Isernio's Sausage

As with everything, the pendulum swings in the food world. In the beginning, there wasn't anything that wasn't local. Then food was special if it came from somewhere far away. We've had the "frozen foods are good or at least quick" phase. Now we're back to local, natural, organic. But some people, Frank Isernio for one, have always offered a healthy, good tasting, local product. His story also illuminates a Seattle largely forgotten.

"Making sausage was not a lifelong ambition," laughs Frank. "Most areas and cultures use sausage, but there was no sausage culture in Seattle. So most Italian Americans made their own—my mom and uncles all made sausage when I was growing up on Beacon Hill. Other than a very few mom and pop retail outlets, there weren't places to get sausage. Plus these small places were primarily Northern Italian. We were Southern Italians and used fennel and crushed red chilies."

Frank Isernio and mom

During his 20s, Frank made sausage for himself. It became a hobby, like wine making. "I was not an optimist about selling it," Frank recalls. "I couldn't figure out how you could make a living doing this." He knew Flora and Tony Mascio, a couple who made Mascio's Pasta in the basement of a house in Georgetown. Flora offered the use of their pasta/sausage stuffer to Frank. He took her up on it and offered her sausage for the favor.

Eventually, the Mascio's convinced Frank to sell the sausage and offered to share their pasta-making space with him. He took a shipyard job, worked graveyard, slept for four-five hours, then made sausage. Slipping into his "selling clothes," he'd head out in his ‘65 Mustang with holes drilled in the floor of the trunk for the melting ice to drain as he went to restaurants asking if they'd like to try good Italian sausage.

"I found that the key ws to cook the sausage properly and get people to taste it. Once I showed people how to use it, I got a following." Restaurant critic John Hinterberger wrote about a favorite new restaurant and the best dish of the year was made "with Isernio's sausage." With this new burst of interest, it was clear that the small basement room housing both a pasta and sausage company would not work. In just one year, the tiny room was at capacity. "I had overstayed my welcome," says Frank. The Mascio's wanted him to stay.

The Mascio's bought the three story house next door and hired men from the Millionaire's Club to dig a basement to expand the production area to include both basements. They rented out the top two stories, built a cooler and parked an old refrigerated trailer in the alley for storage. There was no heat in the house and Frank used a card table for a desk. But they cooked good lunches and made espresso! Frank has fond memories of these days.

Frank quit his other job to focus entirely on sausage. He realized there wasn't much selection at the retail grocery level where most people shopped. A Mercer Island deli asked him to do a demo. One man sampled several times in one day; he turned out to be the manager at Albertson's regional test store. He asked if Frank would do a demo there.

History was in the making. Thousands of demos later, Frank had listened to every reason people didn't want to try sausage. At the time, big packing companies used leftovers to make sausage. ‘They bastardized sausage and people didn't want to eat it," says Frank. When he could explain the difference, let people try it and show them how to use it, they were hooked. Within a few years, he was serving all the major chains in the region. Eighty-five percent of the business today is retail.

Early on, he only made hot and mild Italian sausage. He then launched several premium breakfast varieties. About 1990, he started experimenting with chicken. "I was afraid I'd cannibalize the pork varieties," recalls Frank. "Instead, we sold to people who weren't eating sausage at all; they now had an alternative. Pork sales kept growing and chicken escalated to 50 percent of the sales after we decided to duplicate the pork varieties in chicken." They now offer frozen products like chicken and pork burgers, available through food service distribution like SYSCO, FSA and Merlino's who service Northwest restaurants. Later this year they'll be available in retail locations.

Isernio's products have always been natural. There is no filler (except in the British Bangers), so there is no gluten. The pork is 80 percent lean, chicken 95 percent lean. "You should be able to buy a product that has ingredients that you understand, meat and natural seasonings," says Frank. "If the ingredients seem foreign, you probably shouldn't use the product."

He still creates the recipes and is currently working on a chicken bratwurst for summer grilling. "The creative part is what I enjoy most," he says. "But I also enjoy seeing the Isernio team succeed. I've always liked the saying that you're successful in life to the degree you make people happy." We're pretty sure Frank's going to heaven and we know the rest of us are each time we take a bite of one of his creations.

Click here to see a new recipe by Jess Thomson using Isernio's sausage

Connie Adams/March-April 2007