Nick + Pipers sausages on James Martin.
ITV Christmas Day, 1pm 🎅
Catch Nick on James Martin’s Christmas show from 1pm on Christmas Day. There’s a 10-minute feature filmed in the shop, plus James cooking up a proper sausage sandwich. Follow us on Instagram for news about the launch of our online shop and to see our sausage making secrets!
Serious about Sausages
Best sellers
We are hoping to develop an online store soon! For now visit us in store to try our products.
Our Sausage Story
We started Piper's Artisan Sausages back in 2022 . I was working as a lecturer in the social sciences having gained my PhD in Geographies of food. I was tired of the job and increasingly feeling that I was on the wrong side of the table. I didn't want to teach about and research food from the ivory towers any more. I wanted to live it to contribute something to culture rather than simply to observe.
I have been a cook all my life. Like many kids I used to love baking with my Mum and it was with her encouragement that I learned to cook from a small selection of cookbooks we had. My favourite was Ken Hom's Chinese cookery course. Following those recipes I was amazed that you could achieve such special and distinctive results by combing a small number of ingredients in specific ways. I learned to stir fry, to braise, to deep fry and to steam and learned what each technique did to the ingredient.
Ken taught me the importance of technique and integrity of ingredients. My family shared those values too. I could see from here that there was a world of magic to be found by exploring and learning techniques and constantly trying new ingredients. Learning culinary methods provided the basis for both faithful recreation and the potential for endless creativity. Those, I realise, are the two defining practices at Pipers.
Of course none of this explains why it was a sausage business that we started or even who the 'we' is. I shall explain. Louise and I used to go to Bakewell to buy Austrian sausages before we got married and had an unruly amount of kids. Around about this time I was also exploring sausage making as one of my lengthy obsessions.
I'd been obsessed with fishing, continental philosophy, guitar, kayaking and many more but sausage making, especially continental style sausages, were very difficult for me to master. The Kasekrainer in particular eluded me. How could I consistently reproduce this snappy, smoky, gooey cheese-filled beast for myself?
I tried and failed many times and might well have given up had I not purchased the Olympia provisions book by Elias Cairo and Meredith Erickson. Here I was again, like that 10 year old boy with the Chinese cookbook and barely any knowledge. I completely submitted to the process and followed the steps faithfully.
When it worked and I snapped that first sausage in my hands hot off the smoker I felt the magic flood back into my life. If this was possible, what else was? I started making sausages for my friends and offering them as gifts to local chefs. Louise could see I'd developed a proper set of skills and these were valued by a wider audience. She then very matter of factly said to me "you should open a sausage shop". So we did.
