The Gundy Brothers’ craft butcher shop Olliffe is not just a Good Food Fighter and a supporter of this website, it’s also my local and where I buy all my meat. My kids have grown up on their cuts of heritage breed pork, beef, lamb, poultry – all of it. We are particularly big fans of their sausages, which make an easy weekday dinner. One of my particular favourite sausages at Olliffe doesn’t come from the fresh meet counter, but rather the glass door fridge behind it with cured products. In between their knackwurst and Andouille sausages are my guilty pleasure: the Jalapeño and Cheddar Smoked Sausage. My experience with cheese in sausages has not been uniformly good. In a typical fresh sausage adding cheese to the forcemeat often results in a bit of extra flavour and a lot of salt. Cheese melts and in a course ground sausage it really just becomes salty liquid fat. The Olliffe cheesy sausage, however, is made with more of a finely ground wurst forcemeat with protect the bits of cheese so they are both visible and discernable in both flavour and texture on the palate, along with good kick of heat and a bit of vegetable crunch from the chopped jalapeño peppers and a good seasoning of hardwood smoke from the seasoning. They’re good, and I’ve never been able to limit myself to one.
In any event as I was buying this week’s store of Jalapeño Cheddar Smoked Sausages at Olliffe, Sam Gundy mentioned to me that he would be serving them this Saturday at DADLAND. He then explained that DADLAND is a pre-father’s day event this Saturday, June 15 from 12 to 5pm at Tuck Shop Trading Co, the Summerhill clothing shop around the corner. He told me I should check it out and asked if I could get the word out, which I am doing presently.
DADLAND is the brainchild of Tuck Shop owner Lyndsay Borschke who was looking for a way to encourage more neighbourhood men to come into her shop. She told me: “Tuck Shop is a lifestyle brand that embraces outdoor Canadian pursuits in an elevated manner. We love the cottage and skiing and like to make things that celebrate that lifestyle. Our goal is to source and manufacture our products as locally as possible. As a result, the majority of our products are made right here in Toronto.” Adding locally sourced food from neighbourhood shop like Olliffe, and this year locally made beer from Ace Hill, seemed like the perfect compliment.
Lyndsay directed me to the DADLAND event page on her website that lists all the activities and promotions she has (literally) in store, including axe throwing – yes, really. If you would like to try the Jalapeño Cheddar Sausages I like so much, in this case with pico de gallo and corn tortilla chips washed down with a cold Toronto-made pilsner, while browsing Tuck Shop and/or throwing an axe or two, then I’ll see you in my neighbourhood on Saturday.
Olliffe is a Good Food Fighter. Please support the businesses and organizations that support Good Food Revolution.
