Photos by Linda Campos

Art Welch has always had a thing for sausage. As a kid growing up in a small town in upstate New York, he recalls helping cook sausages and peppers at the annual barbecue fundraiser for the volunteer fire department on which his father served. Kielbasa and kraut was a family staple meal. These days, he loves firing up the grill and all that it entails, from cold beer to corn hole. 

Beyond the nostalgia and feel-good backyard associations, Welch takes sausage quite seriously. As a student at the Culinary Institute of America in the early ’90s, his charcuterie class opened up to him the world of pâtés, terrines, hot dogs and sausages. “It’s challenging to do it right, and if you can nail down charcuterie, that’s something,” he said. And sausage, in particular, offers an opportunity to play around, something Welch revels in as a chef. “You can take different ingredients and turn it into something really great,” he says.

As a Boston-area chef for more than two decades, Welch regularly featured homemade sausages on his menus early on. But his most recent gigs running four restaurants in the fast-paced Fenway area weren’t a good fit for producing labor-intensive sausage. Welch sought out sausage elsewhere, but he couldn’t find anything to replicate his own recipes. “I knew there was the potential for product that would make chefs as happy as consumers,” Welch says. 

Perceiving an opportunity, Welch began having conversations with purveyors and people in the sausage industry and then secured space in Newmarket Square. Soon, he was serving up his new product to restaurant patrons and distributing samples to purveyors and friends. From the start, the feedback was encouraging, with some purveyors signing on before he’d officially launched the company. “I saw an opportunity to grow this idea and for my products to hit the market and do well,” he recalls. 

Sixteen months after Welch hatched the idea, Pig Rock Sausages had its first batch of gourmet sausages ready for distribution in May 2016. By February 2020, things were going so well that Welch left the restaurant industry and committed full-time to the business. 

Pig Rock Sausages—christened by his kids during a hike in Milton’s Blue Hills on Pig Rock Path—uses fresh, quality ingredients, with no additives or preservatives. All the pork is 100% pork butt; all the poultry, 100% thigh meat. No trim. “I’m very picky about what I put in my food, because I don’t want to cook with something I don’t want to eat,” says Welch. 

Welch’s lineup is innovative, with some ingredients sourced from New England, such as chicken and maple sausage featuring syrup from Ben’s Sugar Shack in Temple, NH; and chicken and apple sausage with cider from Wood’s Cider Mill in Springfield, VT. There’s also turkey and cranberry (what Welch deems “Thanksgiving in a sausage”); merguez (a North African lamb sausage made with fresh garlic, cilantro and harissa); and chipotle chicken and lime. And after many requests, he’s acquiesced and even included the more standard Italian hot and sweet sausage. 

As for technique, Welch says it’s pretty basic: Start with fresh, quality ingredients. Then it’s all about ensuring the right temperature and good emulsification. 

But for all the success of Pig Rock Sausages, no sooner had Welch gone all-in with the business in the winter of 2020 than he found himself scrambling to make a Plan B like so many other small business owners in the face of the COVID-19. In response, he went from a model of between 80 and 85% wholesale clientele to nearly 100% retail. “I had to change the way we do things,” Welch says. “Once I got my bearings, I focused on new retail accounts. I am fortunate that I was able to pivot. I was already involved in retail and could grow that part of the business.”

pigrocksausages.com 

This story appeared in the Fall/Holiday 2020 issue.