South Australia’s Fritz and Sauce

Fritz and Sauce is a sandwich from Australia, especially liked by children, consisting of a few slices of a cold cut very much like bologna with an Australian tomato sauce similar to ketchup, on buttered white bread. Seems simple, right?

The devil is in the details though.

“Fritz” as a term for a German-inspired bologna-like forcemeat is used only in the state of South Australia. In other parts of Australia, terms like Devon or Polony or Luncheon might be used to describe a similar product. According to the Australian Food Timeline site, it was referenced in print as early as 1885 and was introduced by a butcher named John Lee, but soon spread to other butchers in Adelaide and across Fritz is sometimes called “Bung Fritz” if that specific version of Fritz is contained in a sheep bung casing that’s generally been dyed orange; other versions include Smiley Fritz, featuring dyed sections of the sausage that are arranged so that a cheeful face appears when it’s sliced, similar to German products known in Ireland and the UK as Billy Roll, Billy Bear, etc.

There’s even a Bung Fritz Appreciation Society in South Australia, though by their website the organization appears less active than it once was. They claim that they only eat Fritz, not Devon… on a page that also suggests that “Fritz” is synonymous with Devon. Some say it’s the sheep bung casing that differentiates Fritz from Devon, though not every Fritz is Bung Fritz. Another site insists that while Devon refers to “a type of processed meat sausage,” fritz means “the state of being defective.” Clearly, whatever language model that website operates under must be on the fritz. Still, confusion reigns. In 2017, on what was apparently a slow news day, a Daily Mail Australian correspondent reported on a man who posted an angry rant on the supermarket Woolworths Facebook page, complaining that they were selling Fritz as Devon.

So does any bologna-like sausage become Fritz when it crosses into South Australia? If so, does Fritz also become Devon or Polony or bologna when it leaves the state? I do strive for authenticity, inasmuch as that is possible when cultures change over time and attitudes shift, cultural dishes are adapted to changing circumstances and tastes. I want to get things right.

But this is bologna and ketchup on white bread. I shouldn’t have to work that hard at it.

Regardless, I started the month going to Gene’s Sausage Shop in Chicago, looking for inspiration, wondering if I might find some precursor to Fritz, an original German product that seemed to possibly have some sort of genetic relationship to the South Australian delicacy. Few if any of the “slicing sausages” I guess you’d say at Gene’s–cold cuts like bologna, that is–come in natural casings, let alone sheep bung. However, one stood out to me as an outside shot: Gelbwurt, which translates directly as “yellow sausage.”

Upon further review of the ingredients–and moreso, on first tasting it–I realized this probably wasn’t the missing link I was looking for. I have searched and searched and never found a good recipe for Fritz, but nothing I’ve read about it indicates that it contains veal, or that it would feature lemon zest as a flavor. It’s terrific, don’t get me wrong. It reminds me of the veal Weiẞwurst I used to get from the old Delicatessen Meyer in Lincoln Square, before they closed and were reopened as Gene’s Sausage Shop, or the similar sausage I’d buy down the street at Lincoln Quality Meat Market before they closed as well, only in a finer-ground, sliceable form. This will not go to waste–I’ll run through it quickly. But I suppose I may as well give it the Fritz & Sauce treatment and see how it goes.

I had planned ahead, and ordered 2 different brands of Australian tomato sauce, Fountain and MasterFoods. I had been thinking that I would taste-test them side by side and decide which I liked better but having now done so, along with Heinz ketchup, while there are articulable differences between each of them (Heinz is the thickest of the three, with the brashest flavor, while Fountain is smooth, thin, and surprisingly sweet and MasterFoods is thicker than Fountain, less uniform in texture, has a more noticeable presence of warm spices, and is probably the sweetest of the three) they’re close enough that it’s hard to pick which one I like the most. To me, it’s all just… ketchup.

So I assembled a sandwich as though I were making a Fritz and Sauce–white bread from a grocery store bakery, less squishy than the standard American commercial variety but unchallenging, butter on both slices of bread, enough of the Gelbwurst to cover the bread, and a squiggly bead of the MasterFoods tomato sauce. Combining these ingredients in this way was… it was fine. The bakery bread was less moist than a commercial loaf, in a good way, with a chewier crust and a decent flavor. Combining the Gelbwurst and the tomato sauce deadened the unique but subtle flavors of each a bit–the warm spices of the tomato sauce, the citrusy element to the sausage–but the combined flavor was good, and though I may not have added quite enough tomato sauce, the butter kept the sandwich from being too dry. It was a solid combination, but nothing I would rush to repeat.

I really wanted to try and find Fritz though, or failing that, to make something equivalent to it. The Australian restaurant(s) in Chicago, Bangaroos Aussie Pies, are focused on the savory hand pies popular in Australia and many nations of the British commonwealth, and did not appear to have any South Australian lunchmeats on hand. I pivoted to searching for sheep bung, the proper casing for Fritz. I could not find sheep bung available as a product in the US. Sheep intestines are readily available, but are far too small–I used them recently making chipolatas and they are hot dog-sized casings. I can usually order beef bungs with a couple weeks lead time–I have used them before making bologna and similar sausages–but they run 5-6″ in diameter, while sheep bungs run 3-3 1/2″. Finally I ordered beef bung regardless and waited for it to arrive.

Weeks later, with the short month of February nearing its end, I reached out to the supplier to find out the status of my order. It wasn’t going to ship for yet another week, and I canceled, requesting a refund.

I provide this background in large part to make excuses for myself. The “Fritz” I made was not great. It wasn’t particularly bad, either. But in a rush, I cobbled together a recipe using German-style bologna as a starting point, adding Liquid Smoke rather than planning to smoke it, and using my sous vide apparatus–with which I’m less familiar than I’d like to be–in an attempt to hold it at 150 degrees Fahrenheit for 4 hours. I stuffed it into an 88mm artificial fibrous casing, first dying the casing red. Why red? OG Tribunal contributor Crit, herself from Australia, had told me that Devon casings were usually red and I suppose I was feeling home team solidarity.

What went wrong? As I said, I was in a hurry. The Fritz was too long to fit into the specially-lidded container I usually use with the sous vide, so I used a larger plastic tub without a lid instead, and the sous vide struggled to bring the water up to temperature. In a rush, I neglected to vacuum-seal the sausage, instead placing it directly into the water. The red dye was leeched from the casing, and some of the salt was pulled out of the sausage as well as a result.

Still, it looks and tastes a lot like bologna, if a leaner, low-sodium version of bologna.

Since the sausage is less salty, the tomato sauce–Fountain in this case–has a chance to stand out a bit more. The leaner, denser beef-and-pork Fritz provided a more substantial filling then the softer, fattier Gelbwurst had, and the butter on the bread made up for any lack of fattiness in the sausage. Again, it was fine.

But you know what?

It was bologna and ketchup on buttered white bread. There is nothing wrong with bologna and ketchup on buttered white bread. I imagine that it is, as my research suggests, popular with the kids. But I have a hard time believing that there’s anything particularly special about South Australian Fritz that elevates the experience above, just… bologna and ketchup on buttered white bread.

And our expert in all-things-Australia Crit agrees. I asked her what separated Fritz from Devon, or Polony, or Belgium or Luncheon or just plain old Bologna. “People from Adelaide like to be different,” she told me. “It’s really all the same.”