That’s right. Salad sausage.

The humble sausage has had a pretty good run as a great way to get kids to eat pork and beef. A dab of tomato sauce and perhaps some mash and hey presto, dinner is served. There’s been numerous tweaks to the magic  sausage  recipe over the years which butcher’s generally kept to themselves, each slightly different from shop to shop and outsiders never really knowing what was actually in them.

The humble snag became something of a gourmet delight.

Rosemary and feta, chicken and basil, the baked dinner sausage, Thai sausages, vegemite sausages, bacon and egg sausages – but until now no salad sausage.

What sounds like both a meat lover’s nightmare and the ultimate contradiction for a vegetarian, the salad sausage is the brainchild of Danny Searl from Clarence Town Butchery.

His suggestion was greeted with initial nose squishing disapproval by his colleagues.

After all, we know from The Simpsons, you don’t win friends with salad.

But once it was made, cooked and tasted, Danny’s creation won over any salad sausage skeptics.

It also won over the customers, quickly becoming the best selling sausage in the busy shop.

And then it won over the crowd at the Gresford Show.

Danny’s sausage won the people’s choice award at the Gresford Show earlier this month with the winning sash and trophy proudly sitting in the meat cabinet alongside the salad sausages.

The store is owned by Joel and Chelsea Butler and Lyn and John Harvey – none of whom are butchers – and rely on the skills and expertise of Danny in the shop.

Chelsea said she was “horrified” when she saw the salad sausages in the display cabinet.

“Danny said “trust me” and because everyone had raved about his Christmas hams and his honey cheese and chilli cabana I knew he had a good track record,” she said.

Chelsea is also happy her five year-old daughter and three-year-old twins get their fix of salad veggies and are none the wiser.

“His little inventions really go off,” she said.

Twenty-year-old Danny estimates he would make between 100 and 150 kilos of sausages a week.

“There were two to three flavours (of sausage)  in the shop and it got a bit boring making them all the time,” says an unassuming Danny.

The sausage contains lettuce, tomato, capsicum, onion, beetroot, cucumber, mushroom, garlic and beef.

“You have to cut them small enough to go through the sausage machine but big enough to get the taste,” he said.

They come in both thick and thin style sausage and are described simply as “delicious” by those who have tried them – including this writer.

“At first they (customers) wondered what a salad was doing in a butcher shop,” he laughed.

“They are like “oh really, okay I’ll try it”.”

Then they come back for more.

Danny lives in Maitland and started his apprenticeship at a Raymond Terrace butcher shop after he finished at Dungog High School before gaining his qualifications at Clarence Town.

He plans on entering his salad sausage in the upcoming sausage king competition.