A day in the life of a butcher
Butchers at Dale's Supermarket spend all day with meat
By JENNIFER WILSON
News editor
The famous Hillsboro sausage — it's loved by locals as well as people who live time zones away.
People order it from the East Coast. They drive miles for a sandwich at the Arts and Crafts Fair.
And there's just one place where it's made: Dale's Supermarket. That's where Bob Jantz, Eugene Steiner, and Dorothy Parks spend all day with meat as grocery store butchers.
These experienced meat handlers have decades of butchering experience among them. Together they make sausage, cut steaks, grind hamburger — whatever it takes to keep their customers satisfied.
Today is Monday, the beginning of the workweek for all three. Usually it's just two of them at a time behind the meat counter, but today there's a full crew.
When they first come in at 7 a.m., cleaning is the first item on the agenda. One worker must complete a sanitation checklist, making sure everything's spotless. They also have to document the temperature in the coolers. The state health inspector makes a visit once or twice a week.
After the cleaning is done, it's time to get down to business.
First, the crew checks out the morning orders from local businesses. Many area organizations such as the local school district and hospital buy meat from Dale's, and that could mean several pounds of hamburger or a meat and cheese tray.
Many out-of-towners call ahead too so that when they get to Hillsboro, their sausage will be ready.
"We do a pretty good percentage of sales from out-of-town shoppers," Bob Jantz says.
And true enough, in a few minutes Jantz hears of a non-local order: a buyer from Lindsborg wants 30 pounds of sausage, and he'll be down today to pick it up.
Right now, Jantz is busy cutting apart sections of thick chuck roast. As he cuts out each massive piece, he lays it onto a roll of brown paper. Once a row is laid out, he cuts out the paper around the shape of the meat. That way, when the meat is stacked, it won't turn brown — although the color doesn't mean the meat is bad, Jantz says.
On the other side of the room, Eugene Steiner is weighing out another order: 30 pounds of sausage for a woman in Pennsylvania. He will wrap each tube of sausage into a one-pound "coil," then wrap that in white paper. The whole order will be frozen in a styrofoam cooler.
But the store doesn't handle the actual shipping of the order — usually a local relative will do that, Steiner says.
Sausage is by far the biggest seller at the meat counter. In a year, Dale's usually sells 50,000 pounds of it, Jantz says.
The sausage-making process usually starts on Tuesdays. That's when the workers take ten-pound tubes of sausage meat from the cooler to season, grind, and "liquid smoke." Finally, the mixture is stuffed into the sausage tubes.
It's a two-day process that results in 800 to 1,000 pounds of sausage a week. And that number goes up during the holiday season as families buy sausage to give as gifts.
As Jantz, Steiner, and Parks work behind the counter, customers trickle up one at a time. Friday and Saturday are usually the heaviest days, Jantz says. There's usually a steady stream all day long.
"You can never guess it right," Jantz said.
Up front in the deli case — which stays a frosty 32 to 34 degrees — there's a broad range of meat, from chuck roast to round steak to pork chops.
The rest of the goods in the meat case, such as frozen chicken patties, corn dogs, and lunch meats, come from a warehouse distributor.
All the beef is cut at Dale's after being shipped there in 80-pound boxes. Gone is the day when the store received entire sides of the cow.
The store could buy pre-cut meat, Jantz says, but customers prefer to choose their own cut of meat. That's something Jantz has mastered after 25 years of butchering at Dale's.
"Gene" Steiner also has a history in the butchering field. Years ago, Steiner used to travel with his brother from farm to farm as a country butcher. The two would visit a farm a day, butchering around 12 to 15 cattle per day.
"By 5 o'clock we were done," Steiner says.
And after days and days of butchering cows, Steiner is pretty familiar with the animal.
"I could take one apart and put one back together," he says.
Steiner worked in other industries for awhile — in construction, at the donut shop — but something about butchering gets in your blood, he says.
Parks also has a background in butchering. She worked at a meat locker plant and a grocery store before coming to Dale's. Today she's putting together a meat and cheese tray, which is a little less messy than cutting up beef.
"She can just take the cow apart," Steiner says, laughing.
Also lending a hand on the really busy days is owner Dale Franz. He pitches in when needed, Jantz said.
But despite all the behind-the-counter busyness, the workers keep the customer as their priority.
"The customer is the first objective — then we try to do everything else in between," Jantz said.
