Big rush to grab festive foods

A few local businesses are making sure Albany families have the freshest and tastiest produce to serve up for their Christmas feasts.

A succulent glazed leg of ham and big juicy prawns are stars of many dining tables at this time of year.

Albany is no exception, with the locally smoked hams from Spencer Park Variety Meats already sold out — all three tonnes of them.

Great Southern Seafoods is also getting ready to dish out literally tonnes of fish and crustaceans in the coming days.

Spencer Park Variety Meats owner Jason Lee said their smoked hams sold out every year.

“Typically, we do orders for our hams for the month of November for four weeks and then pretty much sell out in that time,” he said.

“We make them ourselves and we are the only ones in Albany that do that. Things are flat-out.

“We also do a Christmas menu, which has a seasoned rolled pork loin, a turkey roll and traditionally smoked cooked-on-the-bone ham.”

The hams take four days to make, using the old-fashioned method, with the butchers hand-injecting the meat.

Mr Lee said he believed that was one of the keys to making the tastiest Christmas hams.

“To be able to offer the consumer a local product that is made in-store is a really big plus,” he said.

“The consumer will take the skin off and make their own glaze, score the pork and bake in the oven for 50 minutes, and then you are serving your ham warm at Christmas.”

The store will have 90 per cent of orders picked up on December 23.

At Great Southern Seafoods, punters can beat the rush, with produce snap frozen when it is caught, ready to go into the freezer for Christmas.

Owner Adam Soumelidis said most of the seafood at his store was caught around Albany,

“It is mainly prawns, crayfish and oysters that are sold around Christmas,” he said. “We will also have fresh southern and western crayfish on Christmas Day.

“This time of year, all the supermarkets are selling prawns, but what we do that is different is we only source WA product and it’s also about the size of prawns.”

Mr Soumelidis had a tip about what to look out for when buying prawns.

“A prawn size is done by its count, which is how many prawns to the pound or kilogram,” he said.

“The higher the count, the smaller the prawn and the lower the count, the larger they are.

“Customers should be asking what is the count to the kilo.”

“I try to have my count between 16 and 20 to the pound, which is more of a medium prawn, which is a lot cheaper.

“If you go under a 10 count, they are really huge prawns.”