If meat tastes good, it’s not low fat

'My grandfather was a very wise man," says the German fleischmeister.

"After school, with no idea of what I should do, my grandfather sat me down and said: 'There are three things that humans have to do: eat, drink and shit. Choose a profession in one of those areas and you will have work in the best and worst of times.' I had no interest in plumbing, so I became a butcher."

It took an eight-year apprenticeship - days on the job and nights of study - for Roland Reichelt to qualify as a meat master or fleischmeister. A fleischmeister is trained to slaughter, debone, select, smoke and process meats according to age-old traditions and recipes. This designation, the highest qualification a butcher can achieve and a craft that can only be formally certificated in Europe, is becoming as rare as roast beef.

I visited Roland and his wife, Yolanda, at the Bavarian Butchery in Florence Nzama Street (formerly Prince Alfred Street) in Durban. It's an odd place to find a delicatessen, surrounded as it is by motor dealerships, wheel-and-tyre outlets and the occasional clothing store. The butchery has been operating from the same spot for 26 years, and Roland and Yolanda bought the shop when the original fleischmeister retired a year ago.

Inside the butchery, it's another world. Tubes of salami hang from the wall, the fridge counter is packed with all things meaty. For a carnivore like me, the smell is sublime. Roland is a great bear of a man; comfortable with a cleaver, surrounded by schweinbach, bierschinken, blutwurst and fleischwurst, he is in his element.

"I love what I do," he says. "From the very beginning I took to this job. Working with meat is like surfing the internet. You try a new process, a new direction and eventually you end up in a new place with a new product."

The craft also satisfied his wanderlust. He left Germany as a young man and travelled the world, moving from Tonga to Fiji to Nicaragua and Costa Rica with spells in the US and Thailand. As a fleischmeister, work was always easy to come by. He'd stay for six months, make money and then move on. His last destination was South Africa,13 years ago, where he met Yolanda, the woman he calls his soul mate.

In SA he initially worked for a large meat manufacturer. "There were so many preservatives in the processed meat, so much starch and soya, that I felt like a baker, not a butcher. I missed the meat."

Six months in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands making his own meats - no preservatives except salt and curing salt for colour - and selling them at local markets and through the numerous delis scattered across the Midlands was a dream come true. But the chance to own a butchery in the middle of Durban was irresistible.

"The humidity is so good for the meat," he says. I can only nod, because my mouth is full of thinly sliced prosciutto. In fact, there's a lot of tasting going on in the Bavarian Butchery. Aside from Yolanda plying customers with slivers of roast pork and slices of Hungarian salami, Roland samples his products every morning.

" If it's not perfect it doesn't go out. I don't believe in reworking anything. And old meat goes to the dog."

So what should I look for when selecting processed meat? First off, he says, anything called "low fat" is a lie. If it's meat and it tastes good, it can't be low fat. "The taste comes from the fat," he says. "The secret is, don't stuff your face with it - a slice or two is enough. It's about quality, not quantity."

Look for a nice, fresh, meaty colour, and slightly higher prices because of the class of meat used and the cost of importing the casings and the spices. On salami, he tells me, a dry white mould is good. A wet mould that may be slightly green with black spots is dangerous.

And the fleischmeister's last bit of sage advice on the subject? "Never trust a skinny sausage-maker."