Enough corned beef to cover St. Patrick’s Day
Douglasville ‘Meat man’ has the secret for curing all kinds of pork, beef, venison and more
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Monday, March 16, 2009
From the outside, Douglasville Retail Meats and Smokehouse looks like one of those barbecue restaurants/general stores/hunting shops you stumble into when you go off-highway on a road trip and need lunch. You know the one: a place where you can buy a pulled pork sandwich, a “hot doe bleat” deer call and a pack of Big Red gum.
But inside, Irish eyes are smiling.
Hyosub Shin/hsin@ajc.com
Smoke gets in his eyes: Dave Widaski is preparing lots of corned beef for Tuesday at his Douglasville Retail Meats & Smokehouse.
Hyosub Shin/hsin@ajc.com
Smoke gets in his eyes: Dave Widaski is preparing lots of corned beef for Tuesday at his Douglasville Retail Meats & Smokehouse.
For starters, there is this Irish blessing hanging on the wall:
“May the road rise to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, the rains fall soft upon your fields and, until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand.”
If that’s not Irish enough, there’s corned beef. Lots of corned beef. Over 1,000 pounds of corned beef.
“It might be too much,” laughs Dave Widaski, who personally cured all this beef. “But that’s good news. Whatever I can’t sell I’ll make into pastrami. I rub it with garlic and black pepper and stick it in the smokehouse.”
For now, though, a refrigerator case filled to the brim with vacuum-sealed packages of corned beef on one side and with whole heads of cabbage on the other stands front and center by the entrance. You can’t help but walk into this fascinating deli and not plan your menu for St. Patrick’s Day. You barely notice the treasure trove of house deli meats — bacon, smoked sausages, fresh sausages and cured hams — that lay beyond.
A born ‘meat man’
“I know my name doesn’t sound Irish, but I am. Polish and Irish,” says Widaski, a 47-year-old Texan who opened this butcher shop and deli in late 2006 and then bought Findley’s Butcher Shop in Acworth. “My mom’s last name was Connolly, and I grew up with all kinds of Irish food. We always had corned beef and cabbage on St. Paddy’s Day and New Year’s, and we had lots of Irish stew.”
Widaski’s grandparents were Texas ranchers, and as a child he grew up helping them process meats and stuff sausages into casings. He grew up to be a “meat man” who traveled to New York to study meat processing with some of the city’s best kosher butchers. Eventually he became a regional meat supervisor for the Winn-Dixie and Save Rite chain of supermarkets. The company transferred him to Atlanta shortly before pulling out of this market.
This half-Irishman — who’s tall and broad-shouldered, with an auburn tint to his hair — holds up a pristine, pink brick of corned beef and says, “So, I’ve got to tell you, this is a kosher recipe.”
He explains that bottom round or eye of round can be corned, but that kosher butchers only use the animal’s forequarters — specifically the brisket — in observance of dietary laws. And there is something magical about brisket corned in a garlic-heavy brine.
Blissful bacon
Yet Widaski’s maple-cured bacon is something he definitely did not learn at the hand of a kosher butcher. He offers a fat slice fresh off the griddle, a slice suffused with a canny balance of sweetness, salt and smoke.
Widaski starts with fresh kurobuta pork bellies, then subjects them to the ministrations of a terrifying-looking small device covered with dozens of piranha-sharp teeth that scores the meat. Then it goes into a tumbler filled with brine, where it will spend five days slowly expanding in a vacuum-sealed environment. When Widaski releases the vacuum, the meat sucks in the brine. Then the bellies go the smokehouse, emerging as bacon.
The smokehouse — a closed chamber behind a reinforced steel door — is the center of operations. Widaski produces an enormous variety of smoked meats, including venison salami, smoked chicken, St. Louis style ribs and kabano — a thin, Polish-style “snacking stick” that’s like a Slim Jim, but better.
But for now, Widaski has turned his attention to the task at hand — corning enough beef to get Douglasville and its environs through St. Patrick’s Day with all the corned beef and cabbage anyone could ask for.
ONLINE: For more about the meats and lunch service at Douglasville Retail Meats and Smokehouse, check out John Kessler’s blog at blogs.ajc.com/food-and-more.
