The best sausages in Ireland and Britain are being made by a former Kerry building worker left unemployed after the construction boom ended.
Five years ago John-Paul O’Connor was just another victim of the economic crash. But he was not prepared to accept his fate and set about reshaping it. “The construction business collapsed fairly quickly,” he says. “I had long cooked for my family and loved it but after the business went five years ago, I decided to do it on a larger scale.”
Making sausages
He started making sausages and white pudding, using skills he had picked up from working in sausage production plants in London more than 40 years earlier.
It turned out he was rather good at it. O’Connor and his wife, Kathleen, set up the Sásta Sausage and Pudding Company using locally sourced pork and following their own recipes in their home village of Cromane in 2012. Within months they were collecting awards.
“I started selling in farmers’ markets and I was on the stall one day when a French tourist stopped by and tasted the white pudding. He loved it and suggested I enter a big competition held every year in Normandy.”
Last October his white pudding won the Fins Goustiers award in Normandy. The Fins Goustiers are the European championships for artisan butchers and pork food producers and widely acknowledged as one of the most prestigious awards in the culinary world.
His triumph gave him the confidence to enter an even tougher category in 2014 and this week Sásta was acclaimed for having the best sausages in Ireland and Britain.
“It is a great honour and a big deal for us,” he says. “It is a remarkable achievement, not least because we are in our 60s and only started doing this three years ago.”
Full capacity
But this is only the start of the journey for O’Connor. At the moment he produces about 500kg of sausages and pudding a week – and his small factory is working at full capacity supplying a small number of farmers’ markets and some of the best hotels and restaurants in the country.
“It was always my dream to create employment in this area so young people would not have to go through the heartache of emigration as I did.
“In fact, I had to emigrate twice – once when I was just 13 and then again in the 1980s. I would like to save people from that. I hope that when I open the factory in the new year I will be able to do that.”
Plans to open a sausage factory are at an advanced stage. Initially it is planned to employ 25 people. If the wisdom of French culinary experts is to be relied on, gourmets have plenty to look forward to.
