jim mcmurtry

Smokey Denmark Sausage Co.
3505 E. 5th Street
Austin, Texas 78702
(800) 705-1380
smokeydenmark.com

“We make quality products. We’re not the only manufacturer who makes quality products, you know, a quality sausage. But then everybody knows that there’s sausage and then there’s sausage.” – Jim McMurtry

Jim McMurtry and his family have owned Smokey Denmark Sausages since 1972. In that time, Mr. McMurtry has expanded his factory, updated production methods, and brought his daughter and son-in-law into the business. Though a lot has changed at Smokey Denmark in the last thirty-five years, Mr. McMurtry, a genial, proud, and funny Texan who manages to juggle a second job as a lawyer along with his Smokey Denmark duties, has remained a constant presence in the factory in East Austin. Here, workers, many of whom are long-time employees, create sixteen different kinds of sausage, as well as brisket, chopped barbecue, and spare ribs. Smokey Denmark supplies many barbecue restaurants with sausage, and Mr. McMurtry says that his relationships with these restaurant customers have become treasured family connections.

Listen to this this 2-minute audio clip of Jim McMurtry talking about how the Smokey Denmark product line has developed over the years. [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: Jim McMurtry – Smokey Denmark Sausage – Austin, TX
Date: March 26, 2007
Location: Burdine Hall, The University of Texas at Austin - Austin, TX
Fieldwork Director: Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt
Fieldwork Team: Rebecca Onion and Lisa Powell – graduate students at The University of Texas at Austin
Interviewers: Interviewed by Rebecca Onion and Lisa Powell
Photographer: Lisa Powell

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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Rebecca Onion: [S]o I wanted to try to start with a little bit of the history of your ownership of the business, so if you could talk a bit about how you came across the opportunity to buy it, how you made the decision to do so, what state it was in at that point, things of that nature?

Jim McMurtry: Well, back in 1972, I got a call from my brother in law. And he said, “Jim, there’s a sausage business for sale over there in Austin.” And he was calling me from the Bryan, College Station area, so he said, “There’s a sausage business for sale over there, and why don’t you go over and nose around and see if that’s something that we ought to do, we ought to buy?” He said, “It’s Smokey Denmark, and Mr. Denmark has had a heart attack, and his doctors have told him that if he intends to live very much longer, he has to stop working so hard.” And so I said, “Well, Cliff,” my brother-in-law, I said, “Cliff, we don’t know anything about making sausage.” And he said, “Well that’s all right, we have enough expertise available to us through Texas A&M to be able to learn the business, and we’ll have a manager to manage it for us.” So I went out to the sausage plant and I met with Mr. and Mrs. Denmark, and they provided us, provided me with information, answered every question I had, let me observe the practices and procedures, and I talked to their banker, and that sort of thing. And I am very conservative, especially when it comes to finances, and it looked like to me like it would at least pay for itself. So Cliff and I decided that we would buy Smokey Denmark from the Denmark family, none of their family members were interested in taking over the business. So we bought it, November 25, 1972….

Smokey and Eloise moved here and opened this business in 1964. They had lived in the Lockhart area. A few years ago, I looked back in the old archives of the Austin Public Library, and they had old telephone books there. And I noticed that the telephone number that we have today is the same as they had in 1964.

Wow. But a lot of other things have changed, as we will discuss! So when you bought it, what kind of—did you have plans right away to change things or to expand, or did that idea come later?

Actually, we, if you’re in business making a product, I guess you always have the desire to make more and sell more product, but I remember a statement that my brother in law made, he said, “Here we are making three thousand pounds of sausage a week,” and he said, “if we can just ever get it up to five thousand pounds, that’s all we need.” Well, today we make between thirty and forty thousand pounds. And if I think—the wisdom that—not the wisdom, but the hindsight of that is—if we were at five thousand pounds today, we wouldn’t be in business. I mean, you have to get bigger, or you have to get out.

Are there any, I guess, examples of smaller companies—you don’t have to name names, but was there any negative example you learned from watching?

In what sense?

Over the years—you were saying that if you stayed smaller, you’d have a harder time claiming a share—

Yes, well, I think that actually Smokey Denmark in the days around 1970 probably would have been a good example in itself. Because that’s when meat inspection came in, and if you were, the smaller you were, the more difficult it would consequently be to be able to conform your practices in your plant, to abide by the government regulations. And that’s what Smokey was actually facing. He had a business that was going, but in the facility where he was, which isn’t all that far from where our plant is today, but that facility would not pass government inspection. So they gave him a little time to build a new plant, which he did, and that’s about when he had the heart attack.

And what particular kinds of physical aspects of the plant were not going to come up to code, that he would have to change, or that you changed?

Well, not having seen—because by the time we bought the business, the new, that we called the new plant was constructed and he was operating it, and the facility he had had before was a barbecue restaurant or something like that, but I think most of it probably had to do with sanitation and the ability to wash down areas. I know that the building where he came from does not have floor drains or sloping floors, I’m not sure what they had on the walls, but we can wash every wall in the production related areas of the plant, have it all drain down the drain, and I know they couldn’t do that where he was.

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Lisa Powell: I just have a couple more questions for you. In part to go back to the idea of the history of the business a little bit. Did Smokey Denmark give you any advice when you took over the business? Are there any sort of words of wisdom that he passed on to you?

Well, yes. And I think that Mr. Denmark—Smokey as we call him—he gave us advice that is, I would say, the cornerstone of our operation and our planning and everything—our standards and everything even today and it will be, I think, forever. I remember him saying—when we bought the business—he said that “you’ll probably never be an Oscar Meyer.” And he named off some others. He said, “They are bigger than you are, they have larger production facilities, they buy in larger quantities, they have advertising budgets.” “But,” he said, “you can do those things that they can’t do or they won’t do.” Well, I’m convinced they can do just about anything that they would want to do, but they don’t want to do the things that Smokey Denmark does. And so that has been our niche over the years. We don’t feel like we compete with the big guys. We don’t feel like we compete with those who make products that are inferior to us. You know quality has very few competitors. And so, that’s been kind of a guiding principle for us. We do those things that—we make quality products. We’re not the only manufacturer which makes quality products, you know, a quality sausage. But then everybody knows that there’s sausage and then there’s sausage. But everything we make is a premium quality. So I think those are words of wisdom that, well, that’s been our niche and you can trace that all the way back, not just to what Smokey said, but the way that Smokey ran his business, too. He only had two products, but they fit even today in that same definition.

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RO: So how does that happen, how do you develop recipes? Without getting too specific into trade secrets?

When you visited the plant, I may have made the statement that there are no secrets in the sausage business. And most people, they might say, you’re crazy. But given enough time, enough trial and error, enough patience on the part of the customer, you can usually pretty well match what someone else has done. Or you can tweak the flavor profile, or the texture profile, you can tweak it by again, by trial and error. By taste and by looking at it. So that you can make just about what anybody thinks they want. And that’s the way I would say that most of the recipes have been developed. Somebody had a particular need or a particular product they desired for us to try to do, and given enough time, we have been able to satisfy those kinds of requests.

RO: So who ends up taste-testing it on your end? Do you do it?

Well, it’s kind of a group effort. Usually, someone is working, either Jonathan—my son-in-law, my partner—or myself, is working with the customer, the relationship develops, sometimes it’s both of us and the customer, but because we have an interest, we are very much involved in the taste testing and the analysis—taking a knife, cutting it open, seeing if it’s binding, the meat’s binding together, tightly or loosely, or whatever the objective is, and then working with the customer too, to say “How is this?” and they might say, “We’d like a little more black pepper,” or whatever it might be. It’s fun, though.

RO: Yeah, that sounds like the funnest part. So what are some examples of recipes you’ve developed in that way?

Well, we make sausage products for particular customers that we have developed the recipe but it’s for the purpose of suiting them or satisfying them. I recall one customer that was buying from a competitor and they were having trouble with tough casings. In other words, the casing, the part, we use hog intestines, but the part the meat is stuffed into, was tough. And so they, the customer, had, we found out later from them, that they had gone to different sausage manufacturers in Texas and tried to get something that would be better, more acceptable to their customers and to them. And one of the owners exclaimed to the other one, “I guess we just are not going to be able to find anybody to make a better product than we have right now.” And the other owner said, “Well maybe Smokey Denmark can do it.” So they asked us to do that, and we took that on, and today some, I don’t even know how many years later, we have not only the restaurant that they had then but they have three more now, and I think they’re very satisfied with our product. But we made it to suit them, and I don’t think it’s any secret that one of the last things we do with our sausage, most of our sausages, is that we inject the smokehouse with steam. And that helps tenderize the casing, and that was their particular problem they were experiencing, and so that put our product ahead of whoever they were using.

RO: And so tell us about the smokehouse.

Well, the smokehouses are thermostatically controlled. We use electric power for heat in the smokehouses that we smoke sausage in, and then we have smoke generators that use hickory sawdust to make smoke. And at the precise time in the process when smoke is called for, the sawdust falls down onto kind of a hot plate and it smolders and makes smoke, and that smoke is what is piped into the smokehouse, and that’s where the sausage picks up its smoked appearance and flavor.

RO: And that’s unusual in the business.

These days. In the old days it was not unusual at all. That’s the way sausage was made. But these days, many times, I might say most times, where you have something that was called a smoked sausage, it is actually smoked, and maybe I ought to be holding up my fingers here and putting this in parentheses, it is actually picking up its smoked flavor from liquid smoke that is sprayed on the outside of the sausage. But we don’t do that.

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RO: I wanted to ask a little bit about your other product, the brisket, the ribs, and the chopped beef. Who buys that, and where does it get eaten?

Well, the barbecue items, the smoked brisket, and the chopped barbecue, are primarily used, let’s take them one at a time. The smoked brisket—and we make two smoked briskets, one which we call the whole brisket, which is just like it comes from the meat packer, with quite a bit of fat on it, a whole brisket is a fat-covered piece of meat, and we do have some customers that want it that way, they feel like it is more moist if it’s been cooked that way, and I would agree with them, I think it is. But you have a lot of fat that has been trimmed off, like in a barbecue restaurant, that’s part of what they trim off before they put the meat on your plate. But it is a very good product. So we have the whole brisket, and then we have the trimmed brisket, and the trimmed brisket is a product, it’s whole also in its configuration, but we have removed, before seasoning and cooking it, we’ve removed on average about twenty eight percent of its weight in fat. With the trimmed brisket, virtually 100 percent of it can go on a plate. Okay, who uses that? Well, restaurants do. Not barbecue restaurants, because they will cook their own. But with that brisket, with some of our sausage, beans that a restaurant can make, potato salad that they can buy or make, slaw that they can buy or make, they can have a barbecue plate even without having a barbecue pit. I would say that’s where most of that goes. The chopped barbecue, concession stands, where they’re wanting something that’s easy and good, something that they can heat up, put on a bun, and give it to the customer. Whether it’s a concession stand or a convenience store, even sometimes we have customers that put it on a baked potato as a topping. So that’s where most of that goes.

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LP: Just to kind of piggyback on something you said there, what do you think is kind of the place of sausage in the Texas barbecue culture? Or, somewhat related to sausage, how is Texas barbecue or food is different from food somewhere else or barbecue somewhere else or even sausage somewhere else?

Well it’s the best. [Laughter] Well, because we have the mail order and online customers as well, we get questions that are along those lines sometimes. You know, asking us to describe our products and what is brisket. “I’m from New York. What’s brisket?” In different parts of the country, barbecue is, fortunately I guess, or unfortunately, is different. In the Southeast, if you’re talking about barbecue, well you’re talking about pork. Like I said, in New York City, if you’re talking about brisket, you’re talking about corned beef. And then there are different variations throughout the country especially with seasoning and sauces. Some places want more of a vinegar-based sauce and others places more of a sweet sauce. So there really are a lot of differences. In Texas, I think that probably more so than any other place in the United States, sausage is an integral part of the barbecue menu. In Texas we do it all. We have even chicken and you see turkey and you see ham. And you know that's, maybe that arguably is not really barbecue, but it's at least smoked meats and uh, but the mainstay in Texas is gonna be brisket and sausage and different barbecue restaurants like to be known for having a product that's a little bit different than anybody else has or than somebody else has and that's more difficult to do with brisket than it is with sausage. With sausage, you can vary the meat ingredients, all the way from pork to beef. I can't imagine any self-respecting barbecue restaurant in Texas having anything that has chicken in it as far as sausage goes, but, or turkey. But, uh, anyway, they can vary, in building, or in selecting the sausage that they might want to use. They can go all the way from pork to beef. They can vary the, the, uh, seasoning. We make some sausages that have jalapeño in them and, you know, some that are very strong with garlic and there's a whole range in between. You can also vary the diameter of the casing, so that you have something that is, uh, on the one hand may be very big in diameter and another one might want something that is much smaller in diameter. We have made sausage portions all the way from eight links to a pound, which is just two or three inches to, we made a sausage for one of our customers for their grand opening that was, I think, forty feet long.

LP: And you mentioned your enjoyment of the hot link. Do you have any other specific favorite types of sausage, or favorite flavors that you like to have in the sausage that you personally eat?

Well, the kielbasa jalapeno is one of my favorites, you know, I have people ask the question, you know, like you just did and normally my stock answer is, my favorite is whatever I'm eating at the time. But, the kielbasa jalapeno, I love that sausage and that’s my wife's favorite. Because of the way it looks. It is beautiful to see, you know, bright, real green, not grey green, or anything, but, you know, green color, throughout the sausage. I don't mean a green cast, I mean that there are specks, bigger than specks, of green in there. So when you cut one of those sausages on the diagonal or cross section, you see something that looks good. You know, it's striking. The bratwurst, when you get it, it is made without cure, so it is basically a very light color and it's also not smoked. So it almost has a white, or a grayish, a very light colored appearance. It's, it's beautiful in that respect and it's different looking. When you put grill marks on that, you know, when you have it on a griddle, or on a grill where you've got either a hot flat surface or a screen or something, you see that branded into it, you know, and it's a beautiful brown color. This makes you want to eat it just looking at it. I just, I like it all.

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LP: And you mentioned that in Dallas—Fort Worth they had nicknamed your hot link, was there a particular nickname that they call it?

Yes, in our product, our hot link is known as Smokey D’s in the Dallas—Fort Worth area. There has never been, that name has never appeared on the outside of a box or in any kind of point of purchase advertising. We have not referred to them as Smokey D’s. The public has just given them that nickname.

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LP: Do you have anything else that you'd like to have as part of your recorded interview?

Just a, I guess, a recognition of what I think that you all are about and a thank you. I know that you're examining and interviewing people who have all kinds of different connections with this business, this industry of barbecue. It's something that isn't just a place or a pit, or whatever, it is a whole set of processes that come together. I mean, you've told me that you've even gone out talked with people who secure the wood that is used, by some, to smoke their meats with. And you ladies are young and you all have not lived as much of life as I have. You haven't seen things kind of fall by the wayside. But barbecue has not fallen by the wayside. But, it is something that, like anything else, that is subject to shortcutting, shortcutting, shortcutting. Like we've seen it already with people spraying liquid smoke on sausages. There are even some that are forming their sausages without casings now. I mean, this is kind of experimental. But, uh, you know, I think what you're doing is worthwhile. It's not just a project, it's, I think there's likely to be some lasting benefits from it. In that it's the art of it, the result, the end product of it is more likely to endure and flourish because of the preservation of the information that you guys are putting together…Texas is very hot right now. I mean, we Texans like to think that it always is. But, I'm sure it kind of comes and goes. But, what we do in Texas is very popular these days. And we Texans have a lot of pride in what we do.

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

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