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Dan here with another Sporkful reheat for you.
And look, I know that it's the summertime grilling season.
You're probably having burgers, dogs, grilled chicken, grilled fish.
But what about sausages?
You know, when I lived in Chicago, I had a lot of sausages.
But I haven't eaten as many in recent years until I discovered these Seymour meats and sausages.
Remember, we featured butcher Cara Nicoletti.
She's the founder of Seymour Meats and Veggies.
It's a company that takes a very innovative approach to making sausages.
The brand, of course, is named for Cara's grandfather, Seymour, who is also a butcher.
Now, quick update. Cara tells us that her company's products are now available in Target on the East Coast. And wherever you live in the U .S., you can get them shipped to your house when you order through the website eatseymour .com.
That's eatseymour, S -E -E -M -O -R -E dot com.
Cara also says Papa Seymour, who you'll hear all about in this episode, is now 95 and still going strong, still sharp as a tack.
Cara says he is her guiding light when it comes to the meat business.
Remember, if there's an episode you want us to reheat, drop me a line at hello at sporkful .com.
All right, enjoy. Tell me about your earliest meat -related memory.
Marie? Oh, man. There are, I have a lot of very early meat memories.
I sometimes think like if someone were to crack my brain open and look at them, it would just be like, what the hell is going on here?
This is Cara Nicoletti.
She's a butcher by trade.
So is her grandfather and his father and his father.
She grew up going to her grandfather's butcher shop all the time.
He used to always make us a snack of like chicken liver spread on Ritz crackers.
And I remember him coming out from the cutting room in like a bloody apron with a platter of those crackers and like bringing them behind.
We used to sit behind the cash register.
The smell of his, he were Calvin Klein obsession.
He still does. And mixed with like meat smells.
else. I'm not sure that's how the people who developed Calvin Klein obsession expected it to be used.
I know, I know. It worked.
He always smelled delicious.
This is The Sporkful.
It's not for foodies, it's for eaters.
I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people.
As I said, Kara Nicoletti is a butcher who comes from a long line of butchers.
But as you'll hear today when we share her story, she's doing something with sausages that none of her ancestors could have imagined.
Kara's great -great -grandfather was a butcher in Odessa, which is now in Ukraine.
He had a son, who also became a butcher, immigrated to the U .S. in the early 1900s.
He continued working as a butcher and had a son of his own named Seymour.
That's Kara's grandfather.
father seymour yeah he's incredible he's he'll be 91 in august he you know started butchering with his dad and his brother when he was like 13 it was sort of like a rite of passage he worked into his 80s and he's just like the most positive most generous person of all time grandpa seymour had his own butcher shop in the north end of boston in, a Jewish butcher and a CEO of Italian butchers.
He and his wife had three daughters, and even though he was running a family business, he didn't want his kids to take it over.
That was partly because women butchers weren't very common at the time, but it was also because being a butcher is a very difficult job.
It's physically demanding.
A lot of butchers end up with repetitive muscle strains, plus the hours are long and the pay isn't great.
So for Seymour, it was a classic immigrant family story.
He worked hard so his kids and grandkids wouldn't have to, and that plan And worked with Seymour's daughters, including Kara's mom.
Even though no one from that generation went into butchering, Seymour's shop was still a big part of the family when Kara was growing up.
Hanging out there gave her a perspective on meat that most kids in suburban Massachusetts don't get.
I know it sounds very stupid, but I knew that meat was dead animals, which I think in a weird way was like something that my friends didn't know or didn't think about.
And how did that affect the way you thought about meat?
eat? I think that in some ways it made me more sensitive about meat.
But then in some ways, it also made me have this like wall.
I love animals, but there's this wall of separation that comes up when it comes to like processing them and eating them.
I'm less sensitive to seeing an animal on a cutting table than someone who like doesn't see it every day.
So sometimes I I have to sort of like check myself and like tap into that sensitivity again if I feel like I'm losing it.
Sometimes Cara would help out in her grandfather's shop.
She even learned how to make sausage.
She says that's the least dangerous thing that happens at a butcher shop because it doesn't involve gigantic knives.
So it's perfect for a kid.
Even though she liked spending time at Seymour's shop, Cara didn't always plan to be a butcher.
In fact, when she decided to go into food professionally, Fortunately, she started off as a baker.
Logistically, it was the easiest job to get for like a girl with no formal kitchen experience is sort of the, you know, I couldn't walk into a restaurant and be like, I want to be your protein chef.
But for whatever reason, people were more willing to be like, sure, we'll train you like whatever.
I don't know if it's just like a thing that they just think girls can like naturally do.
There is a perception that baking is somehow feminine or for women and that dealing with With meat and fire is for men.
Totally. Where do you think that comes from?
I think it comes from people thinking that baking is smaller, more like precise, less body strength type stuff.
And actually, like bakers are incredibly strong.
You have to be able to lift enormous bags of flour and knead breads all day.
And like it takes a tremendous amount of strength.
Cara being Cara, she also took on some light butchering for the restaurant she was baking in.
Eventually, she realized butchering was her real passion.
But Seymour was concerned.
I think he sort of pictured me toiling behind someone else's shop counter for the rest of my life.
I know it wasn't necessarily what he wanted to do.
As a first -generation American, I think, like, it was just, if your family has a business, you do what your family business is.
And he didn't feel that he really had a choice.
So he just wanted us to feel like we had a choice.
And I definitely did have a choice.
And I still chose this.
The first step, Kara would need to apprentice with a butcher.
But as she later told Brooklyn Magazine, quote, I walked around the neighborhood and asked all the old dudes for apprenticeships.
And they were like, F you, no. Kara was starting to see why Seymour had been worried.
But after a lot of rejections, she snagged an apprenticeship at a shop called The Meat Hook.
She loved it. Because a lot of it is just sort of doing the same movements and things over and over again.
It was very meditative and calming to me.
And you are using your brain.
Breaking beef especially is very technical.
You have to know muscle groups.
You have to know the muscles of the entire animal's body.
And sausage making is very scientific and technical.
The Meat Hook is a whole animal butcher shop that only sells grass -fed animals raised in New York State.
They don't use factory -farmed animals, and they use the whole animal.
Bottom line, if you're going to buy meat, this is as humane, environmentally friendly, and sustainable as it gets.
Well, originally, I was so dedicated to selling people people this beautiful, humanely raised meat.
And, you know, visiting the farms and seeing how much it took for those farmers to raise literally like one good animal.
And then I would have customers coming every single night of the week to get meat.
And I was just thinking like, this is not sustainable.
You can't eat meat every single night if you want to eat it.
Sustainably, I think maybe Maybe someday if we're able to catch up and make regenerative farming like the thing across the board. But for now, you can't eat meat every night if you want to eat it well.
So I was trying to figure out ways to like stretch our meat further and make it last longer.
And, you know, fillers are like a dirty word in the meat industry and the sausage industry specifically.
But sort of thinking about like how do you turn that on your head so that it's not a negative thing so we can stretch this meat and make it go further.
Adding some kind of filler wouldn't just make this precious meat go further, it would also make it more affordable.
So Kara's idea for a good filler?
Vegetables. And sausages seem perfect.
You know, you can't make a steak that's one quarter veggies, at least not yet.
But with sausages, you're already blending a bunch of stuff together.
What if you could just throw in some veggies, make it healthier, and use less meat in the process?
There was a green market next door to the meat hook, so Kara asked the owner if she could have whatever wilted, leftover but still perfectly edible produce she had lying around at the end of the week.
The owner agreed. Once it was free, it was like I could play around with it.
So it was sort of like a puzzle.
I'd put it out in front of me, you know, wilted dill and like soggy carrots and bruised onions as matzo ball soup.
I like to think about sausages as like the gum in Willy Wonka that's like four courses.
Like, how do you make this like a little complete meal?
I like that. I like that a lot.
Cara started selling some of her experiments, like a chicken gumbo sausage with bell peppers, garlic, and lots of herbs, or the chicken fungi, which had a bunch of mushrooms. Cara's customers responded well.
She had a feeling she'd hit on something, but she kept that to herself.
She wanted to keep improving the product.
In the end, Cara spent nearly 10 years developing her meat and veggie sausages.
Sure, she was working on other things during that decade.
She was a full -time butcher.
Butcher. She helped open another butcher shop called Foster Sundry.
She wrote a book. She hosted a web series for Vice.
But also, it turns out that making a great sausage that combines meat and veggies isn't as simple as grinding everything up together and throwing it in the casing.
It's actually very complicated, because when you cook vegetables, they release water.
The very basic principle is that water is sort of the enemy of sausage binding or protein extraction and vegetables or water.
So there are two major proteins in like every muscle in an animal's body.
They're called myosin and actin.
And when they're in the presence of salt and under any kind of stress, like mixing or grinding or tumbling, they release a sticky substance called exudate, which is like meat glue.
It's like the thing that makes a sausage bind together.
together. Anyone who's ever like if you made burger patties by hand, you kind of notice the meat starts to stick to your hands.
It gets a little bit sticky.
Exactly. And you can take that too far and overbind something.
And it can be it has like sort of a sandy, crumbly texture.
Like you can break that bind just by overworking it.
But water really interrupts those two proteins from creating exudates.
So trying to find ways around that is is the way that you're going to make a texturally correct sausage.
And so what are some of the ways around it?
I can't really tell you.
Oh, top secret. Okay, fair enough.
So I would imagine that like some of the things you had to think about were like how big or small to cut the veggies, because the more surface area you have exposed, the more water is going to be released.
Yes. Yes. Some of it we're trying to get sort of patented because it's starting to become a category now.
They're calling them blended meats.
But you can tell people who are jumping into it who've never made a sausage before and don't really understand like the basic principles because the sausage smears or like it crumbles because the water has interrupted that protein extraction.
distraction. Kara's gotten to the point where her sausages are up to 35 % veggies, but she wants to push it even further.
So as she says of sausages, they are sort of the original sustainable meat because you can use all the scraps.
They're the thing that made my family's business run, that and ground beef.
It's interesting that you say that sausage is the original sustainable food, but then there's also this perception that in that throwing a bunch of stuff in and grinding it all together that something gross ends up in there.
So how do you combat that?
That is a big thing.
And I think a lot of it is just education of customers and also transparency about everything.
Like I think my mind really shifted when I was butchering whole animals myself, where it was like, oh, the entire animal really is edible.
There aren't parts that that are good or bad.
Like, it's not going to hurt you.
It's still meat. And also, it's so funny to me the way that we have this sort of hierarchy of body parts.
Yeah, it's very strange.
You know, it's like – so it's weird if there's chicken feet ground up into your food, but it's not weird that you'll pick up an actual chicken's leg and bite into it.
Yes, I know. You know, like both of those things are weird when you think too much about them.
Meat is weird in general, and it's like when you – even just the knowledge that meat is muscle, people don't like that when you say that.
But I think there's also the perception of where that part of the animal's body was.
Was it on the ground?
Was it sniffing the ground?
And I understand that.
I really do. Our meat is just meat.
But I guess I would just ask consumers, if you ate a hot dog and it was delicious and you were into the whole thing start to finish And then you found out there was some ground -up snout or ears in it.
Why does that matter?
What do you want? A hot dog that's only got filet mignon in it?
I mean, like, come on.
Exactly. So after years of development, Cara has her meat and veggie sausages.
She plans to leave the meat hook and open her very own shop to sell them.
But that's not what happens.
Coming up, one meeting sets Kara on a very different course.
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Welcome back to another Sporkful Reheat, I'm Dan Pashman.
A lot of times people want to ask me like, oh, what are you cooking?
What restaurants are you going to?
They ask Emma and Andres and the whole Sporkful team the same questions.
Well, it turns out we provide a listener service to you that includes that information.
It's our newsletter.
We don't send it out all the time.
We're not going to spam you.
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So there are a lot of benefits, and you can sign up right now while you're listening.
Head on over to sporkful .com slash newsletter to sign up today.
day. Again, that's sporkful .com slash newsletter.
Thanks. Now back to Cara Nicoletti.
When Cara first thought about starting her own sausage company, she envisioned a little shop of her own.
As she started seeking investments, she met Aaron Patinkin, who had co -founded a bakery chain in New York called Ovenly.
Cara shared her sausage shop dreams, and Aaron told her something she hadn't heard before.
You're not thinking big enough.
Aaron said, forget a little sausage shop.
You should be selling to supermarkets across the country.
You should launch a national brand.
Oh, my God, it was revolutionary because for years I'd sort of been told to be quiet and stay in my lane and pay my dues.
And there's a lot of that in kitchens and in food.
And it was completely revolutionary, first of all, to have someone say to me, you aren't thinking big enough.
And second of all, for it to be a woman because I had like no women role models.
A lot of really amazing men, but no women role models.
Cara and Erin decided to join forces.
Another partner, Ariel Hopman, also signed on to work with them.
For their company to be a national brand, Cara would need to find co -packers, basically meat processing plants that would make her product for her.
That proved to be difficult.
It's an old industry with companies run by older people, mostly men.
They knew how to process meat, but veggies?
That was a new wrinkle.
All those complications we discussed earlier about putting vegetables in a sausage, the way water affects meat.
So Kara had solved all that in her test kitchen, but working on a mass scale is very different.
A lot of the companies didn't want to deal with it.
On one hand, you're coming to them with a new idea that requires sort of a lot of extra work to make it happen.
And I'm sure that's one obstacle.
How much do you think it was also in their heads that they were like, what?
A lady butcher? What?
Now I've seen it all.
It's funny because we're all like my two partners, too.
too, like we're all women because they were the best people to partner with.
They were the smartest people.
And I think still when we go into these meetings, a lot of times people, the guys will like sort of laugh at us at first and sort of be like, OK, like, you know, whatever, little girls.
But then we start talking and like they kind of like test you and start throwing questions your way.
And once you can answer them all, they respect you maybe even more.
In the end, Kara Cara approached a hundred co -packers before she found one in Missouri that would give her a shot.
Things were starting to fall into place.
As Cara got into branding and marketing for this new company, she began to see that being a woman might actually be an advantage.
We do associate meat with men so much. And it's like, if you look in the meat aisle and you look at the branding in the meat aisle, it is all so masculine.
And the buying power in grocery stores is women.
It absolutely is moms, and it's women.
And if you look at our packages on the shelves, they stand out a lot, which was pretty easy to do because, you know, I early on did a very deep market dive on like the branding in that aisle.
And it's like there were four colors that people are using.
It's like hunter green, a dark red, black and white.
And I picture like all the lettering on all the packages is like big thick block letters with like screws in the corners of the letters as if they've been bolted onto the package by some sort of heavy machinery.
Totally. A hundred percent.
And there's always a picture of a man's face somewhere on there.
Right, right. And sort of like this illusion that it came from a farm, even though it probably came from Tyson.
And, you know, right off the bat, we're like, it's going to be easy to stand out, just making it more colorful, making it colors that you don't see in that in that aisle.
And given I think the packaging has not only a lot of colors that you don't typically see, but just sort of like a fun kind of silly vibe as opposed to like, look at this meat kind of vibe.
Exactly. And I don't want to shame people.
And I think there's sort of like these two camps.
I think there's the farm to table camp, which is sort of sanctimonious, save the world.
And then there's the, who cares about the world?
I just want to eat meat.
So we're trying to sort of fall in the middle of that.
Where it's like, just do your best. And it's a really delicious way to do your best. So Cara had her sausages, a company to make them for her, and a vision for the packaging.
To sell her product in the supermarket, she just needed one more thing.
A name for the company.
company. She decided to call it Seymour Meats and Veggies.
She spells it S -E -E -M -O -R -E, as in you can see more.
It was a nod to her grandpa Seymour and to the idea of letting customers see more of what's in the sausages.
Seymour officially launched in February of this year.
They're available online and in more than 200 stores across the country, including a bunch of Whole Foods.
Cara sent me some sausages to try, and the day before we talked, I had a feast. they were so good and I feel like if I hadn't been paying attention I might not have even noticed that they were one -third veggies the subtle difference is some of the sausages had little crunchy bits of vegetables and you know when you bite into a regular sausage and there's lots of juice which is basically liquid fat but when you bite into these some of the juice that comes out is water which I really liked I mean these sausages are plenty meaty but they're just a little lighter as I told Cara look I love sausage
but I also feel like when you get a sausage is just like full of fat, like a couple of bites is really good.
But by the time you get to the end of the sausage, you gotta take a nap.
Right. Like I feel like garbage, you know, the sausage is just like absolutely scratched a meaty, hearty, delicious itch, but also in a way that like I felt great afterwards.
Awesome. I love to hear that.
And the one that especially blew my mind was the beet one.
Yes. It's, it's really, that's the one that we knew going into to it that it would be probably the slowest seller because it's such a shocking color.
Right. It's flat out purple.
It is a bright purple beet colored sausage.
And I like beets. I don't love beets.
But like, so what's it, tell folks what's in that sausage.
It's based on a sweet Italian sausage, fresh beets, pork, fennel, garlic.
That's it pretty much. The thing that people don't understand and don't believe is that you don't have to like beets to like the sausage.
Like my dad literally would not go near beet ever.
And he eats those all the time i decided to grill them i was opening them up and my daughter my nine -year -old daughter of course that one catches her eye because it's so bright she goes what is that and she likes she loves meat and she loves a lot of foods and i said um it's a sausage with beets in it she goes why would someone do that to a sausage i totally understand and i was skeptical too but but it's funny like yes sweet italian sausage Sausage, the vibe that I got from it was like breakfast sausage.
Yeah, it has a sweetness to it.
And in the same way that like a breakfast sausage might have sugar, would often have like brown sugar added.
Exactly. Yeah, and sweet Italian sausages most of the time have sugar added to them too.
So replacing beets with that sugar just did something really magical.
There's also the broccoli melt.
That one's got pork, broccolini, spicy pepperoncini, garlic, and Monterey Jack cheese.
And I love that I actually hadn't quite put it together till I read it on your website, but this is your take on a Philly roast pork sandwich. Yes, which would be broccoli rabe, long hots, provolone, and roasted pork.
Right. I kind of like muted those flavors a little bit to make them appeal to more people, but that one is my favorite, and I think it's a surprise favorite.
Yeah, so Cara, this may be the most important question of all.
What's the best way to eat one of your sausages?
Oh, man. So I really like to cook with the sausages.
I mean, I love them just on a Martin's potato roll with, like, chips and mustard and cheese on them.
But I like to cook with them, and I really love all of them in pasta, the broccoli melt and the beet especially.
I like to take them out of their casing and, like, crumble them and brown them.
I have a recipe on the website for broccoli melt orchette that's, like, it's so good.
good. It's so good.
I think a lot of times people look at these and they're like, what do I do with this?
And the answer is just do whatever you would do with a normal sausage with these.
When you take the sausage out of its casing and what happens to the casing?
You throw the casing away.
Well, that feels a bit like a tragedy, Cara.
I totally understand.
So the chicken ones, it should be said, do not have a casing on them because we didn't want to do any pork in the chicken sausage.
If you take it out of the casing and toss the casing that's you're right that's hard you could crisp the casing up in the pan and just eat it look there's more than one way to eat a sausage but to me if you pierce the casing with anything but your teeth you are depriving yourself of one of the like really just one of the that bite when you bite through a natural casing you know when you your teeth first start to come down and it's kind of like it's it's bending it's bending it's you know you're sinking your and then snap when you snap so with you and it pops and the juices and the flavors come
pouring out very primal that is an absolute hall of fame bite right there like yeah yes what's the holy grail like what's the what's the my thing that i'm like so i want so badly is um I want to be able to put cabbage in, but when it cooks, it kind of releases because it has lactic acid in it, which makes the meat, like, mushy.
Why cabbage? Why do you want that one so badly?
It was part of a recipe that I really loved, and I just—I can make it work without it, but it also was really beautiful.
It's purple. And I just was very, very set on it.
But we made, me and one of our co -packers made like so many rounds of it.
And it was just like, yeah, we got to just give this one up.
Like, I don't know.
Maybe someday. In the beginning, Grandpa Seymour was really worried about Kara becoming a butcher.
But now that Seymour's sausages are on shelves across the country?
He really loves them.
Yeah. It took him some time to understand.
I remember years ago bringing him sausages that I was making that were like chicken potsticker sausages, and he was like, what the hell is this?
But you eat it, and then you get it, and it's – yeah, he's a big fan and very, very emotional about the name.
He wanted me to call it Cara's Kitchen.
Why is he emotional about the name?
He just doesn't understand why I named it after him.
He thinks that I should have been calling my own name out, but he is my greatest role model.
That's Cara Nicoletti, founder and chief creative officer of Seymour Meats and Veggies.
By the way, I think we should all aspire to have the title of chief creative officer at a sausage company.
You can follow Seymour on Instagram at eatseymour, and that's S -E -E -M -O -R -E.
This show is produced by me, along with senior producer...
Emma Morgenstern. And producer...
Andre Sohero. Additional production by...
Julia Shu. Our editor is...
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The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher.
Our executive producers are Chris Bannon and Daisy Rosario.
Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
And I'm Sean from Dayton, Ohio, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.
This reheat was produced by Gianna Palmer The team that produces The Sporkful today includes me, along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern and senior producer Andres O 'Hara Our engineer is Jared O 'Connell The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios.
Our executive producer is Camille Stanley.
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