When chef Nico Pagani started making sausages and salami in his lounge, it was only meant to be a hobby, and one his wife Betania was dubious about.
That’s because the reddish-brown salami rolls, speckled with white fat, stank out the house every time Pagani opened his oversized, temperature-controlled, ageing fridge.
He hadn’t been able to find a decent charcuterie so he copied skills and recipes he’d learnt from his Uruguayan grandfather Luis, a butcher.
“It was just a hobby,” he recalls of moving to New Zealand from Uruguay 10 years ago with Betania, landing in Wellington, and making sausages.
He grew to know other chefs and restaurateurs and, while socialising, they asked him to make his fresh and smoked meats for their eateries.
The restaurateurs were persistent, offering him their kitchens when their restaurants were closed, plus payment.
“It started like that, so random. I never thought of it as a business. ‘How am I going to make a living selling sausages? C’mon’,” he laughs.
But he has made it a full-time enterprise, and now living in Mount Maunganui, he produces 200kg of sausages a week, cut and shaped by hand.
The cultural melting pot of Uruguay means he has recipes for Argentine and Uruguayan chorizo, but also Italian and Spanish-influenced products.
So good are his recipes, that he convinced Betania, who for a year converted to vegetarianism, to switch back to eating meat.
“Very fast I changed my mind because I remember saying ‘if I’m going to eat meat it has to be worth it’ and I know good quality meat, and it was delicious,” the ex-chef turned sommelier says.
The couple lived in Wellington for seven years before moving to Mount Maunganui in late-2019, opening El Jefe Meats in 2020 after years of working for others in hospitality. El Jefe means “the boss”.
Pagani won silver in the artisan awards last year and supplies more than 20 restaurants and retail stores between Auckland and Wellington, including Farro and Moore Wilson’s, Vetro, and Gourmet Trader.
Wellington’s Argentinian restaurant El Matador uses his chorizo and black pudding “morcilla” in its authentic parrilla (barbecue dish).
South Americans living in the Bay of Plenty also love his morcilla, particularly during kiwifruit season, when there’s an influx of Spanish-speaking visitors to the region who come to work during harvest.
“You probably can’t get anything else like it in New Zealand, because it’s authentic the way that we make it. I even get people calling me from Otago asking to send it.
“Irish people in New Zealand love it as well. We are always running out.”
Alongside his morcilla and sausages, he makes and sells salami, bacon - including beef bacon out of beef briskets, pastrami, and smoked meatballs.
He has been running sausage-making classes for the public during this month’s Flavours of Plenty Festival, and hopes to continue them long-term, if there’s demand, adding in salami, pate, terrine, and bacon-making classes.
While he isn’t the only sausage maker around, for a long time it was “a lost trade”.
Sausage-making was practised in ancient Egypt and became popular there in the late Byzantine period before 641 AD. Sausages were also eaten in ancient Greece. In the Odyssey, Homer dined on fatty, goat-blood sausages.
“In all parts of the world, sausages have had a place,” he says.
At his sausage-making workshops, rookie butchers are split into teams and learn the ratio of salt and fat to meat before working together to measure, cut, grind, stuff, shape, cut, and pack. They make flavoured sausages like ham and cranberry, and chorizo pork before getting to taste test their creations and take the sausages home.
Years of making sausages have turned Pagani into a sausage experimenter when it comes to flavour and cooking methods.
“I seldom cook sausage as a normal person would,” he laughs, explaining that he makes sausage meatballs, dumplings, chorizo stuffing for roast chicken, leek and fennel sausage mixed into his hand-made pasta and creamy pasta sauce, and pan-sears sausages to render them crisp on the outside before adding them to fried rice. For Betania’s birthday, he made a “chorizo fondue”.
Inside a slow cooker, he had three different types of cheeses and tiny chopped chorizo. “People were going crazy [for it].”
He started out selling at local farmers’ markets in the Bay, which helped him understand what customers liked. Some were sceptical about sausages.
“They didn’t know what was in them, they got them cheap, and they came in this massive bag.”
Pagani’s sausages are natural, preservative and sugar-free. His pork and fennel sausages are made up of PigCare-certified pork, Himalayan salt, spices, fresh herbs and natural casings, and are keto-friendly and gluten-free.
The same with his beef sausages, and he’s working on lamb sausages.
He also does custom orders for hunters from wild meats.
He makes his own red wine reduction, with herbs, garlic and seeds for his Argentinian sausage, and seasonings are without flour, chemicals and crumbs to stretch or fill the meat.
“A good sausage is made with love and has good ratios of fat to meat, so it’s not dry or too fatty, has natural ingredients, and casings made from intestines, " he says, adding his production fits the culinary concept of nose-to-tail butchery, meaning that every part of a slaughtered animal is used.
From Uruguay to New Zealand
Pagani’s business success is exciting considering that when he arrived in New Zealand in 2013 he couldn’t speak a word of English.
A qualified chef who’d travelled the world, the only job he could get was as a kitchen hand washing dishes in Wellington.
“It was frustrating when the manager came to me and said ‘you’re so good at doing dishes’.”
Within a few months, he had learnt enough English to ask if he could step in when the restaurant was a chef down.
“I helped one day and they were like, ‘hey, you’re good’, which I had been trying to tell them.”
He went on to become head chef there.
His English continued to improve and he worked in various fine-dining restaurants but the 14-hour shifts that went with cheffing began to wear thin for him and Betania.
That’s when his sausage-making hobby and the suggestion from friends to turn it into a business, started to take flight.
He asked his then-Wellington employer if he would mind if he came in on his day off and use the kitchen when the business was closed for his “side hustle”.
The boss was on board, Pagani got the necessary approval from the council, and he started to grow clients in Wellington, which he’s kept.
Now living in Mount Maunganui, he loves the relaxed, beach lifestyle.
“We always came here on holidays and we dreamed about living in Tauranga one day.”
He landed a job locally as a head chef and then he sold his beloved Harley Davidson Sportster, and his car, to fund the business start-up.
His dad Felipe was so proud of him, that he took it upon himself to bicycle around the town where the Pagani family is from, Paysandu, and collect handwritten recipes and photos of recipes, from every butcher he could find. They were happy to part with their closely-guarded secrets only because New Zealand was so far away.
When Pagani and Betania’s families visit New Zealand from Uruguay they are always the first in the kitchen helping out. “It’s like a tradition now”.
The 31-year-old has always been an entrepreneur.
From age 8, he would take lemons and avocados from his grandmother’s home and go door-to-door selling them.
At 13, he worked odd jobs including working for both grandfathers - one a butcher, the other a baker.
“My mum was getting calls from school saying ‘Nico’s fallen asleep on his desk’ because I was so tired. My first bicycle, I bought it myself.”
At 17 he left home and studied hospitality working in hotels and restaurants throughout South America and Europe, meeting fellow Uruguayan Betania along the way before visiting New Zealand and deciding to stay. The couple now has a 10-month-old son, Oliver.
“I didn’t know much about New Zealand, other than it was far away - it seemed mystical, a tiny island.”
Passing on his culture to New Zealanders and working for himself in cheffing and butchery has been a dream come true.
“It gives me happiness and satisfaction when I see people’s smiles when they’re eating. I wouldn’t get it from doing something else.”
# For more on El Jefe Meats, visit eljefemeats.co.nz
Tomorrow is the last day of sausage-making classes in Mount Maunganui, 10am-2pm, during the Flavours of Plenty festival. To book, go to flavoursofplentyfestival.com