Today was a fine day as I woke up at eight in the morning and felt the fresh breeze seep through my room. I got up, and the first thing I wanted to do was take a swim, but Ani advised me to sit down for a breakfast of poha and fruit, which I duly did. We then headed out toward the city to pick up Ani’s wife from the local train station. But before that, we stopped at a local shack to enjoy a plate of fish thali with a glass of coke. It was a simple shack, and the plate of fish thali cost three times less than it would in a restaurant. The fish was tangy and spicy, and I even enjoyed the mussels with gravy.
Today we decided to wander around Goa and do some photography. I found a very interesting place to buy traditional Goan sausages. This was Denver Crasto’s Pork and More Shop, and for the first time, I was able to actually see how pork sausages are made and packed to be sold in the open market. Denver took me to his kitchen, where his local Goan staff were packing pork meat and making sausages with very exotic machines, all made of steel. The store area had all the ingredients that are mixed into the meat to make it tangy and spicy. I saw jute sacks full of red chilies, and then sacks full of ginger and garlic. These are used to make a paste that is mixed into the sausage meat. There were bottles of vinegar mixed with the ginger paste to give the pork sausage more flavor and zing.
Pork Shop
These ingredients are mixed into the meat, and then the meat is put inside cow intestines and tied up. These intestines, filled with sausages, are then placed on hot iron rods and smoked over a coal fire. The sausages are hung to roast under the coal fire, but the rods are perched high up so that slow smoking takes place, which adds to the flavor of the sausages. This gives the sausages a dark brown, almost reddish color. The sausages are packed and sold to local Goan department stores and even to shops in Mumbai.
Denver’s grandmother started the pork shop, and the family owns three pig farms. They have been in business for over forty years, with dozens of employees working for them. They have more than fifty pigs being raised on the farm. Typically, a pig is slaughtered when it weighs more than eighty kilos, which takes a year or so for the pig to reach that weight. Some pigs are even slaughtered before reaching a year of age if they have grown faster than the others.
The slaughterhouse is where the heart of the pigs is cut off, and their entrails are removed. After cleaning the meat, the mincing and grinding of the meat take place. There is an entire process to this, and there are operating rooms where each process takes place. I could see sausages being hung to dry before they were packed to be finally sold in the retail market. All in all, it was a fascinating process, and I managed to capture it all after a detailed chat with the owner, Denver himself.
