German Beef Jerky

By 10 on a brisk Saturday morning, the retro aluminum-lined glass butcher case within European Deluxe Sausage Kitchen is already cloudy with fingerprints. Devotees of 60-year-old Beverly Hills niche sausage and beef shop tend to be pressed contrary to the cup, trying to choose on the list of two-dozen German-style brats and bocks, spicy Italian links and smoked Polish sausages.

Gary Troub, the 51-year-old German sausage maker and owner, reaches into the instance and pulls out a tray of rosy, 2-inch-thick beefy backlinks. "What amount of pounds of boerewors had been it?" he requires a willowy younger mama toting a Gucci diaper case.

Troub rips off a sheet of white butcher paper, folds it neatly round the chubby sausages, and hits for a foot-long strip of leathery meat jerky holding contrary to the wall. "And for the biltong, dried out or smooth, fat on or off?"

The Fancy Food Show-worthy brands among these air-dried jerkies and fresh sausages belie their centuries-old sub-Saharan origins while the level of the vinegar-and-coriander-spiced taste. Ask among the list of nearly 30, 000 South African expats living through the entire la area, and hands will probably point toward the Sausage Kitchen for freshly made biltong (foot-long chunks of coriander-and-cider-vinegar-cured, air-dried meat), droëwors (surface beef stuffed into half-inch sausage casings before treating and drying), or boerewors (fresh beef farmers sausages seasoned with cider vinegar, coriander, cloves as well as other herbs). European-style sausages might have been the inspiration for the store with regards to exposed in 1948, but it's the South African niche products that maintain the brick cigarette smoker churning today.

"I spent my youth next door to a butcher shop, and so I learned to just like the sausages early, " states Troub, organizing boerewors in neat rows.

Beginnings

The butcher store was in Höhr-Grenzhausen, a tiny town across the Rhine River known more for ceramic pottery than bratwurst. After earning a butcher's meisterbrief, a rigorous seven-year guild-regulated certificate system, Troub worked at a local butcher store (his future spouse, Andrea, worked leading countertop). Once the few moved to l . a . 20 years ago, jerky wasn't precisely on their mind.

"Germans want fresh animal meat and sausages . . . jerky, less."

Several mornings each week, Troub hunches over a stainless-steel prep table in corner associated with the 450-square-foot home, slicing foot-long chunks of beef bottom round and, whenever marketplace prices are reasonable, farm-raised antelope.