Source: Radio New Zealand
A jerry-rigged backyard invention has turned into sizzling hot property for a retired farmer turned entrepreneur.
Alan Dyer has worked out a way to brown sausages evenly, ensuring they don’t roll around on the barbecue.
Using piece of wire, he shaped a device that keeps snags in place while they brown and then helps to roll them all over in an orderly fashion to crisp up the reverse side.
And so, the Sossbosser was born.
Having refined the culinary accessory, it’s now attracting international attention.
Dyer told Checkpoint that coming up with the Sossbosser was a light bulb moment.
“When I first had that unruly sausage floating around the barbecue, misbehaving, and I fashioned this U shape out of a piece of number 8 wire, yeah it was quite a ‘gotcha’ moment to see that renegade rollaway finally under control.”
Dyer said he got annoyed that he couldn’t put the sausage where he wanted it to go because it kept rolling back onto the side that was already cooked.
After he promoted the device on social media there was some international interest, he said.
After appearing on a Chicago TV channel and with the help of some viral videos, the number of people ordering Sossbossers skyrocketed, he said.
“At one stage there we had to actually shut the website down because we couldn’t handle it and I was a bit concerned about taking money off people and not being able to provide them with product … but anyway we got through that.”
One of the videos “baited the Aussies a bit”, he said.
“We told them, you know we’ve invented this and we invented the flat white and we invented a few other things and they kind of took a bit of umbrage at that.”
But that worked out because people engaged with the post and it ended up getting several million views, he said.
To cook a good sausage you need to cook it slowly so that it hardly sizzles at all and to cook it gently all the way around so it’s totally brown, he said.
“Do not pierce the skin because you want to retain all that juice in there, I mean that’s the flavour that the butcher’s gone to all that trouble to put in there.”
There should be no white stripes or “zebra sausages”, he said, because that meant they were only semi-cooked.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
