Dennis is king of the mighty banger

We will be giving away some fantastic prizes during the week, including hampers of local food, dinner at top restaurants and top cookery books.

As this is British Sausage Week too, Melissa Thompson starts off with a visit to sausage maestro Dennis Spurr, who helps her create an article to make headlines - the Dorset Echo Exclusive

IF DENNIS Spurr could take one thing to a desert island it would be Tom Jones. Not the curly haired, fluffy-chested Welsh crooner but his favourite ever sausage, the pork and leek Tom Jones.

Dennis is the owner of the Fantastic Sausage Factory with shops in Weymouth, Dorchester and Yeovil. He's been a butcher for 35 years, although his enthusiasm for his cherished meaty parcels might lead you to think he discovered them only yesterday.

Think of him as the Gilly Goulden of the sausage world and you get the idea. And with today marking the beginning of British Sausage Week, surely no one is better suited to act as ambassador to the mighty banger than Dennis.

To him a sausage is not simply minced meat encased in skin that is eaten to fill a gap. It is a top-notch foodstuff that should be celebrated and enjoyed in its own right.

That is why you my see him and his staff outside the store offering chunks of juicy sausages to passers-by.

"Sausages used to have a bad reputation," said Dennis. "There are still many poor quality sausages and they don't necessarily look any different to a good sausage but you notice it with the taste. That's why we do the tastings so people can see what a proper sausage tastes like."

In the late 1960s, living in London, Dennis was taught how to make sausages by a 'grumpy 70-year-old Polish man'. After spending decades progressing through the trade he ended up controlling the biggest chain of independent butchers in Britain which owned the largest butchers in the world in Croydon. Disillusioned with the direction the company was taking he moved to Dorset and started a shop in Dorchester.

He added: "That shop was successful so we so opened up another in Weymouth in 1998, which was then the Dorset Meat Company.

"Then when foot and mouth happened, people stopped eating meat. They had seen all these images of animals being burnt and so they stopped eating it. Somewhere along the line, I don't know where - but it probably involved me and a bottle of brandy - I came up with the Fantastic Sausage Factory."

The most striking thing about Dennis's sausages is the names. The Beckham Bender (the name comes from a 'championship' sausage of cuts of pork united with posh spices; The Peking Porker ('a sweet and sour pork sensation'); The Wurzel (it has apple in it) and the The Vampire Slayer (garlic) are just some of them. Inspiration can come from all sorts of directions.

The Ploughman was born after Dennis enjoyed the traditional meal for his lunch one day. Maria, his wife, suggested that some of the ingredients might taste nice in a sausage, and she was proved right. He said that he and Maria have spent many an hour thinking up the wording that accompanies the sausages.

"I like to make them interesting," said Dennis. "Food should be fun, it should have the 'smileability' factor."

Food may be fun but what about the sausage-making itself? As I was to discover, it is an art. You may scoff, but the slippery little things are much harder to make than you might think.

After making several, or at least attempting to, I will never again dismiss lightly the sight of a handcrafted sausage plait hanging in a butcher's shop window. Instead I will look upon them with awe, marvelling at the uniform yet still unique quality each of the little beauties boasts.

Maybe it was just me, but sausages never held any sway as a 'crafted' foodstuff. As Dennis said, maybe it's because they've had a bad reputation in the past. Myths abound about their content being nothing more that the unspeakable leftover bits and what is collected from the floor.

But after spending a couple of hours surrounded by Dennis's enthusiasm for bangers - he's a self-confessed 'sausage anorak' - plus the odd chef promoting their merits, I am a changed person. This was also the result of sampling different ones in the shop and being bowled over by how tasty and how individual each one was.

Dennis had set up a small sausage-making machine behind the front counter in the shop. Considering they sell more than 150,000lbs of sausages every year Nathan, their resident maker, cannot afford to stop making them so he was out at the back with a bigger machine.

I washed my hands before I settled to watch Dennis show me how it's done. There was a responsibility on my shoulders, as I was holding the torch for this very newspaper. We were going to create the Dorset Echo Exclusive , a fine sausage made with Dorset Blue Vinny and on sale throughout British Sausage Week.

The brief was simple - the ingredients had to be local. So we choose Blue Vinny Cheese, country herbs, tomatoes and chives and the Echo Exclusive was born.

The meat is mainly shoulder, as other cuts are too fatty. We were using pig's intestines for the casing - is it a coincidence or cruel irony that their guts are just the right size for the perfect sausage?

Lamb's intestines are used for chipolatas as they are thinner, but they are only made at Christmas here because they are fiddly to make.

Dennis took the 100ft-long intestine and placed it over the machine's nozzle. Your leg presses against a lever that controls the flow of meat, and the speed is set with a dial.

He pressed, the meat ejected and a long, smooth snake rapidly began to take shape.

Easy, I thought.

Now there are different degrees of being wrong about something, and my unfounded confidence soon put me in the 'way-off' bracket.

The trick is to use your index finger and thumb as a 'brake' to control the flow of meat. I started off OK, and then my sausages began looking on the chubby side. "Relax your hold a bit," said Dennis. So I did, a little too much, resulting in thin sections. From then my 'snake' began to look as if it had eaten small animals at regular intervals. Fat sections were interspersed with stick-thin bits.

Dennis was great though. He kept telling me I was doing fine, giving me advice and showing me the way. He even said I could have a job, although he soon retracted the offer when he saw my linking skills.

Linking is the bit you do when the skin has been filled and you have to forge the individual sausage by a series of twists and turns. Like the Rubik's Cube, you know what the end product's supposed to look like but getting there, to mangle a metaphor, is a whole different kettle of fish. Dennis did an entire link in about 20 seconds. I went for about five seconds at a time before getting tangled up and looking pleadingly to Dennis to sort it out.

"I'm not sure how you managed to get them like that," he said as he went about untangling a particularly strange formation.

It didn't get any better than that really. If you looked at my sausages from a distance, let's say 30ft, they would look passable.

However, The Dorset Echo Exclusive (made properly by Dennis) will be on sale at The Fantastic Sausage Factory in St Mary's Street, Weymouth, and Hardye Arcade, Dorchester, all this week.

TOMORROW in the Dorset Echo we look at the food that grows all around us but is often ignored. Melissa goes foraging in Dorset's hedgerows in search of fruit, berries and herbs...