JERRY SCHULTZ & NICOLE HARMEL

BURTON SAUSAGE
11700 HWY 290 West
Brenham, TX 77833
(979) 289-3421
www.burtonsausage.com

“A lot of people don’t know what dry sausage is. I mean we have calls all the time, ‘How do you fix dry sausage?’ Dry sausage is ready to eat. It’s a ready to eat product. We’ve got it on there ‘ready to eat,’ but people don’t look at that, and a lot of people will cook it, and you can’t cook it. I mean you cook the flavor away when you cook it… They’ll call and say, ‘Hey, how do you fix this,’ you know, and we’ll tell them, ‘Well, just cut it off and eat it.’” – Jerry Schultz

Describing himself as three-quarters German and one-quarter Bohemian, Jerry Schultz learned the meat business in central Texas’ Czech and German traditions. Today he owns and runs Burton Sausage, a company that is part slaughterhouse, part sausage producer. Along with his daughter, Nicole Harmel, who also sat down with our interviewers, Schultz has more than twenty employees in the family business. Born in 1945, Schultz says he got into the meat business in 1972; two years later Nicole, the first of his three children, was born. The company started seriously producing sausage in 1982.

Listen to this 3-minute audio clip of Jerry Schultz talking about how he dries sausage. Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

NOTE: What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

EDITED TRANSCRIPT

Subject: Jerry Schulze & Nicole Harmel
Date: July 11, 2007
Location: Burton Sausage - Burton, TX
Fieldwork Director: Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt
Fieldwork Team: Marvin Bendele and Andrew Busch

Produced in association with the American Studies Department at The University of Texas at Austin and the Central Texas Barbecue Association.

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Marvin Bendele: Hello, this is Marvin Bendele. I’m here with my colleague Andrew Busch, and we’re in Burton, Texas, on July 11, 2007, at Burton Sausage and Processing. And I’m here with Jerry Schultz and Nicole Harmel. What I want you to do is just say your name and spell the last name for us and give your date of birth just so we can test the levels on you guys also, OK. This is Mr. Jerry Schultz.

Jerry Schultz: S-c-h-u-l-t-z, Schultz, and born March 18, 1945.

Nicole Harmel: Harmel, H-a-r-m-e-l, four, seventeen, 1974.

Sounds good? OK. Well, let’s get started here. Just generally, the first question and it’s really general—I’ll just let you guys go with it and we’ll go from there. We want to kind of get an idea of where you guys came from, how the business got started, things like how long you’ve been in business, things like that. So, just give us a little bit on that.

Jerry: We started in 1972 with a slaughterhouse, and we started butchering cows for people down in Houston. And then in 1982, we started making sausage, and my daughter has come in business with us in—

Nicole: 1999.

Jerry: 1999. And in 2000, we built this new place on [US Highway] 290, called Burton Sausage.

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OK, OK. Well, can you give me a history of how you acquired the business? What—what—kind of some stories on how it started, things like that?

Jerry: Well, I—me and my wife got married, and I always wanted to go into business for myself, and I always liked the meat business. So, that’s how we got started. We started in Brenham, and we was in Brenham for about two-and-a-half years. Then we left Brenham, sold out, and we moved to Burton and bought the plant and started slaughtering cattle at Burton.

Did somebody else own and run something here before you got here?

Jerry: The slaughterhouse, a man, Gilker, from Burton, he runned it, and we bought it from him and then we just kept adding on to it. It was a small operation, and we kept adding on to it. In 1975 we butchered as high as 235 cows a day.

That was the most you’ve done, in 1975? So, what do you do today?

Jerry: Now, we do custom processing. We probably run maybe fifteen to twenty head a week only up there at the slaughterhouse. We just do custom processing. We don’t butcher anything for the plant down here. We sell quarters and halves that’s butchered up there, but everything else that is run through here comes from other meat companies.

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OK, when you say custom processing, do you mean if somebody wants to slaughter one of their own cows?

Jerry: Right, people bring their calves in, and then we cut them the way they want them cut, to their specification.

OK. Do you also do wild game?

Jerry: Yes, we do a lot of deer. We probably do anywhere from probably 1200 to 1500 deer a year. We do make sausage out of them when deer season opens up.

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I noticed that you have—we were just looking at your meat counter over there and the dried area where you have the jerky, and it looked like you had some turkey jerky, maybe, and then some really thicker jerky that almost looked like chicken. Can you tell me what that’s about?

Jerry: Well, we make a turkey jerky, then we make a dried—dried sliced jerky, then we make stick jerky—a thick stick jerky. It’s probably one inch in diameter stick jerky.

How long does that stuff take to dry out?

Jerry: It takes approximately—on the thick jerky, we smoke it probably about thirty-six hours, and the thin jerky runs about eighteen hours.

Do you have that in a—is it just set out in the air to dry and smoke or do you have a machine?

Jerry: Yes, we have a smokehouse. And we put it in there and smoke it, and then we put it in another room with no humidity and dry the rest in there.

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Can you kind of go through the process of making the sausage for us?

Jerry: Well, we take it out of the cooler and it goes to a grinder, and we coarse grind it. And then it goes into a mixer-grinder, where we throw our seasoning in and we let it mix. Then it goes from the grinder—out of the grinder into a stuffer and the stuffer stuffs it automatically. It makes the link—you press the buttons and it makes the link the size you want.

Wow. OK, so is it one of those water pressure stuffers?

Jerry: No, it’s a vacuum stuffer, there’s no water. It’s a vacuum stuffer.

OK, yeah, the one—it’s fine—the one I interviewed in Castroville, they had one of the water and he was talking about the vacuum stuffers as the latest technology. So do you have—this guy had a guy operating it where the sausage came out to just keep the casing moving? Do you have to do that here?

Jerry: Right, right, you got a guy to put the casing on the horn and then once the sausage comes out and that casing is off he puts another one on.

OK, and then you also mentioned you have the coarse-grinder and then the mixer-grinder. What are the subtle differences between those and why do you need to do that?

Jerry: Well, we coarse grind—grind our sausage through what we call a chili plate, and then fine grind it to mix it better. A lot of the companies are fine grind, and we course grind our sausage because we can’t compete with the big companies. We sell quality not quantity.

The mixer grinder, is that actually where you put in the salt and other ingredients you might?

Jerry: Yeah, in the mix grind, we put all of our seasonings in.

And it grinds it a little bit as well?

Jerry: Right.

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OK, so your dry sausage. I just want to kind of get an idea, you know, you talked about how you prepare the sausage. What happens after that to dry it?

Jerry: To dry? It takes roughly about three weeks to dry, and it’s made out of pork and beef, and we put it in the smokehouse. Four—we give it four smokings and then we put it in the room with no humidity and dry it in there. And it—it takes approximately—depends on the humidity in the air too—I mean, it takes about approximately three weeks to dry.

When you say four smokings, what does one entail? What does that mean?

Jerry: Well, we put it in and—see, nowadays you’ve got to heat your temp—your sausage up to 156 degrees. And we got to—we’ll put like three smokings on it and the last smoking we’ll heat it to 156 degrees. Otherwise, you’ve got to go under all kinds of other specifications if you don’t heat it to 156 degrees.

So, does that basically cook the sausage, or does it—?

Jerry: It’s pre-cooked.

It is? I know in some areas when people just do it on their own it just gets dried raw—But you can’t do that?

Jerry: No, we cannot do that.

So, do you dry all of your different styles of sausage or just the pork and—?

Jerry: Just the pork and beef.

Can you dry the rest of the stuff, or would it—how would that taste?

Jerry: You could dry all of it, but we just make a pork and beef here and dry it.

Have you done it before on your own, and I guess—I guess my question is, is it not economically feasible to do it?

Jerry: Well, no—well, a lot of people don’t know what dry sausage is. I mean we have calls all the time, “How do you fix dry sausage?” Dry sausage is ready to eat. It’s a ready to eat product. We’ve got it on there “ready to eat,” but people don’t look at that, and a lot of people will cook it, and you can’t cook it. I mean you cook the flavor away when you cook it.

Even from around here people will—

Jerry: Well, not right around here, but people that stop by, you know and stuff like that. They’ll call and say, “Hey, how do you fix this,” you know, and we’ll tell them, “Well, just cut it off and eat it.”

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Does the grind matter, though? The way you do grind it, and the mixer, the grinding mixer.

Jerry: On the dry it does. It’s real important because you can have it too coarse and it will be real stringy when you cut it and when you chew it. And you’ve got to have it just right or otherwise it will be real stringy-like.

How about on the fresh sausage?

Jerry: No, I mean we just run it through a regular grind—it’s something different when you cook it like that, but when you dry it, it just forms a—it’s real dry and it’s hard to, you know, to chew like that when it’s, you know, not ground right.

OK, the turkey—going over to the jerky part of it—I think probably jerky is a pretty—I think it’s popular around here and most people know in all of Texas what jerky is. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen turkey jerky until I got into central Texas. I’m wondering how popular that is and if it’s the same process that you go through with beef jerky?

Jerry: It’s the same process as beef jerky. And you cannot cut turkey jerky real thin like you do beef because it will get real crisp, real dry. And that’s the reason we leave it in a—a chunk-like.

Yeah, I was going to say it kind of looked like—that’s the one we thought probably looked like chicken when we were in there, and it’s thicker. But it dries out just the same?

Jerry: Right. Yeah, it dries out just the same.

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Andrew Busch: What brought you back to the industry, I guess?

Nicole: I don’t know. I worked out on my own and drove back and forth to Houston, and that just wasn’t for me, and I just wanted to come back and work with Mom and Dad. Just emotion—more emotional I guess.

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Marvin: Well, when—if and when you do retire, do you envision your daughters or family taking over for you?

Jerry: I think they will. I’m ready to retire now. I’d like to take care of my cattle [Laughter].

Do you think you’ll take over?

Nicole: [Laughs] I don’t know. You know, with help from the family I think we’ll be able to carry on.

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To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

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