Ohio City Provisions opened on Lorain Avenue nearly decade ago with a model that was both old-fashioned and new: a neighborhood, whole-animal butcher shop stocked with locally raised meat and other Ohio-grown foods.
Owners Adam Lambert and Trevor Clatterbuck didn’t inherit a generations-old sausage recipe. Instead, Lambert , a chef, started with classic butchery and sausage-making techniques — then figuring out how far he could push them. That can mean a simple French sausage made with little more than pork, salt and pepper. Or it can mean trying to cram the flavors of an entire Philly cheesesteak or pepperoni pizza into a casing.
Why open a butcher shop when so many of Cleveland’s old ones have disappeared?
For Ohio City Provisions, the idea was to create a place where the owners knew where the food they were selling came from. The shop sells its own pasture-raised beef, heritage pork and chicken along with locally produced dairy, produce and other groceries.
That philosophy carries over into sausage making.
“If we don’t feed it to our family,” Lambert said, they don’t want to feed it to customers.
The shop tries to keep its sausages “clean labeled,” avoiding artificial ingredients and other additives people don’t want or need.
How do you learn to make sausage?
Start simple.
Lambert points to saucisson sec, a traditional French dry sausage that can be as basic as pork, salt and pepper.
“If you can make that taste really, really good through your sourcing of products, your treatment of all the ingredients, it goes a long way and it teaches you techniques,” he said.
Those basic sausages teach the fundamentals: ingredient quality, proportions, texture and technique.
He said you have to have reverence for the classic roots of sausage making and butchery before you can really try to do all the “‘fancy stuff.”
During Signal Cleveland’s visit to Ohio City Provisions, Lambert made kielbasa, starting from a cut of farm-raised heritage pork. For this particular sausage, he mixes equal parts pork and beef to give the final product “a lot more background, a lot more flavor.”
Ohio City Provisions also has a rotating cast of wild sausages
Lately, Lambert and the crew started challenging themselves to turn meals into a sausage – and get the taste just right.
The shop has sold Philly cheesesteak sausage, an ode to Chicken Tikka Masala and a pepperoni pizza sausage. Other favorites include the currywurst.
“When you cut into them,” Lambert said, “you’re like, ‘Holy shit, this actually tastes just like it.’”
The challenge isn’t simply throwing those ingredients into ground meat, he said. The techniques learned from making classic sausages help the butchers figure out how much of each ingredient to use while keeping the texture right.
Is there anything that should never go into a sausage?
Apparently not.
Asked for a sausage equivalent of the “no pineapple on pizza” rule, Lambert couldn’t come up with one.
Different styles call for different ingredients, he said. You can certainly add too much of something — cheese, for example — but he was reluctant to declare an ingredient completely off-limits.
That openness helps explain a sausage case that can move from traditional Italian sausage and Greek loukaniko to lamb merguez, chorizo and more experimental creations.
So is Cleveland still a sausage town?
Lambert thinks so.
“Cleveland’s Cleveland, man. We’re blue collar.”
Butchery fits that identity, he says, because it is itself a blue-collar trade. Cleveland once had neighborhood butcher shops scattered throughout the city. Most have disappeared, although Lambert has noted a small number of newer shops emerging.
“We don’t need anyone to tell us that we’re good,” he said. “I think we just put our heads down and we just make the product.”
