Andouille in BR

Ronnies makes some, I'd give them a try.

Iverstine's was smoking some last night if you want super fresh andouille.

Benoit’s

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Iverstine's is my favorite in town.

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same here.. just picked up a few pounds. fresh out of the smoke house this morning...

Iverstine's

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Iverstine's

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I've heard too many good things about this place. Next gumbo I make, I'm hitting them up for a few pounds.

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Andouille is sausage, it is just large holes on the head of the grinder so the ground meat is coarser and it is in a beef(intestine) casing as opposed to a hog(intestine) casing. That's it. So unless the quality of the meat they were using is different I don't know what you are talking about.

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That's pretty much what I getting at. VERY coarse so there are still large (for sausage) chunks. Some brands use a fine grind, put it in a bigger casing, and call it andouille. It should look like this

Not this.

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I would think that City Pork di it as a specialty item, so unless they have a sausage making operation in the back, they were buying it and putting their label on it.

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Nah, not when they first opened up. What they are now is VERY different from what they were for the first 6 months to a year. This is just the deli I'm talking about, too, not the restaurant on Jefferson or the now-closed lunch place in Industriplex. The best way I can describe how I view that place is that early on, it felt like a charcuterie shop that had sandwiches available and then it morphed into a place to eat that has some limited charcuterie available. The deli didn't really change WHAT they did, per se, just their focus and the charcuterie suffered massively. I imagine economics had a lot to do with it; sandwiches have to have a higher margin than hand-crafted and ever varying charcuterie.

From just talking to their original charcuterie guy when I'd go in for lunch (maybe Don was his name, it's been a while), there is no way in hell I believe that he was buying someone else's product. When it came to meat products, that dude knew his stuff and was a damned wizard when it came to smoked and cured meats. He had a collection of items he always tried to have on hand, but was also always trying new things and rotating what he was offering. From week to week, some items would go away and be replaced by new items as the various batches would finish curing and be ready for sale. Basically, he didn't make everything all the time, so if there was a particular thing he made that you really liked, you might have to wait until he made it again and he felt it was good enough to sell. It was all very much a small batch hand crafted thing, though, so even the stuff he'd try to always keep in the case would sometimes sell out before what he'd made to replace it was ready to sell. I still pine for his duck prosciutto; it never was the same after he left. After he split and the makeup of the ownership group changed, though, I wouldn't be shocked if they started farming at least some of the production out, but I don't think they do. I honestly just don't know.

Sad, really. At some point to me it became just another place to get a meal that really didn't stand out and I quit going because there was no reason for me to go there over some place closer. For a brief time at the very beginning, though, that place was hands down one of the most interesting places the Baton Rouge food scene had.

Day’s in watson is my new favorite.

Thanks for all the suggestions. Went with Vellions and was satisfied. Have to try Iverstines after Christmas traffic dies down.