Island Bay Butchers Supreme Sausage Award review

It is great to the see the award for the top sausage in New Zealand returning to Wellington. Island Bay Butchers, one of Wellington’s great sausage shops won this award for their smoked kielbasa.

 

This is a lightly smoked sausage, the smoky flavour is present but not intense. The sausage is ground to a fine medium texture. They are pleasant on the palate and taste good. I find some sausages made by Island Bay Butchers to contain too much fat; this is not the case for these sausages. For someone who is looking to try an Eastern European sausage, I would recommend these. I prefer a more flavoursome sausage but my wife prefers these. We served these cut into slices as nibbles when we had people around on Sunday afternoon and they were enjoyed by all, with much discussion on the qualities of sausages with our German neighbours.

 

Cost per kilo: $19.95

This award got me thinking, and researching. The first Wellington sausage maker I can remember winning this award was Bells Smallgoods, with a bratwurst.  This sausage had a regular diameter and was small in length. It was medium to coarsely ground and it had a very good meaty taste. Bells Smallgoods were based in Newlands(?). At the time there was limited supply of quality sausages that a sausage aficionado could purchase. Many years ago they rebranded and became Luscutto. I have not seen Luscutto products for sale recently. The website www.luscutto.co.nz has been parked. I have gone back into archived websites and discovered that in 2006 and 2005 they won the supreme sausage award. A fantastic achievement. In 2005 it was for the Thuringer Bratwurst, followed by the Luscutto Hunter Sausage in 2006. The web archive did not go back past 2006 but I think that another bratwurst made by Bells won the supreme award many years before 2005.   

If anyone knows what happened to Bells/Luscutto, leave a comment.