Logan Higger wants to move as much Maine meat from holistically managed pastures to appreciative eaters’ plates as one butcher can. His small business, Sowbelly Butchery, sells cuts of pork that demonstrate both Higger’s whole-animal butchery skills and his intention to honor the lives of the animals whose flesh lands on his cutting board. The pork he offers ranges from skin-on, bone-in chops and whole, trimmed tenderloins to ham hocks and racks of ribs. Other cuts on sale tell a waste-not story. Think back fat, bone broth, leaf lard, liver pâté, and trotters.
Higger’s primary Maine meat delivery vehicle, though, is sausage. In a rented commercial kitchen housed in a repurposed maple sugar shack just up the road from the homestead he shares with his family in Jefferson, he creates wonderfully decadent, mostly fresh links. The natural casings he uses are stuffed almost exclusively with organically grown and/or grass-fed Maine meat, produce, and dairy he buys from Maine farmers.
Higger has developed over 100 recipes and offers them on a rotating basis. The list includes traditional Italian sweets and hots, beer brats, and maple breakfast sausage links, of course. But other varieties mix and match cultural influences and local ingredients. In August, for example, Sowbelly offered a dill pickle sausage comprising pickling cucumbers from Dandelion Spring Farm in Bowdoinham, dill from Bramble Hill Farm in Unity, and garlic from Dickey Hill Farm in Monroe. In September there was Mexican-style street corn sausage made with ground pork, bacon, corn, cilantro, cotija cheese, chipotle, lime, red onion, and smoked salt. In October, the company solicited customer requests via Instagram on what to make next. edible MAINE, meanwhile, asked Higger to make five interesting sausages we could feature in this issue, and he honored our request.
The fat content in Sowbelly sausages holds constant between 25% and 30%, says Higger. It’s the ingredient that both keeps them moist after cooking and makes a modest amount very satisfying. Smaller breakfast links come eight to a pound. Larger links come three to a pound, packaged in brown butcher paper. Prices range between $15 and $25 per pound, based on the fair market value of the ingredients.
Higger says Sowbelly’s success is best quantified in the number of Maine food producers with whom he engages. “We started with one pork producer who wanted to retire breed stock. We sold sausage out of one cooler in collaboration with Whatley Farm [in Topsham], highlighting their produce, utilizing bumper crops and seconds to turn them into a value-added product,” says Higger. It was just a matter of weeks before he made enough sausage to meet demand—an amount that filled two coolers.
Just three years on, Sowbelly works with dozens of producers. Higger intentionally shops at the farmers markets in which Sowbelly participates to harness the abundance of farmers mindfully stewarding the land. Higger has worked steadily with a group of whey-fed pork and grass-fed lamb and beef producers to grow his business and cultivate consistent quality within his product line. On occasion he sources older animals, plus rare varieties of pork or meats like duck, goat, and veal. Having those meats in play allows him to expand his imagination, support someone else’s unique farming shtick, or find use for one-off batches of livestock.
“If one guy can move thousands of dollars each week across our local economy in pursuit of ethical, tasty bites, then I’m already successful,” says Higger.
Luckily for eaters here in Maine, though, he plans to grow his business on that foundational achievement.
Here we serve up an appetizer featuring fried plantains alongside Sowbelly’s Cubano sausages (pork, pickles, Swiss cheese, and mustard, like the sandwich!). If you’re thinking soup, we’ve got one featuring Higger’s Seaweed and Scallion sausages atop baby bok choy. We’ve also developed side dishes incorporating three other Sowbelly sausage varieties: Lamb and Sweet Potato, Umbellifer (named after the family of flowering plants that give us caraway, celery, dill, and parsley, all ingredients in this link), and Duck Sauce (made with apricots, plum vinegar, soy sauce, and turnip greens). Higger’s only advice on cooking Sowbelly’s sausages is to use a preparation you’re used to in order to prepare any sausage. So we leave the method—grilled, broiled, baked, sautéed, or steamed in beer—mostly up to you in these recipes.
This time of year, Sowbelly Butchery sells its sausages at Pumpkin Valley Family Farm’s shop in Somerville on Sundays through December, throughout the winter at the Saturday morning Brunswick Winter Market, and by arrangement at the Sowbelly Butchery farm stand in Jefferson.
