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“I liken the sausage business in this area very much to the wine business in the Okanagan or in the Niagara region,” Boldt said. “There are wines you like and wines you don’t, just like there’s sausages you like and sausages you don’t. And it’s enough to keep a lot of people in business.”

Boldt’s Pine View Farms is one of nine producers on the menu at the competition, which the organizing committee dubbed “The Lord of the (Sausage) Rings.” Although each butcher has a proprietary recipe or two, all Mennonite sausage comes from the same blueprint. It’s simple sausage with simple ingredients, he said.

At Smokehaus Meats in Martensville, for example, hogs are slaughtered offsite and delivered cold, according to Trent Ens, who runs the business with his wife Tanya. After butchering, the pork is seasoned with salt and pepper, stuffed into casings and smoked. It’s easy, at least in theory.

Photo by Liam Richards / Saskatoon StarPhoenix

“Texture, appearance and flavour — those three are very important,” Ens said, referring to the criteria customers and competition judges use to evaluate sausages. “But what really makes one Mennonite sausage better than another is the third one, texture. The texture is critically important.”

Ens grew up on a dairy farm south of Langham and worked as a truck driver and seller of aerial farm photographs before taking a job as a kill floor inspector in Alberta. In 1999, he and Tanya bought a meat plant in Swift Current, which they ran for several years before founding Smokehaus Meats in 2006.