A Pound of Questions for Hungry Hill Sausage: James Fares

The interview took place at the Hungry Hill Sausage shop in Homewood, Ill on May 9, 2009. It is a thirty-mile trip south from downtown Chicago to Homewood, Illinois and it is definitely worth the trip. Jay Fares is a sausage artist true to the craft. First-rate sausage, hand cut meat, quality attention to details and outstanding sausage.

This sausage artist works on a palette he knows; no filler, no chi-chi trendy fruit ingredients - well crafted flavorful sausage, lean and well spiced. Don’t expect 30 different kinds of sausage; expect an artist producing a product he knows well and is focused on making it better. Expect great things from Hungry Hill Sausage – get there before he gets discovered. - Kent

1. How did you get this Italian sausage into the Arizona Diamondback Stadium?

This recipe is one my father used. It was handed down to him from the originator, John Gianetti. He started a small delicatessen called The Specialty Shop. There was an area in Chicago Heights, the south end, called the Hill, Hungry Hill.

Basically it was where a lot of the Italian immigrants came over and migrated to that portion of town. When John was ready to retire, he was an old butcher from Kroger who developed this recipe in his basement. It became a big hit in the neighborhood, so he quite his job at Kroger and opened the deli. My Dad bought the deli from him in 1985 and moved in to the north end of Chicago Heights and sold it in 2000 when he planned on retiring to Arizona.

What happened is that Jerry Colangelo who is the owner of the Diamondbacks, he grew up on Hungry Hill. So my Dad was a boyhood friend of Mr. Colangelo. So that’s pretty much how it got into the Diamondbacks. Jerry wanted something that reminded him of home or gave it a little Chicago feel. People in Arizona really don’t understand good Italian Beef or Italian sausage so it was a big hit. The recipe was really created here in Chicago Heights.

2. Have you made any adjustments to the recipe over the years?

No, I tried to get it almost to the exact same way that John made it. Over time once The Specialty Shop had sold in 2000 things were changing. I could tell when I went to pick up sausage the casings weren’t the same, the flavor was a little off, there was too much fat. This was my opinion – I grew up on it. There had been some complaints. People were saying that it was not the same.

What happened was that Gary closed the shop in 2005; there was a demand in the area for it. He was still processing it, and selling it through a deli called Scotts. They wouldn’t have it every week, sometimes they wouldn’t get it or it was past its shelf life. People would ask me about it when I was out and about so my goal has been to try and perfect it. I haven’t really ever goofed with the recipe. I tried using the recipe as a base and adding to it, either a Lithuanian blend or a Croatian blend – people would ask for that. So we experimented with that, but I’ll never really mess with the original recipe.

3. What part of Italy were your parents from? Were there any influences from there?

Not really. My heritage was does come into play. I’m 50% Italian and 50% Irish. My Dad is full-blooded Italian. My great grandmother came over from a place called San Benedetto on the Adriatic side. It’s a town of hills at the mountain base. I grew up very much raised for Italian than Irish – the pasta dinners, rosemary chicken, soups on Sunday, pasta on Monday. Then once my great-grandmother died everyone pretty much went their own way. But obviously the lunchmeats, the cheeses, gift baskets, we try to intertwine the Italian background.

4. You have very lean sausages, 76-79%. In your opinion what are the big commercial sausage makers doing in comparison?

I really can’t speculate what other people are doing. What I noticed is that many of them use pork trimmings. If a butcher or meat house is trimming pork loins or port chops, whatever is left over after they have finished trimming the fat, gristle and most of the carcass out, rather than throwing it out, they shove it into casing and call it sausage and sell it very cheap.

Which is why if you buy Johnsonville and compare it to the Jewel brand, there’s a definite difference there. I would suspect that Johnsonville does the same thing we do and uses pork shoulder, which is like pork steak. So rather than using the trimmings, we actually use the best part of the hog, hand trimming it, limiting it’s fat content and gristle intake and hand mixing it into this fantastic product.

5. There are a lot of Italian sausages on the market. Do you taste other Italian sausages? What do you like?

I do like to compare and contrast. I’m very biased. I know what I like and because I was raised on it it’s really the only thing I will eat. Sometimes I will shy away from it at the ballpark. It’s just too mass-produced; you can taste the lack of love as far as putting the ingredients together.

But yes, I’ve tasted quite a few others. On the mass-market side, I think Johnsonville does it the best. On a local market, Greco Brothers makes a decent sausage. They’re out of Barlett. It’s edible. Russo – he makes a decent product. He’s out of Palos. They sell to a lot of delis, Rufinos, Italian imports, but he’s been around about the same amount of time as my Dad. What he does is that he takes other peoples recipes and makes their sausage for them.

6. Italian sausage has been your focus. Do you ever think about adding other sausage varieties?

We got some phone calls – blood sausage, summer sausage, some off-the-wall stuff. Mostly become we radio advertise. We get calls from the 847 area code, 630 area codes and they see sausage companies and they just assume we carry a wide variety of sausages. We’ve thought about it but we’re still kind of young and we’re sticking with what we know works, but as we grow obviously we’ll develop different kinds. I’m really interested in some turkey sausages, I get a lot of calls for apple sausage, and so down the line it’s something that we’ll definitely look into.

7. What type of sausage training did you go through? Were you trained as a butcher?

It was my summer job growing up, whenever I needed money. Summer jobs, if I needed spending money that’s what I did. I started making sausage when I was about 10-11 years old with my Dad in the back. My brother always did the boning and trimming and I did the stuffing while my Dad ran back and forth from the front to back. I originally wanted to buy my Dad’s store when he sold it. When he sold it, I was just getting out of college; I was in the work force for about 3 years.

8. What were you doing right out of college? Where did you go to school?

I went to Southern Illinois University. I graduated from Homewood Flossmore High School, went to SIU, got a job at the school newspaper as a sports reporter and worked my way to the copy desk and learned desktop publishing. I was an English major and planned on being a teacher. Because of my experience on the newspaper, I got a job at Sears in Hoffman Estates right off the bat developing a hardware magazine for them.

So graphic design is my background, copy writing, and sports reporting. Like I said, I wanted to buy the shop from my Dad, from Sears I got a job at Playboy, saved a lot of money, and he wouldn’t sell it to me. “This isn’t something you want to do,” he said. “You have a good thing going, you have benefits, you have stock options. Stay where you are.”

But the day-to-day mundane-ness doesn’t stop; it’s the same thing every single day, just changing projects, and it was wearing on me. I knew there had to be something more than just being part of the rat race. So after about 10 years I saved enough I finally saved enough money and I said, “I’m going to do this”. There’s no way I was going to be able to sleep at night saying I coulda, shoulda, woulda. So I tried and here I am.

9. You’ve got a great Italian sausage recipes and but how did you get from Italian to Polish Sausage?

The Polish was developed basically by my Dad. He started making it around the Easter holiday. The Polish heritage is that they like to jump off the Lent bandwagon and eat Polish sausage around Good Friday and Easter Sunday. So Polish sausage according to USDA is just a lot of garlic, as much garlic as you can shove into the meat.

So my Dad was experimenting. He basically used a recipe and added three times the amount of garlic, and it just kind of hit. It’s got a following. It’s probably our least seller out of all the flavors, and then Polish, but that’s because the mild doesn’t have as much garlic, and unless you have that Polish background where you’re dying for something like that, the mild outsells everything four to one. They get the hot because they like the spice. Then we sell the fennel because people are so used to Italian sausage having fennel, it’s like a necessary evil. You have to carry it. I prefer it without the fennel, but some people prefer the fennel.

10. Tell me your views about preservatives and your views on sausage making? Are you a purist in terms of your ingredients?

Yeah, there are no added fillers or preservatives any of that. Our sausage has a shelf life of about 5 days from the day it was made, and then you freeze it. I tell my customers that it lasts for about 3 months in the freezer, but I’ve had it a year later and couldn’t tell the difference.

11. Do you recommend to your clients that they cook it the same day?

When our sausage is coming close to it’s shelf life, I’ll tell our customers “This sausage was made on Tuesday, you might want to cook it by Friday at the latest, or freeze it.” So we definitely inform them. You’ll definitely be able to tell when your sausage is going bad. Not only will it give off a distinct odor, but also it will kind of get a film over the casing like a greasy film and once it gets to that point you’ll know you’re on the downward cycle.

12. You’re a small family-run business. What plans do you have to grow the business?

Obviously build our commercial accounts. Our business is about 75% retail, 25% wholesale. Our bread and butter customers are those that walk in off the street, bring it home and grill it, make it with pasta sauce, make pizzas. But the commercial end, you are going to make more money the business will grow with the more volume you can push out the back door.

Commercial is a good avenue to take that because people are starting to request it at restaurants. So we get leads, we send them sample packs, and hope something comes out of it.

One of the new clients that I think it looks like it’s going to happen, I don’t want to jinx myself, is Sam’s Wine and Liquor downtown. They’re a very large liquor/wine distributor, and they have a very small deli where they sell cheeses and stuff. I had a meeting with them yesterday and they seemed very interested. I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Depending on how that goes, it may double our production. Get there on Thursday, that’s when we’re delivering –- once a week. (Note: Sam’s now carries Hungry Hill sausage.)

13. Do you change your meat vendors or spice vendors very often?

I shop around for the best price on pork; in that case I use 3 different vendors. One of them is my competitor on a much larger scale, that’s Greco and Sons. He not only makes his own sausage, but he sells pork butt shoulder at a very good price, and he sells the brand I’m interested in.

So we use IVP pork, Excel Farmland, Indiana Packers. Those are 4 packaging companies that I don’t mind using. Their hogs are all grain fed, they’re not slop fed. There all fed corn, wheat, grain, and that’s what I’m looking for.

You can tell the difference when you open a cryovac package of pork butt shoulder you can tell which one – if you took one which was fed slop and one which was fed grain, you can tell which is which. It’s that obvious.

For the spices, I’ve worked with the same person since I opened the store, and the same person that my Dad worked with back in the 80’s and 90’s. Its Superior Knife believe it or not. They’re a knife company, they sharpen my knives, but they also sell spices on a wholesale level. He gets it from somebody in NW Indiana or South Chicago; I can look up the name. They package the spices for me. It’s a specific blend of pepper that I buy, black pepper, coriander is in our recipe, salt is a main ingredient, garlic.

We were using MSG for a while because the recipe called for it from back in the 80’s, but he cut that out, never told me until one of my clients asked me if we had MSG in it. I told her yes, and she said “That’s terrible, you have to get that out of it right now!” I said I’d run a batch and see what it tastes like, and you can’t tell the difference, so why put something in there that’s poisoning people. So we cut that out and haven’t looked back.

14. What standards do you use to say that this is good Italian sausage? What are you looking for?

I think the way that it cooks on the grill is s good indicator. If you are cooking a sausage that shrinks or shrivels up, that’s not right, they’re probably using water. I don’t want to say that it’s a way to rip customers off, but there’s an old fashioned way to just add water to the sausage, but we don’t, because it shrivels up and makes the customer say, “Wait, I ordered a quarter pound and now I have an eighth of a pound.”

The taste obviously, but also what’s inside. If there are large chunks of gristle or large chunks of fat, I just spit it out. I don’t want that stuff. Good flavor. I think your palette’s going to tell you what you like or don’t like. But I would say, the gristle, the way that it cooks on the grill is a good indicator, and obviously the size.

You don’t want to have a sausage that is very long, but very thin. You want it to be fat, robust, almost bursting out of the casing with flavor and juices while it’s cooking. When you’re picking a sausage out of your deli, you want it to be rosy or red. You want it to be fresh. You don’t want it be gray or thin.

15. Americans eat a lot of sausage. What advice do you give to someone who is looking for good sausage? How do you know what to try?

Pretty much the same way that I just explained. You want the look of it, but also word of mouth. Your friends and family are going to be the best people. You know, if you’re going to buy a car or a stereo, you ask around. It’s the same thing. You have to ask around.

16. What do you like? How do you like to cook it?

We prefer that you actually grill it. We believe that’s the best flavor overall. There’s something about that charcoal flavor. If you’re into smoking it, that’s another way. I’ve had people come back and tell me all kinds of different ways that they cook it. It’s a different way every time.

17. Do clients ask you to use recipes to make sausage?

Yes. The Lithuanian and Croatian people come and ask if it’s possible to do that. Turkey sausage is another one that people request. Some people can’t eat pork due to religious or heritage reasons. Outside of the Lithuanian or Croatian, I really haven’t. I don’t mind experimenting. For 50 pounds, I’ll try it, but I don’t want to waste my time or bang my head against the wall for 10-pound increments. It’s just too time-consuming and frustrating.

18. How many pounds of sausage do you make each year?

I looked that up while we were talking on the phone, and I was kind of surprise. We’re growing – I didn’t realize! But our first 6 months when we opened in July 2007, we went through about 25,000 pounds in about a half year. Last year was our full fiscal year and we topped out at about 60,000 pounds.

This year we’re on pace to about double what we did in 2007 and I’m hoping to reach a century mark. If I can get to 100,000 pounds, it roughly 1800 pounds a week. We’re pretty close. We’re at about 1,500 pounds right now.

It depends, on what scale. For a shop my size, I’m pretty proud of that. For a shop such as Greco or Battaglia, they’re mass-producing it. As you can tell with Destry in the back, he’s making it by hand; he’s putting the casing on.

But these other companies have humongous big processors that forklifts dump these big bins of meat into and this guy presses a button and it just spits out 1,000 miles per hour! And all he has to do is put the casings on.

This weekend is Mother’s Day weekend, just after Easter before Memorial Day, the weather’s nice, the people are excited that the weather is changing and they’re ready for grilling. So this happens to be a pretty special weekend, and today we’re probably going to process about 450-500 pounds, so Destry will be back there for a while.

19. Do you ship out of state?

Yes, we are USDA approved. That was one of the major inclinations for me as far as regulation was concerned. I didn’t want to deal with the county, didn’t want to deal with the state. The federal government will basically be the umbrella to cover everything I need to be regulated for.

Our inspector is in here Tuesdays and Thursdays when we’re trimming and anything that is a wholesale account, or a commercial account, or being shipped over state lines has to be federally approved. So that’s where our labels, our packaging come into play and he basically watches us put it together and get it out the door.

I’d like to get into the ecommerce end of things. Some delis in Brooklyn do it; there are some delis in California that do it. We’ve shipped out of state, but it’s very expensive. You have to ship next day or second day it’s got to be frozen with Coolie packs or dry ice. I use UPS or FedEx. They’re the ones that set the market price and with fuel costs very expensive, you might buy 20 pounds to send our brother in Florida and that 20 pounds will cost you $60 in product but $180 to get there next day, and whose going to spend $240 to buy 20 pounds of sausage? Rich people basically.

There is a small market, we’ve done it. We ship through UPS. We ship through their UPS World Ship program. But I’ve had a very hard time finding a developer that can build me a website with everything I want on it.

The developers like to cut corners, and say “Include the shipping in your price.” Well I don’t want to charge $12/pound on the product page. I want it to see it broken down during the checkout process, shipping $120, handling $10, sausage $65. Otherwise it’s $17/pound for sausage. It’s kind of a Catch-22, but there’s definitely a market out there for ecommerce sausage.

A lot of it has to do with the way that I’m packaging it right now. If I start to sell if as Johnsonville does, they have 6 links, about a pound and a half, already vacuum-sealed or shrunk wrapped. We’re still kind of in the fetal stages to find out what’s best for us to market our product, what’s best for our customers to receive our product.

We’re slowly moving forward. We’re running into some roadblocks. I’ve met with three different developers and I’ve spent quite a bit of money, and I’m getting nowhere, so it’s kind of frustrating. And it’s embarrassing too, because with my background, you think I’d know people, which I thought I did….

20. Tell me about the sausage recipe you like best in your shop?

I like the sausage patty. I like the bulk sausage outside of the casing. I like it hoagie-style, kind of rectangular, on garlic bread with mozzarella cheese and roasted red peppers or giardinara. That’s my favorite way, obviously grilled.

But I also enjoy it with my eggs in the morning, the bulk again. But there’s something about the mild sausage with the taste of maple syrup that really turns me on. It’s like spicy and sweet so those are two ways that are my favorite.

My wife and my kids really like it in pasta sauce. My wife likes it because it adds flavor to her sauce. The kids like it because they like the marinara. I use my kids as a barometer, like “Is there too much pepper in here?” because they’ll tell you.

Some people will tell you what they think you want to hear. And it’s hard to get honest feedback especially when they’re your friends or our family, or even your customers. They don’t want to insult you. I’m not looking for that. You’re not going to hurt my feelings. I need you to tell me if something’s wrong with the product. Did we do something wrong with this batch. Sometimes this happens, so I use my kids for their honest.

21. One last question for you -- Do you ever worry about being so large that your quality will fall off?

No, I don’t think that will ever happen, that’s why I’m here today. It could have been very easy for me to stay home and give them a list of things to do, but I want to make sure that Destry is stuffing it the way my Dad taught me to stuff it.

I want to make sure that the rings are 2-1/2 to 3 pounds that the customers aren’t getting ripped off. They want a full ring, not a half-ring. They don’t want a small reel. To be honest with you, I hope I have that problem some day, but I don’t think the quality will ever suffer because that’s why people come. Once that happens you may as well close the doors.

22. Are you going to ever look at other stores, other locations?

We’ve got some following about 15 miles east, northwest Indiana, Munster, Scherville, St. John , Dyer, people come across the border, so I’m looking into locations there, strictly just having a deli, maybe selling hot sandwiches. We don’t have a kitchen here.

We get a lot of requests from people coming in the door “Can I have a beef sandwich?” “Can I have a meatball sandwich?”, but we just don’t have the space to make it. We thought about getting some hot bins up front, just a small counter where the girls can quickly make a sandwich, we’re still tossing that idea around.

But probably Northwest Indiana, and then about 15 miles west, Frankfort, New Lenox, Mokena, we have some clients out there too. Unfortunately with the economy where it is, rent is cheap, but it doesn’t matter how cheap it is if nobody’s spending any money. So we’re kind of basing our home here and as we grow… in order for us to grow, we’re probably going to have to take that step of opening a couple other locations.

Hungry Hill Sausage:
18217 Dixie Highway
Homewood, IL 60430
Phone: 888-241-HILL
Fax: 708-799-3343
www.hungryhillsausage.com