Seymour Alternative Farming Expo: Maestro to share secrets of making salami

BUTCHER James Mele pays meticulous attention to the meat he carves in his boning room at Kilmore.

James Mele and Marcel Mandanici from The Meat Room at Kilmore East.

BUTCHER James Mele pays meticulous attention to the meat he carves in his boning room at Kilmore.

Surprisingly, he’s not interested in selling the bespoke cuts of beef, lamb and pork to the public.

“We set The Meat Room up about five years ago, for small-scale farmers in the area,” said James, 45.

“They are farmers who want to produce a boutique product and thought, ‘How do I get the produce from the paddock to consumers’ plates?’.

“It is important to us that the people who do all the hard work with their animals receive a quality service at the end. We take great pride in our attention to detail and packaging.”

James runs The Meat Room at Kilmore with his wife and a part-time employee, butchering carcasses into cuts and sausages for about 20 small-scale producers from across central Victoria, from Lancefield to Strathbogie.

He works to their precise instructions to provide products they then sell directly to customers.

James comes from a long line of Italian meat-smiths, but was not a butcher by trade when he decided to follow the family tradition five years ago.

“At the age of 37 I decided I wanted to get into it. It was in the blood, I guess,” he said.

Two years ago James received a scholarship to go on a one-month study tour of Italy to learn the craft of sausage and salami making.

Rather than keep the knowledge to himself, James is sharing those skills with as many people as he can.

“The thing is for us, there are no such things as secrets,” he said. “Obviously we make sausages for farmers, and for those sausages it’s their recipe. But for me, it’s about passing knowledge on, not holding it in. That’s not the way to do it.

“One of my family members, his father died without giving him the family recipes. It doesn’t make sense that this knowledge will die with them.”

James recently became a PrimeSafe-licensed salami maker, and will launch his own line of salamis this year, sourcing pork from a Ballarat producer.

He plans to supply local delis. James will run sausage and salami-making workshops at Seymour on Sunday, February 18.