Firstly, please accept our thanks for visiting our web-site and allow us to introduce ourselves. Individually we are Gerry & Terane and together we are Baku Bangers, a small sausage making operation in Baku, Azerbaijan. Baku Bangers produces a wide assortment of 'western style' sausages, black pudding and a small range of regional pies which we, on a personal level, enjoy greatly and hope that you our clients, take as much pleasure in as we do.
Gerry arrived for the first time in Azerbaijan in the latter part of 1999 and was soon to find his wife, and currrently sausage making partner Terane, in the somewhat offbeat capital city Baku. From the outset it was obvious that there were certain things which were just not available in Baku despite Citimart, the expat oriented, Indian run Supermarket which makes a brave attempt at providing the comforts of home, at a price. Gerry, in spite of being a Scot, feels that "The English Breakfast" and a number of other staple dishes are not complete without a 'good banger' and the locally available offerings are far from 'good'. The local, although of Russian origin, 'sasiska' is prepared by boiling and might be seen as a poor substitute for the 'frankfurter' in a humble hotdog whilst the 'banger' replacement sold by Citimart and served, as far as we could tell, in all of the expat bars in Baku is a highly processed frozen item of Kenyan origin and doubtful pedigree; altogether a far from satisfactory situation for sausage lovers. After a couple of years of deprivation, and transportation of British produced sausages to Baku, a friend of ours spotted the website Sausagemaking.org which stimulated our interest in sausagemaking and we started to consider that it might be a worthwhile diversion for Terane and possibly a local source of better quality sausages. Without further ado we purchased a Reber sausage stuffer, some hog and sheeps casings and a couple of diferrent types of sausage seasonings and set off on a journey of discovery. Our first attempts were somewhat unprofessional in comparison to our current product but were still highly edible and this encouraged us in our goal of producing desireable sausages. In spite of being a predominantly muslim country, Azerbaijan has a more than adequate supply of good, if expensive, pork and although happy with the taste and quality of our early production we quickly realised that importing most of our raw materials from the UK was not necessarily the best way forward. Fortunately we were soon able to find a reliable local supplier of quality sheep casings and also started to produce our own blends of seasoning.
The rest as they say is history and currently only two out of our ten varieties of sausages are produced from imported seasoning.
