John Reusing stands impatiently over a saute pan in the kitchen of his Baltimore tavern, Bad Decisions, as the aroma of garlic rises from a sputtering pork patty and fills the air. He turns the patty over, watches it sizzle another minute or so,and takes a bite.
“That’s where it should be. Salt’s good. Garlic’s good. The pepper will come through more as it rests,” he says, nodding in approval. With that he steps through the back door and onto the sidewalk, walks 20 feet and enters Ostrowski’s Famous Polish Sausage, the sausage factory next door. He bought the place in December 2013 from a scion of the eponymous family that had owned it since 1919.
“It’s good!” he yells to Peter Lerkaram, the employee who was waiting for word that the batch of fresh Polish sausage he has just made was seasoned correctly before filling the stuffer.
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“You don’t want to stuff 300 pounds of sausage and then find out it doesn’t taste right,” says Reusing. “We found that out the hard way when we forgot to put the garlic in the kielbasa once and had to take it all out of the casings and fix it.”
Reusing, 33, was pretty much destined to find out everything about sausagemaking the hard way, considering that he had little experience in food preparation and was taking over a beloved business that had been in the hands of one family for nearly 100 years.
His background was not exactly rich in Polish food heritage. His mother is of Scottish and Irish descent, his father Italian, and childhood dinners in their eastern Baltimore neighborhood were on a weekly rotation. Mondays meant mince and totties (ground beef and potatoes) and the frozen vegetable du jour; Wednesdays were spaghetti and meatballs from a can.
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After receiving a bachelor of science degree in biology in 2005 from the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Reusing worked in a genetics lab at John Hopkins Hospital and then in administration. In the evening he worked as a bartender.
“Once I realized that I enjoyed my part-time job better than my daytime job, I decided to open a bar,” he says. In 2008, he opened Bad Decisions, a corner property with good foot traffic in Fells Point. The place came with something not on his original wish list: a kitchen.
“I had a kitchen, so I was going to use it. I started reading cookbooks and trying stuff out. I was all over the place, but basically just trying not to screw up basic bar food,” he says.
In 2013, Reusing’s Fleet-and-South-Washington-Street location turned out to be an intersection of opportunity and timing. Outside his bar one day, Carleen Miller, who worked at Ostrowski’s, told Reusing the place was up for sale. The owner, John Ostrowski, wasn’t well, and there was no one to take over the business. Reusing bought it, along with the recipes, the equipment and the name.
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“The name,” he says, “meant a lot around here. It used to be a predominantly Polish neighborhood, and this is where everyone came for sausage, especially at Christmas and Easter.”
Miller, 39, conveyed, too. She had worked full-time at Ostrowski’s for four years and part-time since she was 16. Her great-great-aunt sold the Ostrowskis the property, she says, and her family still owns the house next door. A loyal soul,she insists that John Ostrowski’s sausage has always been superior to that sold a few blocks away at Ostrowski’s of Bank Street (opened by John’s brother, Victor, in 1976).
The retail area of Ostrowski’s holds six customers comfortably and maybe 16 sardine-like during the holidays. A display case is filled with Polish delicacies; a giant chalkboard menu lists the store’s bounty, which includes four kinds of pierogi (half-moon-shaped dumplings that are boiled, sauteed in butter until crisp and usually served with sour cream and fried onions), golumkies (stuffed cabbage), fresh horseradish, house-made whole-grain beer mustard, four kinds of homemade sauerkraut, pickles, cream of pickle soup and, of course, sausage. (Reusing puts his cooks at Bad Decisions to good use during their down time, preparing non-sausage items on Ostrowski’s menu. )
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John Ostrowski, who died last April, sold only three kinds of sausage: fresh Polish sausage, made with ground pork, tons of garlic (40 pounds per 300 pounds of meat), dried marjoram, white pepper and salt; hickory-smoked Polish sausage (kielbasa), made from fresh sausage and curing salt; and gypsy sausage, for which fresh sausage is mixed with ground beef, peppercorns and curing salt, and smoked.
Share this articleShareBeyond the customer area is a behemoth smoker and the beating heart of Ostrowski’s: the small concrete room that houses the massive grinder, the Butcher Boy mixer and the Buffalo 200 stuffer, a workhorse built in the 1920s or 1930s that the Ostrowskis acquired in the ’50s. And, most of the time, Peter Lerkaram.
Lerkaram, 33, a college buddy of Reusing’s, left a monotonous information technology career to join Reusing’s new enterprise. For months before the deal was finalized, the two read charcuterie books voraciouslyand shadowed Ostrowski to learn from the master.
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Lerkaram now oversees the entire process — with Miller’s help, and Reusing’s during crunch times — cutting the meat to ensure that there are no bone pieces in it, grinding it with trim to achieve the correct 33 percent fat ratio, portioning the spices and mixing them in for 20 minutes, threading the stuffer with rehydrated casings (made from pig intestines) and filling them without air pockets.
Reusing got a real trial by smoke when he officially took over the business just before Christmas of 2013, and people lined up down the street for sausage. He had to convince a largely Polish clientele that a mince-and-totties guy could produce sausage as good as the Ostrowskis’.
It might even be better. Reusing changed suppliers and buys better cuts of pork: butts, belly and trim only, no random pork bits. He got rid of the “handful” method of measuring that Ostrowski had used and standardized recipes. He improved techniques (hanging fresh sausage overnight to let the flavors mellow, or for several hours before smoking so the skin becomes tacky and grabs more smoke) and, to entice the millennials pouring into Fells Point, added new varieties of sausage: sweet and spicy Italian, sage, celery, double garlic, andouille and boudin.
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This week, Ostrowski’s will sell more than 5,000 pounds of sausage, much of it to the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of bygone customers. Some will no doubt insist that it’s not the same as it used to be. They’d better not express that opinion to Miller.
“John has been doing a good job,” she says fervently. “He gets a lot of grief on social media that he doesn’t deserve, but we are doing it the same way. Better. People should be glad he is doing this. Without him, there would be no Ostrowski’s.”
Ostrowski's Famous Polish Sausage 524 S. Washington St., Baltimore. 410-327-8935.
Hagedorn, a regular Food section contributor, is co-author of "My Irish Table: Recipes From the Homeland and Restaurant Eve" (Ten Speed Press, 2014). He'll answer reader questions on our Free Range chat Wednesday at noon: live.washingtonpost.com.
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