My love for cold cuts of our country I have never hidden it and with every opportunity where I travel to areas of Greece I do not miss the opportunity to try their products. It is true that in recent years many butchers have built their growth on local products, on identity products. Although there are not many PDO and PGI products, mainly because the meats - especially the pork and beef used - are from other regions and mainly imported, nevertheless the cooking techniques are kept as before, thus creating a wide range of flavors with famous sausages that show the identity of their place of origin (Cyclades ouza, Mykonos sausages, Mani synglino, Kalamata salt, Lefkada salami, Crete apaki, Corfu noumboulo, Kerkini kavourmas, Thrace pastrami, Karamanlidika sausages).

On my last trip to Kalamata I had the opportunity to try them smoked sausages of the area - their main feature is that contain orange peels - but also to watch how they are made, since their producer Elias Moutevelis he had the kindness to give me a private show of his production, which excited me.

The defining element of every sausage is the "salt", thanks to which the sausage is preserved over time and the spices that give it its taste identity.

Their spices, composition and recipe are the secret of every butcher. With the bowl on the electronic scale, they weigh and create the proportions that make each sausage special. From the colors and aromas, we distinguished, the natural salt, the cinnamon, the cumin, the nutmeg, the allspice, the pepper and the pepper.

In the end, thrombus was added in abundance to finish the process of preparing the herbs.

What impressed me was the purity of the meat that was being prepared to be minced. Elias, as a butcher, supplies meat only for his sausages and pastas, and everything is raw pieces and not leftovers from other cuts.

The mincing is done with a special tool to make the minced meat thick.

Then the peels will pass through the orange that will give the special taste!

And the red beans will mix with the orange ones!

Then the red wine will be poured…

and the mixing will end with the throwing of the spices.

It will take ten minutes in the stirrer to homogenize the pulp…

The pulp will then enter natural pig intestine…

And after the natural drying, the sausages will be transferred to the smokehouse where the beech and olive wood smoke will smoke the sausages so that they can be stored in the consumer's refrigerator for 6 months.

This is followed by vacuum packaging and labeling.

The traditional village sausages of Kalamata by Ilias Moutevelis, a young creative lad and young butcher, fourth generation from a historical family of butchers of Kalamata, are ready to give untold moments of joy to the friends of the genre.

My heartfelt thanks to Elias Moutevelis and his aunt Jenny Moutevelis for the wonderful tour.