On a recent Monday morning, trucks line both sides of Olde Wadsworth in downtown Arvada. Their all-terrain tires are caked with mud, and antlers are poking out of the pickup beds. Some drivers have been nursing coffee here since 3 a.m., hoping to be first in line when Steve’s Meat Market opens at 9. For big-game hunters, this is the last stop after a successful autumn weekend.
By 9, the line of trucks spills onto the street. The lot manager hands each driver — some still in their camouflage — a clipboard with an order form to start filling out while they wait. One at a time, they pull into the drive-through garage where a team of three employees scurries to open the back of the truck and unload the field- dressed elk or antelope, hanging it on a track-mounted meat hook to be weighed.
The hunter (or, in some cases, his helpful but overdressed wife) squeezes past the hanging carcass and into the smokehouse-scented building. Here, they discuss their order with Steve or Karen Hein, the husband-and-wife team who know many of their customers by name.
“The antelope are crazy. It’s the best I’ve seen in years,” Steve greets one customer. “361 pounds! Is that a bull?” Karen asks another. Together, the customer and one of the Heins confirm the quantity and quality of the product coming in, the yield the customer can expect, and how he wants his meat. Steaks? Roasts? Jalapeño jerky?
For first-timers, there is a tasting of all the sausage and jerky products set up on a nearby countertop. “I’ve had some of your summer sausage. It’s good,” decides one newbie.
“We don’t call you. Please don’t call us. It will be ready for you one week from today, we promise,” Karen ends each meeting before quickly turning to the next customer with a smile. The phone is ringing off the hook, and the line of trucks now extends around the block. At times processing up to 4000 animals during the peak season of mid-August to mid- December, Steve’s receiving room is a busy place.
The production room is its own traffic jam of activity. Here, the elk or antelope are singed with a torch to remove any remaining hair and then pressure-washed. Once clean they are rolled into a cooler until one of seven de-boners, who have been working since 4 a.m., frees up. Focused and silent, they each take an animal from the cooler and lay it out on their workstation, removing the meat from the bone and separating the primal cuts from the trim.
The primal cuts, such as sirloin, top round, or roasts, go to the steak room, where they are inspected according to the customer’s order and then vacuum packed and frozen. The trim, which comes from the shoulders and neck meat, gets made into sausage or jerky.
For these custom products, Steve’s Meat Market brings in 27,000 pounds of spices a year, all of which are blended in-house according to guarded family recipes, some dating back to Steve’s German and Italian ancestors. From bratwurst to salami to teriyaki jerky, elk, antelope, venison or buffalo is being ground, slowly dehydrated or hickory-smoked into 20 kinds of sausage or jerky. Last year, 180,000 pounds of product were processed.
In the instance of Steve’s fresh sausage products, the lean game trim is mixed with pork jowl to provide some fat. Together, the game and pork are fed through a grinder, mixed for three minutes with spices and then squeezed into old-school sausage bags.
While ribbons of antelope fall from the grinder against a backdrop of hanging carcasses, the sausage stuffer, Daniel Caswell, is musing about the benefits of being located on the Front Range, “a geography where access to wild game merges with the farming and agricultural heritage of the Midwest.” Meanwhile, Scott Pike, the smokehouse manager, is hanging his just-smoked link chorizo to dry.
While the link chorizo and a few of the 19 other products are reserved only for hunters bringing in their kill, there is some good news for the rest of us. Many of the Hein’s secret-recipe sausages can be purchased from a retail space at the front of their building.
By law, the wild game that comes in from a hunter is processed and goes back to the hunter, while the game that is sold at Steve’s retail counter has to be USDA-inspected meat. That means it comes from commercial game farms, not from the wild.
But take their fresh elk chorizo, for example. Perfectly spiked with red pepper and a touch of apple cider vinegar acidity, its complex elk flavor will have your palate convinced that it came from some babbling brook by way of a muddy pickup truck.
