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Country Sausage Company “Andouille is leaner than a smoked sausage, and it’s good for gumbos and stuff. You can also put a little more fat into it, which helps out when you make the gumbo. It would dry out, if it’s too lean. So I always like to add a little more fat to the andouille.” – Vaughn Schmitt Vaughn Schmitt’s sausage is found in gumbos all over New Orleans. Along with his business partner Deanie Bowen, this second-generation sausage maker is proprietor of Creole Country Sausage Company. There they make a traditional andouille, a special-order mango sausage, and everything in between. Vaughn’s parents, Fab and Ricker Schmitt, started Creole Country in 1979. They felt compelled when their favorite sausage producer in Church Point, Louisiana, went out of business. After a two-week crash course—in Oklahoma of all places—they started filling casings. Today, Creole Country provides sausage to restaurants throughout New Orleans—a vital link in the city’s renowned gumbo tradition. NOTE: What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here. Subject: Vaughn Schmitt --- Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans on Wednesday, August 9th, 2006 for the Southern Foodways Alliance. And I’m at Creole Country Sausages here on David Street in New Orleans, and I’m with Vaughn Schmitt. Vaughn, would you say your name and your birth date for the record, please? Vaughn Schmitt: Vaughn Schmitt—11/18/56 [November 18, 1956]. All right. You and Deanie Bowen are the co-owners of this establishment, is that right? Yes. But your parents started it? My mother and father started it in 1979. And it was an old house that we shelled out and made into a little sausage factory. And then they went to Oklahoma State University for a two-week crash course in sausage making. And from that on, they played around with different recipes, and we basically started off making smoked sausage, andouille [sausage], hogshead cheese, boudin—the basic sausages that people would want in New Orleans. And from then on out we introduced ourselves to the chefs in New Orleans, and they always came up with their ideas of what they would want, and we would work together and make different products. So we have a hot sausage called chaurice and the chaurice—and now we have a crawfish [sausage], green onion [sausage]; we have an alligator sausage; we have a craw-gator, which is an alligator sausage made with crawfish tails, because one guy wanted something different. And then we have a cheese and jalapeno smoked sausage—very unique. And we also work with chicken and make a chicken and apple sausage some certain chef out there wanted. And we use turkey products also, so we make a turkey andouille and a turkey Italian. And then, if people out there are interested—if they have heart problems and they can't have sodium or no preservatives or this, that, and the other, I can also custom-make to their—their wants or needs so the can enjoy the products with no—no salts, no this, or whatever they want in it. What were their names? Fabiola Schmitt and Fred—well, say Ricker Schmitt. So we called them Fab Schmitt and Ricker Schmitt. Were they native New Orleanians? My mother was from Church Point [Louisiana, which is in Cajun Country]…My father was from New Orleans. So what made them want to go in the sausage business? Well he was in politics, and he always wanted to open a restaurant, and my mother wouldn’t allow him to go—because that’s like too late working all day—all the time working. So she said, “Let’s—let’s go to Church Point and buy sausage.” And the guy in Church Point closed down, and so they went over there and bought his little equipment. He [my father] came back, and they came over here and played with recipes; and they decided to open up a sausage factory because they don’t think they had any people over here [in New Orleans] that made quality sausage. And where is Church Point? It’s a little bit north of Lafayette [in Cajun Country]. --- Okay. So when they got the equipment and everything from the old place, did they get recipes, too, or they just started from scratch? Oh, basic recipes but I think what they did is they went through cookbooks and looked for sausage recipes and stuff you can get at the—I mean at the bookstores and stuff and then they worked them out into they—they ended up making a lot of good products from basic recipes. The basic recipe is salt, pepper, a little garlic pepper, crushed red, and then you get that and you throw a little Italian—to make Italian [sausage] you would throw fennel in there. And then if you want throw some sage for breakfast sausage or just have that, and they’d set up and make smoked sausage. And then if you want hot, you would add cayenne pepper, you know, but it’s more to that—to it than that. You just add different flavors to get different seasonings. And so they opened this place, Creole Country, in 1979? Correct. --- The recipes that your mom had, she wrote them down and those survived the hurricane [Katrina]? Oh, we still have them and they’re in my—I know them all now, you know so—but we still have copies of them, and that’s still the heartbeat of the company because that’s the basic sausage recipes. Well how would you say your sausages are different from other people’s sausages? Well we use good quality meat, and we don’t use any cereals, no soy, no byproducts. Every piece of meat that comes in here—every day I get fresh meat in, and it’s never been frozen. And every piece of meat that I use is mostly used up by the end of the week, and it’s all properly cooked and packed and stored properly and mostly sold. By the next week it’s probably all eaten. So it’s never going to be more than a few days old, if you buy it…But every grocery store we sell to is usually buying about twice a week, and by the end of the week we’re already stocking them up with fresh stuff. So I don’t over-stock. So what’s the ratio of selling to the grocery stores and to restaurants; is it about equal or do you sell to more restaurants? We’ve only got like six grocery stores…I only go high-end grocery stores, which people don’t mind, and they like the flavor, and they’re familiar with the product. I’d say restaurants, those are my main business. What are some other restaurants that you sell to? Well sell to all the Brennan Restaurants, Ralph’s on the Park, Mr. B’s, Bourbon House, Red Fish Grill, Napoleon House and, of course, Liuzza’s by the Track. And let’s see here—Bozo’s Restaurant in Metairie. Right now that’s all I can think of. Most of the major hotels downtown, we sell to all them. --- Can you talk a little bit about the different the sausages? Like, in particular, the difference between hot sausage and chaurice? Well the hot sausage is mainly a salt, pepper, garlic powder, and cayenne pepper, white pepper, and paprika. And if it’s seasoned properly, it’s going to taste good with the proper meat, and it’s real good. The chaurice—the French version of chorizo, which is the Spanish version of the chaurice. I hope I’m talking this all right. But anyway, chaurice is made with chili powder, four different kinds of peppers and thyme, allspice, and the chili powder gives it a little Spanish-French flavor. I don’t know how chaurice does it, but that’s where we got this recipe out of the cookbook. So it’s—it’s—chaurice was supposed to be a real hot sausage but I mild-ed it down because the flavor was so good that so even the older people can come in and enjoy it. So if someone special-orders, they want hot chaurice, I’ll make a hot batch, you know. But the regular hot sausage has no chili powder in it, so it’s just mainly a hot sausage. Is the density of the packing of the sausage different at all? No, it’s the same meat, same grind—just different seasoning. And then andouille, can you talk about that? Andouille is a smoked sausage. That’s a coarse-grind smoked sausage, which means it’s in bigger chunks, and it’s real good. And it doesn’t have to be—someone tried to make something different, and it’s leaner than a smoked sausage, and it’s good for gumbos and stuff. You can also put a little more fat to it, which helps out when you make the gumbo, and they add the sausage to it. It would dry out if, it’s too lean. So I always like to add a little more fat to the andouille. But like Billy [Grueber, chef/owner of Liuzza’s by the Track] says, he likes to use your smoked sausage for his gumbo. Yeah. Because it has a little more fat consistency, and it doesn’t dry out as much. Actually, I use my smoked sausage for my gumbo also. It depends on the chef, what they like, you know; some people like the lean, lean stuff because it wouldn’t put any grease in his gumbo and everything. But I always say, when you use a lean andouille, after you do the cooking of the gumbo, you add it in the last half-hour or so; the sausage flavor gets into it but it doesn’t dry it out. And the smoked sausage you can add a little sooner because then it will give it a little more flavor but, of course, it’s best to wait to the next day to eat your gumbo, and that way you can skim the fat off the top of the gumbo. Tell me about your gumbo. Well my mother taught it to me. Of course, she was—lived in Church Point [which is in Cajun Country], so we’d make the roux. And Billy [Grueber] made his roux on top of the stove; we make our roux in the oven at a temperature of 400, I think, or 350 [degrees]. And we get half oil and half flour and put it in the oven for, I think, ten or fifteen minutes—and then have a timer, and we stir it all the way until it gets dark enough to what we like. Start off with a gallon of water, onion, bell pepper, and we boil that for a while and put the chicken in there, of course. And I use boneless thigh meat because that way we don’t have to pick it so much. And then what we do on that, after we get it to like it’s chicken soup, I’ll add chicken bouillon to get it—make it like chicken soup—and once you got all that done, you take out the meat and that way you can shred it to the way you like it. And you add your roux and basically, you have gumbo. You can salt and pepper it to your taste and then you’ve got—everything else is being added. I’ll add okra at the end and a little tomato, and then that’s basically it. And then you can let it simmer for a little while with the sausage and the chicken that’s tore up, and then you’ll have gumbo. I mean you can add—like Billy [Grueber] adds shrimp and oysters to his, which makes his a little different, and it’s very good. So do you make a thicker gumbo or a thinner gumbo? I think mine is a little thicker than his, but I don’t like it thick-thick because you get too much flour taste. So I think Liuzza’s by the Track has one of the best gumbos in the city. What do you think makes a good gumbo? Deanie Bowen: Sausage. VS: Good answer. [Laughs] Sausage. Creole Country sausage. Would you say that it tastes different, [with the roux] being made in the oven than on the top of the stove? DB: Nah…It’s more consistent. And, in fact, we can make it like that and keep it in the refrigerator, so we don’t have to do it every time. You know, a lot of times when you do it on the stove, it’s just for that one time. All right. [To Vaughn] So where do y’all get your meat that you use to make the sausage? I get most of the meat—a lot of it comes from Natko Supply Company and Scariano Meat Company, and both companies have got affected by the storm also, and they’ve been transplanted, so we all have been doing business before the storm. Well since the beginning in 1979, these are the people I’ve been dealing with. And there’s no reason to change. You know, I might buy some from somebody else once in a while, if they don’t have it. But you know, it’s like a family. If you’ve been doing business with people for thirty years, you’ve known them and it’s—it’s personable, you know. We’re not just like a number. I call up the owner and we talk; we’re friends—both companies—and stuff and about—we’re supposed to be re-inventing a new sausage as we speak. We’ve got to make a breakfast sausage for the Wyndham Hotel—Wyndham. Or the Windsor Court, that’s it. And it’s supposed to be a chicken and mango [sausage]. So we went out to the International House of Foods last—yesterday afternoon and went and bought all sorts of mango. We’ve got a pulp mango in the can, we’ve got mango slices in the can, and we have dried mango. So we’re not sure which one we’re going to use because we’ve got to go find the right taste with the sausage. How often do you get custom sausage orders like that? It comes when it comes, you know. I
can't say it’s all the time, but every chef has an idea,
and whenever they think of what they want, I try to get with them
or get with somebody and work it out, so that they’ll do
business with us—or in this case they’ll do business
with Natko because that’s who they’re going through.
So I’m— --- [Vaughn is now making a batch of crawfish sausage] Tell me again how many pounds [of meat] this is. Well it’s 180 pounds of meat [pork] with about eighteen pounds of crawfish, and with the seasoning and the vegetables you probably end up with a little bit over 200 pounds. --- [Vaughn begins loading the sausage mixture into the casing, making ling spirals of sausage.] Maybe you can kind of describe what you’re doing as you’re doing it. And then you rope it like that [into a spiral], and you wait until you can hang them on a smoke tray—that’s a smoke rack. So after you hang up the whole thing and stuff it, we light up the smoker, roll them in, and they cook for like two-and-a-half hours to—your heat at 160-degrees. And then after that, we shower it because you need a shower to cool it down…And then you sit it in the hall for maybe ten minutes and keep it from—you don’t want to roll a hot product right in the cooler. And then you roll it in the cooler, and it cools down. And once it gets to forty degrees, you pack it and send it to its new home. I do about three or four racks a day. But before the storm, I did six…And so a whole rack maybe holds 200 pounds of—I mean, 240. I used to make them all 240 before the storm, but since it slowed down a lot, I try to keep as minimum because I like everything to be made fresh. So I make about 750 pounds a week of this crawfish green onion [sausage]. --- Do you have a favorite one of the sausages that you make? I think I like the green onion—the smoked green onion, which is a basic smoked sausage with chopped green onions in it. The chaurice is real good. I like the cheese and jalapeno. I think I like most of them all, really. It depends on what you’re preparing to eat with them. But that chaurice on the grill, I want to tell you—you get the right barbecue sauce on it, you’re going to get—anytime they had a party out there and I brought ten or twenty pounds of chaurice, that’s the first thing that disappears. And the seafood sausage I was telling you about earlier and basically—with the fish and shrimp—but if you want to go more expensive, you know, you can add scallops to it, and then you could add crawfish tails…But no, it’s—mainly it’s the color presentation that helps out a lot, too. So if the fish is clear, I put the green onion and it gives it a green [color]. But if you have the crawfish it, will give you that orange color. And the scallops in there and the—little bay scallops would be cool, too. Of course, you bring the cost up, too, you know. --- All right, now we’re in the kitchen [which is also the office] with the gumbo [that Vaughn made]. All right, we’re in the gumbo. And this is my mother’s recipe—what I explained to you earlier. And we just like boiled the chicken with the vegetables; we pulled the chicken out, we shredded it, and then I got the roux and I took the chicken—I shredded the chicken and took the chicken out, of course, and put the roux in there, and then we made the roux…After we put the roux in there, I added the chicken back with the sausage and cooked that all down, and then at the end I added some okra and tomato. What sausage are you putting in there? Smoked sausage, the same stuff Billy [Grueber] put in his. All right, Vaughn, I think we maybe can put an ending on this, if you have some final thoughts about sausage making. Well this is—a lot of people get out there and eat it and cook with it for me, please, and enjoy it. --- To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
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