While crafting this Tube Week piece, I sought the earnest advice of one of my more culinarily savvy girlfriends about what type of sausage she’d recommend for a Valentine’s Day meal.
“The hot Italian sausage…with…wine,” she seductively tells me.
She jests, but she also has a point. I still had some left. Knowing that I bought the Stachowski Brand Charcuterie pork frankfurters with fennel and sweet paprika that is in fact called the “Hot Italian Sausage with Wine” for Super Bowl Sunday, she couldn’t help throwing in that adulterated pun.
But the family-owned charcuterie business is serious about its meat. For years, it has offered a wide assortment of gallantines, pâtes, terrines and fresh and cured sausages. The fresh sausage, however, has become the main entrée.
Bayou Bakery, Bastille and Meridian Pint are few of the restaurants who have Stachowski on the menu. They also have stands in two of the year-round farmers’ markets in Falls Church and Palisades in Northwest D.C., where around 11-13 different types of sausages are offered — English bangers, duck and chicken franks, veal and pork Wisconsin-style bratwursts, lamb merguez, kielbasa and even a sweet version of the Italian.
“What kind of other package of meat that you can count on to give you so much flavor other than sausage?” muses founder Jamie Stachowski. “You’ve got steak. OK, it just has one dimension – it’s beef. And most people don’t do very much with that. They’ll just sauté it, grill it or put some flowery seasoning on it or something like that. But sausage. Now that’s very complex.”
A chef trained in French technique (most notably with legendary chef Jean-Louis Palladin), Stachowski knows his charcuterie. He is widely known for Restaurant Kolumbia, a downtown venture he co-owned with his wife, Carolyn. It closed in 2007, but the butcher’s board–a selection of house-made charcuterie–was a hit at the restaurant. He also grew up in a large Polish immigrant family in a farm in Buffalo, NY, where there was “lots of cooking, lots of butchering, lots of sausage making, lots of raising the animals.”
“This is what I love about sausage making. It’s a direct connection back to our ancestors,” Stachowski reminisces while assisting a Milwaukee butcher in the sausage-making episode of “Meat America,” a History Channel program about the country’s meat culture that he hosted last summer.
Stachowski also creates non-European style meats. When describing the Thai chicken sausage, the very first Stachowski product I tried, he softens his otherwise animated voice and explains the creation process with the delicate passionate tone of a chef. “There’s a lot of flavors in it. But they work really well together. That’s the deft hand of a chef seasoning the sausage. You’ve got all the elements: fresh herbs, mint, basil, lemongrass, ginger, lime, just enough fish sauce and Thai peppers in there. All that deliciousness, all that good flavor and then it’s simple to prepare. It’s wholesome.”
When I asked him what sausage he would recommend for a Valentine’s Day meal at last Sunday’s Palisades Farmers’ Market, he exclaimed, “Valentine’s Day is this week? I should’ve brought pâte!” How about from one of these selections? “Duck sausage…because it’s sweet.”
Stachowski was also somewhat known for periodically selling his high-end products from the back of his Izuzu trooper for three years. A few days before his selling date, he would post on the online foodie board DonRockwell.com a time, location, the goods he was hawking, and the password that would initiate the semi-covert transaction. Capitol Spice describes one experience as bearing “a striking resemblance to your average movie depiction of a drug dealer’s den.” Stachowski laughs about those times and says, “That was fun.” With “chacha” as the password (as well as the current greeting to his voicemail), I doubt that there was a dull moment.
The Georgetown butcher shop at 1425 25th St. NW, is the next big project Stachowski is launching with his son, Josef, who has been his partner in the family business for almost three years. The chef likes to call his upcoming brick-and-mortar business a “neighborhood candy store for carnivores,” where he’ll widen his product line and even bring back many of the regular charcuterie he has made in the past.
The Stachowskis don’t give a definite answer on when the shop will open, but delays are common in the business. Standing outside the under-construction family business, the younger Stachowski throws out mid-March, but jokingly follows up with, “You should just say ‘it’ll open at some point in time.'”
Before I left the storefront, the chef again revealed how serious he is with his products, He expounded on the rising costs of meat and the environmental struggle of maintaining the animals that many of us consume, stating that people now have a more conscientious view toward the meat industry.
“We’re at an important precipice here. Flesh is precious,” he says. “This planet can’t support all these flesh eaters. So what we have to do to the flesh that we do eat, it has to be treated like it’s precious. And we’re going to do that here.”
