Meryl Smith Lawton

Seriously, No Smoked Sausage Jokes Allowed | Head of custom smoking at K&K, 20-year-old Tyler Walker.

K&K Foodliner
9944 82 Ave, 439-6913

In the basement of K&K Foodliner, a German and European specialty market near the corner of Whyte Avenue and 99th Street, a dozen or so heavy-duty machines fill the space, glistening with water, newly cleaned. I’m too late to see them in action — up until 15 minutes ago, they were all up and running, smoking, slicing, mixing, and processing various meats and imported spices into the trademark products sold at the deli upstairs.

Founded in 1956 by brothers Albert, Rudolph, and Leo Krause, K&K has two major claims to fame in the Edmonton meat circuit. One is that it makes all of its sausages in house. The other is that it fully processes wild game brought in by its customers — from moose to elk to bear to boar, if you can prove you bagged it legally, they’ll cut and spice it according to your taste.

Awkward disclosure time: your correspondent is a vegetarian. I do eat seafood, which means technically I’m a pescetarian (or, as a friend puts it, a “fish and chippocrite”), but the fact remains that no matter how fascinating this machinery is, I’m in pretty obviously over my head.

Luckily, K&K’s head of custom smoking, 20-year-old Tyler Walker, is here to accompany me. Walker has worked at K&K full-time for the past three years — his older brother Kevin, who married into the Krause family, is the store manager — and he knows the meat processing routine well. Perhaps a bit too well; after I ask him a fairly dumb question about one of the machine’s blades being sharp, he holds up his right hand, which I now see has a bandaged index finger that’s missing everything above the top knuckle.

“Yeah,” he says with a big grin and what turns out to be a characteristic burst of laughter. “Pretty sharp.”

The accident happened a few months back, and Walker has only been back on the job for three weeks. (As you maybe guessed, he’s already cutting meat again.) He does look young, today wearing a matching green shirt and bandana, with a sizable ring through the cartilage of one ear. Yet there’s no doubt he’s a capable guy, one who’s involved in more than one level of the store’s operation.

K&K does carry things like produce, as well as aisles of juices, cookies, and spices imported from Europe (mostly Germany, Poland, and Hungary). But meat is clearly the store’s big pull: it comes from several companies around Alberta, and K&K uses a secret mix of spices to give it a one-of-a-kind flavour. Walker also points out that K&K is one of very few stores that uses natural casings for its sausages — by “natural” he means pig intestines, and then shows me a barrel full of them.

I inspect them for your sake, dear reader, not mine.

Price-wise, a kilo of bison or turkey garlic sausage is $19.99. Ham is $17.99, and beef $10.99. There’s also a broad swath of cold cuts and individual pieces in shrink-wrap. Of course, if you’d rather work with meat you’ve caught yourself, you can pick up brother Kevin’s DVD, How to Cut Wild Game, for $29.95 at the front counter.

Other big sellers are the imported cheeses, with approximately 20 varieties to choose from, and European staples like sauerkraut and pickles. A large 1.5-litre jar of Wolski dill pickles, which are on prominent display beside the deli, costs $5.19.

K&K’s clientele used to be primarily European, but Walker says that’s all changed in the past few years.

“There’s a lot of newer, younger people coming in,” he says. “People come from the university, because it’s so close. In the summer we’ll make up some wings and go through maybe 400 in a couple of days.”

So if you’ve got a deer carcass stuffed in your freezer that you don’t quite know what to do with, maybe it’s time to pay Tyler a call.