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SUNSET SPECIALTY MEATS Richard Elliott Sunset Specialty Meats
"There’s where the difference is in boudin: is it rich in flavor, or is it rich because it’s hot?” – Richard Elliott After nearly two decades in the chain-grocery business, Richard Elliott bought himself a small specialty meat market and food store. If the inspiration for such a move was the allure of being his own boss, the side effect is that he has become the only small-scale, personalized grocer in a town that used to have several such businesses. In a single trip to Sunset Specialty Meats, you can eat a hot link of boudin and a bag of warm cracklings, both prepared that day; find a brown-paper sack of bananas, over-ripened and perfect for banana pudding; drop off a freshly killed deer to be hung, cut into dinner-ready pieces, and wrapped; pick up a pound of housemade andouille for your next pot of red beans; and scan the meat case for regional specialties such as the heart, kidneys, liver, and marrow guts packaged together for cowboy stew. Elliott tweaked Sunset’s boudin recipe after purchasing the store, and the result is a full-bodied sausage made with ground pork from two different cuts, as well as dried cayenne peppers, medium-grain rice, and a touch of pork liver.
Subject: Richard Elliott --- Sara Roahen: This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Sunday, September 9, 2007. And I’m in Sunset, Louisiana, with Richard Elliott. Could you say your full name for me and your birth date, and also tell me the name of your store? Richard Elliott: My name is Richard Elliott. My birth date is July 19, 1960. And my store is Sunset Specialty Meats in Sunset. How did you wind up in this area? My daddy was in the oil field, so he kind of—we kind of bounced around, and we ended up in South Louisiana—you know, came down here, and I was a graduate from Acadiana High at about—on the other side of Scott. And I’ve been in the grocery business since. So you started in the grocery business right after high school? Right. While I was in high school, since I was a freshman. I always worked in the grocery business, and from that I went from that into the old Delchamps [grocery store] building when Delchamps first came to Louisiana—and from Alabama is where they came from. And then I stayed with them for about seven, eight years, So I’m curious, what kind of restaurant did you run in Texas? I took over from my grandfather’s restaurant, which was in Brownwood, Texas. He had a seafood and steakhouse that he started from a little—about a 12 on 12 building—and it ended up being a big outfit out there. But I helped him, and then when he wanted to retire I went out there and did that and learned a lot from him, and it just didn’t work out. My wife was pregnant at the time and homesick, so we ended up coming back home. Your wife is from this area? I think she was born in—Winnie, Texas. And then, but she was raised all in South Louisiana all of her life. Tell me what you did with the Albertson’s company. Well I started out as a lobby manager, and from there I went to the grocery manager, which was in my field—between grocery and meat department. I was a market manager for Delchamps, and then I ended up being a grocery manager for them, and then from that I went back into the meat department. You know I’ve always cooked. I’ve always did catering jobs, did festivals, just—always have done it. It was just money in it, you know, at the time. So what kinds of things would you cook for festivals? Festivals are done with you know—I have a fryer so we have boudin balls, and then we do barbeques with the pork chop sandwiches and pork steaks, hamburgers, and I make a jambalaya. I got the black pots and—and then we have the cracklings. When we go to the Cracklin’ Festival, that’s what the main thing is: cracklings and boudin and the boudin balls. We cook the boudin on the pit, so it kind of gives it a smoke flavor at that point too. I would do smoked boudin over at the store, but it—it’s a Board of Health issue, because you got to keep time and temperature and all kinds of other stuff going on at the time, so it’s just better off that we don’t mess with it. Tell me what prompted you to buy this and get out of the chain grocery business. Well it’s like anything else: you always want to be your own boss. What about, we were talking earlier about how different this operation is from, say, the meat counter at Albertson’s or at Wal-Mart because at—in most of those stores they aren’t actually cutting meat on-site. Yeah, absolutely, they—over here you can actually see your meat being cut. I mean, I’m not enclosed where you can’t see the meat cutter, and it’s fresh. We still do some box meat. I get calf in. But at Albertson’s everything is boxed beef. Most of the time it’s not, you know—ground beef is pre-packaged, like at Wal-Mart. And it’s coming to that, but only because of a labor issue, where everything sooner or later will be cut and boxed and all you got to do is take it out and—and buy it. And it’s just with the trend with the young people who want something right then and there. They don’t want to wait or—or anything else to do with like that. But you know, when you buy something from Wal-Mart like that, you know it’s cut at a long period of time so they’ve had—it’s had to be gassed. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed when you buy a piece of meat from Wal-Mart or—or I don’t know if Wal-Mart is the only one doing it these days, but when it’s gassed up like that, you take it out and you bust that pack open and within two days that meat is going to be dark and brown, you know. It could be dark and brown coming from me too, but it’s going to be a little bit longer life—shelf-life on it. But when you buy something here it’s going to be fresh. Well, can you tell me a little bit about your boudin business here? I know that they were making boudin here before you came. Did you just adopt their recipe, or develop your own? Well it seems like everybody has got their own recipe for boudin, and it was—when I took it over there was a—there was a market manager here at the time, and he had his little recipe that he took from the recipe that was here before that man, and from that man from that man. It’s all traced down and everybody has got a better recipe. And it’s like when—when the market manager that was here left, I kind of—I kind of implemented my own little recipe from that point, you know, and I did more natural stuff. I added more celery. I added more natural peppers. I added more onions, bell peppers. I did the natural thing on it more than anything—than I did the unnatural—and the only thing that’s not natural is the MSG that I got in it, and you really can't afford not to put MSG in products now because it just—it’s a flavor enhancer. It just brings out all the stuff that you’re trying to make come out even more, you know. And that’s what it’s all about, is trying to get more flavor. Now you can over—you can overkill the MSG. A lot of people do, but I only put enough in there to—to bring out those flavors. And when you say natural peppers, did you mean hot peppers? Yes, cayenne peppers. You know I get it from Targil, and sometimes that changes your recipe from time to time because they don’t always get—the different cayenne peppers, because you can see it in the color, it’s a different pepper each individual time you get your seasoning. So, but I mean it’s something that they have no control of, you know. It’s—peppers are grown yearly, so I mean it’s not every—peppers ain’t going to be the same from year to year, you know. What about, what kind of rice do you use? It’s a medium grain. We don’t use a long grain. We like the medium grain. And how about the pork? What—what form is that in? Most of the time I like to mix a butt—a Boston butt roast and a picnic roast, and—because the picnic is a whole different flavor than a Boston butt, so between the two of them it gives—it gives it a different flavor also. A lot of people just put butts; some people just put picnics. Some people mix it. I mean it’s so many different ways that you can do things and it—and every way alters the taste, and everybody has got their own—everybody has got their own thing and they’ve got the best. So you know, when I say I got the bestest, I got—I say I got the bestest. I don’t say I got the best; I say I got the bestest. So it’s just one of those issues where you know your product is good, and everybody else’s is good too. It’s just a matter of the area you’re in. You know you go a little bit further north or a little further south, it may be hotter, it may be more milder. When you go to North Louisiana, they can't handle the hot seasoning so you got to back it off. Sometimes I make it for people up in Texas; they—they like it really hot. But people in North Louisiana can't take the heat, so I got to—I got to blend it down. Can you tell me on the animal what the difference is between the picnic cut and the Boston butt? It’s just a little lower; it’s lower on the shoulder. But the picnic comes with the skin, and that’s grinded with it. So you got that skin flavor, and that’s where the flavor comes in. The picnic is a little bit leaner too. The Boston butt has a lot of marble in it—little more fat in it, so that kind of gives you the—not so much of a dry taste. And the butts will also give it a—a stringy taste too, and a lot of that varies in the way you grind it. You know you’ve got different holes—different sized holes that you can grind. Some people like it small; some people like it —I like a medium hole, you know, just the way—you don’t want a big gob of—. When you take a bite, you know you don’t want that big chunk of meat—a lot of people, you know. But then some people do like that. You know, you just can't satisfy everybody. Everybody has got a different taste. Do you use liver in yours? Definitely. It’s—it’s like a small part of liver. I don’t use near as much as a lot of people use the liver in it ‘cause I don’t—personally don’t like the liver taste. But a lot of people do like the liver in the boudin, and some people believe that’s the main ingredient in it, and you can taste the difference when it’s not in there. I wanted to ask you how often you make the boudin, and how much would you estimate you make per week? Well we usually make boudin every day. With it hot like it is, we might miss once or twice a week depending on the sales. I do a small amount and that’s—that’s about average of about 100 to 150-pounds a day, you know. I’d say 150—I’d say 160 because we make it in intervals of 100. You know it starts out at 60-pounds; by the time you add your rice and everything, it comes up to about 100-pounds. So you’re looking at about 200 pounds on two batches. Now I mean that varies from—from day-to-day, you know. It really depends on the sales. Now when We were talking yesterday when I stopped in about how there’s not a lot of profit in cracklings. What about boudin? Boudin is very profitable. I mean you—you’re talking anywhere from 60 to 100-percent profit. Because it’s not as labor intensive? Not so much that; it’s just that pork is cheap, and that’s all you’re putting in it. You’re not putting beef in it. You know probably the most expensive thing about—about that is the casings. Casings are getting where it’s pretty expensive. I think for—for a hank of casing, it’s now like $12-bucks for 10 or 12 hanks of casing, and it’s climbing. You know it used to be a quarter of that price, and now everybody is making sausage and boudin and stuff like that; it moved up the price on it. We were talking yesterday a bit about how much more complicated it is to make cracklings. And can you tell me what the challenges of making cracklings are? Well I guess the challenge in that is to having the same person do it, you know. It’s like I was saying before: it’s all a labor issue when it comes to cracklings ‘cause that’s—that’s strictly something you learn. I mean that’s a nose deal; that’s an eyesight deal, and—and just the smell. It really does. I mean you can cook cracklings; each time it’s going to cook different because every box is going to cook different, because the guy from the beginning didn’t cut them to the right size; they were bigger or smaller. The grease breaks down, and like I was telling you yesterday they—the grease is only good four or five times, and then you got to change it out because like anything else, grease breaks down. And as grease breaks down you—it takes longer or less or—. We cook cracklings twice, so if somebody cooks cracklings the first time and cooked them a little bit too long, well you don’t cook them as long the next time. Well it—it’s just something that’s got to be seen. It’s—it’s all by eyesight and smell, because once you smell it and it goes just about a minute too long, well it’s finished. It’s—you just as soon throw them in the trash. And you know you’re talking about $60 a case. Yeah, it—it’s expensive to—and $60 a case, and you come out with half a case when you cook them, you know. That’s why cracklings are $9 and $10 a pound, because there’s just—there’s no profit in it. You know you’d have to do an abundance of cracklings and—and there again it’s—well now is this really worth it? Because then you got to pay somebody to cut and cook it and everything else down the road. And it’s all—everything else. It’s a labor issue, like everything else around us these days. It’s labor issues—labor and pay, you know. That’s why it’s going to all come down to the consumer where they got—that’s why they got to pay $10, $12 a pound for this stuff. But it’s full of cholesterol, so they either pay me or they pay their heart doctor. One of the two. [Laughs] Not the healthiest food. No, it’s definitely not. I mean if you would see how it clogs up drains, you would see how it clogs up your arteries because it—it is really bad. I mean in the—in the summertime we don’t have a problem, but in the wintertime when it’s cold it clogs up a four-inch pipe with no problem. I saw one of your employees yesterday cutting up the pork bellies with the saw. And then you cooked them twice in the grease. Can you explain to me why you cooked them twice? Just the process. And after you—if you cook—if you cook this stuff outside it cooks totally different. Cooking it inside—don’t know why it does it. There’s no explanation for it, but you cook it out in a festival or something like that, you can cook it once and it comes out just perfect. You can cook it once. It can be done this way too [inside the store], but it just—it’s more of a chewy and hard crackling when—if you don’t cook it twice. So that’s why I say it’s got to pop. The crackling itself has got to pop, and when you cook it the first time it gets a little—it gets a little pop, but then it gets too crunchy. So when you take it from that point and you cool it down, and then you come back and get the grease at a certain temperature and drop those cold cracklings in there, it’s like anything else—it pops. Kind of like popcorn. And—and when it pops then you got—you got a perfect crackling. And do you season your crackling at all? Oh definitely. We do both salt and seasoning. Sunset Specialty Meats—I have my own seasoning, and it’s all natural stuff too: salt, pepper, paprika; there is a little MSG in it. I cut back a lot in the MSG in my regular seasoning, but it’s more—more natural seasoning in it than anything. And that’s what we use on our cracklings, and they’re not—we started this past year just doing salt ‘cause a lot of people wanted just salt on their cracklings, and that’s been a big pretty good hit too. So we do half a box in seasoning and half a box in salt every time we do a box. The older people, do they like just the plain salt or have—have people been seasoning cracklings with other things for a long time? I think in the old days they probably just seasoned them with salt ‘cause a lot of the older crowd will buy with just the salt. It’s the newer crowd that likes the seasoning, and it’s really a mixed crowd though. You know everybody likes the seasoning. I guess in the past year the seasoning has—has been in there, so they’ve always bought it, but I would say in the older generation—older days it was probably just salt. And you continue to make the crackling—we talked about this a little yesterday—even though there isn’t much profit in it. You continue to make it—why? It goes hand in hand with the boudin, and—and the old traditions, you know. I’m known for having cracklings here, so I do cracklings. It’s—I would really like rather not do them, you know. I mean I don’t do enough to justify some You come into a place like this, and I mean this is a real preservation-type place. And I know that you bought it to have your own business, and it’s a business venture for you, but do you feel any sort of responsibility to the community to carry on some food traditions? In a sense, yeah. I mean you got—you have a lot of people that come in here that—from Sunset—that I think they would admire me and remember me as Richard Elliott: he helped me out one time or another. And that’s a pat on your shoulder more than you got at Albertson’s, you know, or the Delchamp’s, or the other bigger towns, because there’s nobody there to pat you on the back. Or if it is it’s a quick pat; now get back to work, you know. It’s one of those deals. I would think it’s a lot more gratifying over here ‘cause you have—you have the elderly and you have the younger crowd, and the—if somebody comes in, Well I ain’t got the money for this. Can you loan it to me until tomorrow? Or sometimes they came in late at night—Just take it and pay me tomorrow. And they’d look at you like, Is this for real? You know, and I catch that every now and then. And I said, You know what? What I just did, nobody else does that. I don’t think anybody has ever done me that way, you know where I’ll go into a place and they’ll say, Well pay me tomorrow. And that’s exactly what I’ve done several times, you know. And they’re here the next morning to pay for it. I was closing up and didn’t feel like opening up the register or whatever I needed to do and—and you don’t see that no more. No, you don’t see it at all. If you do, it’s very far and in between. --- To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
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and kind of went offshore for a couple years. I took over my grandfather’s restaurant in Texas for—for about a year or so and then came back and worked for Albertson’s for 18 years. And from that I bought this.
winter gets here, sometimes we can make two and three batches a day.
one back there—again and the issue is labor—in order to do that. Now the profit margin on that is not the greatest thing. It probably pays maybe for a meat cutter in a week’s time if they do enough of it, but I mean everybody who buys boudin usually likes to buy cracklings with their boudin, and just—it’s just a traditional type thing.
