need that week. What we do is we put the ground meat in with the spices for the sausage flavour and we let it mix for about 15 to 20 minutes. Each type of sausage has a specific ratio of spice that goes in, depending on the intensity of the flavour."

A sanitary work area is without a doubt the most important thing for a butcher.

"Sanitation is a very big part of the job," Wainwright said. "If we don't clean properly, cross-contamination can happen and then you end up with tainted meat and sick customers. I clean my hands 50 times a day, at least.

"Keeping the temperature of the meats in the safe range is also extremely important. We keep our walk-in coolers between 2 C and -1 C; it's the standard temperature. Anything in the freezer is kept at -18 C or below."

We piled the meat into the hydraulic stuffer. The stuffer can hold up to 100 kg of meat. The stuffer pressed the meat and pushed it into an artificial casing.

"We use an artificial casing for the breakfast sausages but for the bigger dinner sausages we use hog intestine," he said.

The 15 kg of ground pork made two sausage tubes more than 50 feet long. Wainwright then tied the tubes using a special technique, twisting and pulling the sausage to create bundles. Once tied, they are set out in the display case for customers to purchase.

"We sell a variety of meats," said Wainwright. "We have lots of pork and beef but we also sell a lot of local meats like Arctic char, muskox and caribou.

"Tourists buy a lot of the local meats. It's not something they get to try very often so we sell lots."

I asked Wainwright what was the most exotic meat they ever had in the store.

"It was a long time ago but we used to have alligator meat here," he said. "It was pretty popular, but you could imagine it was quite expensive. It tasted a lot like chicken."