UI’s Vandal Brand Meats is a store and a school

MOSCOW, Idaho – There’s no secret to what’s in the sausages made on campus at Vandal Brand Meats. University of Idaho alumni like Ginger Osborn remember enough of the tricks to make similar treats at home.

Recently, she sent her husband to pick up an order of pork trim from the campus store for the couple’s winter batch of sausages. The Osborns planned to spend three to four hours on the first steps of mixing the meat and filling the casings. They’ll need another day smoking the sausage to finish the process.

“You know what goes into it; there are no surprises” when you make it yourself, said Jake Osborn. He grew up on a farm and considers sausages a family tradition.

He likes delving into the meat because he gets to experiment with different flavors. The Osborns planned to mix in venison from a four-point buck Jake shot this season as a special addition. Osborn said his wife learned the techniques for making sausage from Ron Richard, manager of Vandal Brand Meats.

The Osborns plan to make enough to fill them both while providing plenty of leftovers to share with friends and family.

Vandal Brand Meats is a school to some and a store for others. Every semester Richard teaches 15 to 20 students like Ginger Osborn. The students learn the steps of meat processing at the federally inspected facility. They start with the whole animal and finish with a retail product. They also benefit from Richard’s 19 years of leading the store and instructing through the UI Department of Animal and Veterinary Sciences.

Richard said he remembered Ginger Osborn as a good student and inquisitive, always asking why certain steps were done. Other students and classes haven’t always turned out as well.

Richard remembered one class that used the wrong amounts of spices.

“They weighed out pounds instead of grams,” he said with a laugh. Another class filled the smokehouse but forgot to turn on the oven.

When things go right, the students take their products to competitions like Northwest Cured Meat Championships. If their recipes and projects are winners with the judges they earn a place behind the glass doors of the cooler cases in the Vandal Brand Meats store. Winners like the 2004 recipe for Linguisa still own a place on the shelves.

The judges at competitions can take apart any sausage and tell you exactly what’s in it, Richard said. “There is no such thing as a secret recipe. They can take a sausage and tear it apart,” he said.

“Your sausage recipe ain’t secret anymore.”