Sausage Hang

I think I mentioned Paul Bertolli’s Cooking by Hand before, but it’s worth mentioning again. Reading it makes you want to run off to a Tuscan villa and eat handmade pastas from homegrown wheat all day long. Lately I’ve been obsessing over the salume chapter. How great would it be to make your own prosciutto? Pretty awesome until you read how you have to hang your salted and massaged pork leg in a 40° humidity-controlled room for six months after which you need to clean it and coat it in kidney fat (available at most 7-Elevens) and Italian rice flour and let it hang in a 50° cellar for another six months before it’s ready to eat. Sadly, my temperature and humidity-controlled rooms are in somebody else’s house right now. So I decided to start out on a culinary bunny slope by making fresh sausage. It’s pretty straightforward and requires relatively simple climate control. Thank you, Mr. Pig The first step was buying an 8-pound pork shoulder. Most recipes call for extra back fat but this shoulder had a fair amount of fat through it and it’s not the easiest ingredient to find. Food nerds like McGee say that the back fat has a better texture and melting point but the idea of trimming shoulder fat out and replacing it with back fat seemed wasteful and, more importantly, labor intensive. Of course you need a meat grinder, too, like the attachment for a trusty KitchenAid. But I also needed the sausage stuffing attachment which I picked up at nearby Sur La Table. The store was right next to a bookstore so I poked my head in and perused through Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s Charcuterie. Taken with a spy camera in Barnes & Noble His recipe for hot Italian sausage seemed oddly spiced – i.e., no sage – but who was I to question such a fancy looking cookbook? Back home, I was still dubious. Spice overkill? I decided to mix my spices using the dry weights provided in the recipe, thinking that would be more accurate. But when I mixed my spices with the meat before grinding, it seemed very well…spiced. Again, who was I to question a book endorsed by the great Thomas Keller? Play-Doh for grown ups The grinding was lots of fun. There’s something incredibly satisfying about sending chunks of meat through whirring steels blades. Very Fargo-esque. I probably made a mistake to make sausage on a 100 degree day as you’re supposed to keep everything cold, but it went by pretty quickly. After that it was into the paddle mixer where you mix the meat until it’s cohesive and sticky. Then it was time for a taste. You’re supposed to check at this point to adjust for seasoning but the sausage was spiced and salty I almost went out to buy another hunk of pork to dilute it. I even used less seasoning than the recipe called for. But checking the recipe again, I noticed that their volume-to-mass conversions seemed off. The 8 grams of coriander they called for seemed to be substantially more than the one tablespoon equivalent in the recipe. Turns out, a tablespoon of coriander barely weighs 3 grams. All of weights were heavily overstated. How the hell did that happen? I can’t take out the salt they told me to put in. Who's to blame? Who can I sue? But I soldiered on and got my sausage rig on the mixer and started stuffing away. Here I hit another snag: the KitchenAid attachment sucks ass. The idea is to cram a steady stream of meat into the machine so you can have nice, even sausages but what actually happens is that occasional bits go through the mixer and the rest comes oozing back around the edges of the crammer. At the same time, the sausage casing fills up with air bubbles. More comes out the top than into the casing The other big flaw with the sausage stuffer is that the sausage comes out a foot off the counter which means you constantly have to hold all the sausage as it comes out. You can’t just let it dangle. Vacuum sealed by my lips But after much sweating and hassle, I managed to cram all 8 pounds into pig intestines, packed them in Ziploc bags and got them in the freezer. In the end, they turned out O.K. I still think they’re on the salty side and the coriander is very prominent but everyone seems to like them. They’re juicy, too, so I don’t think I lost anything from omitting the back fat. Maybe it’s not the 30% fat that most recipes call for, but I’ll say it’s in the high-20s. Sliced when frozen makes it perfect for pizza So what are the lessons I learned? Trust Bartoli over Ruhlman. Don’t feel bound by the recipe. I think any kind of seasoned fatty pork will taste pretty good as long as one doesn’t overdo it. Most importantly, I imagine it’s much easier as a two-person operation; one to stuff the meat hopper, the other to handle the sausage. It’s really, really frustrating to do it on your own. And if you can afford it, get a real sausage maker. Screw you, KitchenAid. On my Christmas list

Nouveau Spam

When I was a kid, I loved salami. If us kids were lucky, we’d get it sliced thin from the local deli and I’d stack it high with a ½ inch thick slab of cream cheese on white bread. A snack. Or else I’d just hack off giant hunks a salami, peel off the paper and eat them one after the other. And it was always Gallo Dry Salame (estranged younger brother of Ernest and Julio). It’s not like we had a choice; it was the only brand in town. Gallo Salame and Spam were pretty much all I knew about cured meat products for the first couple decades of my life.

Then in the early-90s, I became aware of the term charcuterie. You know, that trendy food craze that’s only been around since the 15 th century. I remember going to this Frenchy place in West Hollywood, Mimosa, and being dazzled by their charcuterie plate with its crock of mustard and the little cornichons. The rest of the food was not that remarkable but I’d never seen such a variety of pork products. Fat-speckled saucisson sec, aspic coated pâtés, pork rillettes, and other forcemeats I was too intimidated to ask about. I still don’t know much about French cured meats but that didn’t stop me from smuggling seven sausages when I went to the Dordogne a few years ago. La-di-da, aren’t I worldly?

These days, I never hear the word charcuterie. The new hip term seems to be salumi. Same thing, different country. And two names seem to be growing in ubiquity: the first is Paul Bertolli. A former executive chef at Chez Panisse, he latched onto Alice Waters’ slow food/local produce concept and pushed it to the geekiest levels. For example, he’s got a tasting database of 300+ tomato varieties and he mills his own flour for his pasta. I'm guessing he got beat up a lot as a kid. His book is amazing and also completely unrealistic for the home cook. I just don't see myself curing olives in lye anytime soon. But I’m glad that someone nerds out to the extent he does. He started curing his own meats in his restaurant basement for his restaurant, Oliveto, and then refined his techniques to where he created Fra’ Mani, a salumiere that distributes to restaurants and fancypants markets.

It’s very Whole Foods-y – sustainably raised pigs, no antibiotics, handcrafted, etc. Frankly, while it’s fantastic stuff, I haven’t had it enough to differentiate between their Salametto and the Salame Gentile and the Salame Toscano. They all have pork and salt and spices and wine and they all taste delicious. Clearly I need to eat more of it to appreciate their subtle differences. Please feel free to send me a gift order or two.

The other big name I keep hearing is the unimaginatively named Salumi Cured Meats. Started in Seattle by a retired aerospace engineer, they, too, adhere to traditional, artisanal techniques. They achieved prominence as the founder is the father and salumi provider of my culinary hero, Mario Batali. But make no mistake, its success is because of its dedication to quality, not nepotism. I’ve had everything from their guanciale, made from pig jowls, to their lardo, mouth-melting strips of pork fat and it’s all spectacular. But again, I think I need to sample much more of their offerings before I can truly make an informed judgment.

Armandino Batali

I should emphasize that I'm kinda talking out my butt. I'm just a consumer who has done no actual market research. I have no idea if these salumieres are making an impact on anyone besides myself. But there is no denying that salume is a significant culinary trend. Just last month my sister brought me some stunning fennel pollen salame made at a hotel restaurant in Seattle. I’ve never tasted salami that was so bold and meaty and at the same time complex and subtly layered. It lasted maybe two days.

The other porcine revelation I had was when I tasted La Quercia prosciutto. I read about it in the New York Times and was skeptical. How could a product from Iowa be better than the Italian DOC-controlled original? But just like Napa’s Chateau Montelena beat out Bordeaux in 1976, La Quercia has been hailed as being better than its Old World counterparts. Herb and Kathy Eckhouse, basically smartypants academics, spent years learning the art of prosciutto curing in Parma before returning to the States to ply their trade.

La Quercia Pork

Made from sustainably raised pigs – some from organic and Berkshire pigs (aka Kurobuta) – the meat is buttery and flavorful and the salumiere has a steady hand with the salt (the only other ingredient besides pork). The prosciutto slices are luscious; as sweet as they are salty. It is a completely different product than the overpriced, oversalted, German junk you get in the plastic packages at Trader Joe’s. Nothing against the Germans, but it’s a crime that they call that prosciutto.

So last weekend when my friends canceled dinner plans at the last second, I wasn't too bummed as I got to eat all the La Quercia prosciutto and Fra’ Mani Salame Toscano myself. Breakfast? Why not have a few shavings of salami? Afternoon snack? Why not have a couple slices of life-affirming prosciutto? And I’m not ashamed to say it: I chopped up the last three slices of prosciutto along with a handful of frozen peas to go with the Kraft mac & cheese I had for lunch. It was sublime.