Tasty Salted Pig Parts

	Photo: Mitch Tobias

    It’s been a good year for salumi. In January 2008, Slow Food Berkeley hosted a Laboratorio of Salumi at Café Rouge in Berkeley. Four restaurants and three retail/wholesale purveyors presented samples of their cured meats, ranging from such familiar varieties as salami, mortadella, prosciutto and pancetta to such lesser-known specialties as bresaola, finocchiona, lonza and capocollo. Chefs, butchers and salumeri discussed sources, seasonings and techniques with a packed house of gourmands and advocates of sustainable agriculture and husbandry.
    At the end of September, among the dazzling Taste Pavilions at the first Slow Food Nation gathering at Fort Mason in San Francisco, a never-ending queue filed past the salumi station where culatello, bierwurst and prosciutto Americano were among the samples being sliced and laid out on waxed butcher paper in tempting spreads for hungry visitors.
    This is not your parents’—or your childhood’s—lunchmeat. The mortadella made by Paul Bertolli’s Fra’ Mani Handcrafted Salumi in Berkeley bears about as much resemblance to Oscar Mayer bologna as an Acme Bread Company baguette does to a loaf of Wonder Bread. Likewise, Christopher Lee’s prosciutto, aged in a cool room behind the kitchen of his Eccolo restaurant on Berkeley’s Fourth Street, will never be mistaken for a Hormel ham.
    There’s a revolution going in the meat department, and as with so many other food trends, Northern California, and the East Bay in particular, is command central. But were your grandparents, and certainly your great-grandparents, to taste the coppa that butcher Scott Brennan cures from whole pork shoulder muscle at Marsha McBride’s groundbreaking carnivore-centric Café Rouge, or the coppa di testa (head cheese) fashioned by Chris Cosentino and Mark Pastore’s Boccalone in Oakland, they might recognize these cured meats (“salumi” in Italian, “charcuterie” in French) as homespun delicacies from their childhoods. And they would probably describe the current salumi movement as a renaissance rather than a revolution.


History in the Making
    San Francisco has long been a capital of salame making: Italian immigrants established Molinari & Sons in 1896, Gallo Salame in 1910 and the Columbus Salame Company in 1917. Those near-legendary businesses still tout their adherence to “Old World craftsmanship” and “the traditional art of salame manufacturing,” but much has changed in the industry over the past century. In a Salumi Manifesto on its Web site, Boccalone declares: “All great cultures have ancient traditions for food preservation that elevate meat beyond the realm of ordinary. Here in the United States, that tradition has been sacrificed in the name of efficiency, speed, and cost.”
    The ascendance of California cuisine since the 1970s, emphasizing fresh, organic and locally grown ingredients, and the more recent rise of the Slow Food movement have inspired countless chefs to cure their own meats, often on the premises of their restaurants. It’s hard to find a Slow-oriented East Bay Italian, Mediterranean or California restaurant that doesn’t offer an artisan salumi platter on its menu, often featuring a selection of house-cured meats.
    This trend, not surprisingly, has its roots in Alice Waters’ kitchen at Chez Panisse, and such Chez Panisse veteran chefs as Paul Bertoli and Christoper Lee have remained in the salumi vanguard for more than two decades. While Lee makes house-cured prosciutto and salame strictly to offer on the Eccolo menu, Bertoli’s Fra’ Mani turns out about 20 salumi products to the tune of 50,000 pounds a month, wholesaling different varieties of dry salami, cooked salami and fresh sausages to retail stores throughout the country; Fra’ Mani salumi is also served in restaurants from California to New York.
    Falling somewhere between Eccolo’s modest in-house operation and Fra’ Mani’s nationwide reach, Marsha McBride’s Café Rouge includes a retail meat market that purveys handcrafted sausages, pâtés and cured meats; and chef Chris Cosentino and restaurateur Mark Pastore parlayed the popularity of house-made salumi at their Incanto restaurant in San Francisco’s Noe Valley into the Oakland-based Boccalone, a burgeoning “Tasty Salted Pig Parts” retail company that sells 23 products directly to consumers—through Community Supported Agriculture–style sacchetti (small bags) and in the Boccalone Salumeria in the Ferry Building Marketplace in San Francisco.


From Passion to Obession
    Paul Bertoli built his reputation as one of California’s best chefs (acknowledged by a 2001 James Beard Foundation Restaurant Award to that effect) during his decade at Chez Panisse (1982–1992) and his even longer tenure at Oliveto (1993–2005), but his passion for salumi goes back to his childhood in San Rafael. “We’d get these packages from my grandfather [who cured meats in his Italian delicatessen on the South Side of Chicago], and we’d open them up and fight over them, they were so delicious. It just drove me wild. We also had a corner store in our neighborhood, it was called Mario’s, and we had an account there, and my mother would allow us to go and get salami sandwiches after school. I always craved it. The tang and smell of fermented sausage really piqued my interest.”
    Bertoli began experimenting with sausage making around 1979 at the Fourth Street Grill in Berkeley. His true baptism came soon thereafter. During a yearlong sojourn in Italy in 1981-82, he worked in restaurants and private homes in Tuscany. “I had the opportunity to work with these Roman pork butchers who go from farm to farm,” he recalls, “and during the cold months they come and kill the hog for the family and put up all the parts. So the first things I made were fresh sausage. I got very interested in hams early on, too, so I started experimenting with prosciutto.”
    When he returned to the United States and landed his job at Chez Panisse, Bertoli found Alice Waters receptive to his interest in “making things from scratch and by hand in the Italian tradition.” It was at Oliveto, however, that his passion became an obsession. Oliveto became renowned for its annual Whole Hog dinners, which Bertoli describes as “a celebration of a whole year’s worth of products, from the hams that you started a year earlier and the big sausages that take 180 days to cure, down to the coppas and smaller salamis, which take 60 days, 50 days, 40 days, and the fresh cuts. It’s about using the whole animal, head to tail.”
    Bertoli also made cured meats a regular feature of the menu. “People really took to it and asked if they could buy it,” he recalls, “and around 2003, I started to think that maybe there was a real viable business opportunity, so I started to put together a business plan and then walked my products around the country to specialty retailers and asked, ‘If I had these products for sale, would you buy them?’ I got a general picture of what the demand would be and built the plan on that, and in March 2006 we started production.”
    Compared to any of the other artisan salumi operations in the East Bay, Fra’ Mani is a huge enterprise—Bertoli’s butchers had cut 10,000 pounds of fresh pork the morning of the interview—and machines are essential to production. But Bertoli, who can talk in dizzying detail about the biology and chemistry of drying and fermentation and the critical roles of bacteria and molds, insists on emulating Old World techniques, from hand-tying the salame to customizing an old mechanized chopper to mimic hand knife work.
    A crucial goal for Bertoli has been to make a soppressata, the largest of Fra’ Mani’s salame, that comes close to the one made by his grandfather. “He was from a region of Italy where they make it a certain way, and it was the thing I loved to eat when I was a kid. After many years of trying, I think I’ve finally got that one,” he says with a smile, “yeah.”


Beyond the Prosciutto Project
     Christopher Lee’s interest in salumi was piqued shortly after he started cooking at Chez Panisse in 1987. “Bone-in prosciutto couldn’t be imported then,” the Chicago-born Lee recalls,“and the quality of the boneless stuff that was being shipped from Italy was good but not great. So, being sort of industrious types, we said, ‘Why don’t we try to make it?’
    “I thought I knew something about making prosciutto,” he continues. “I certainly thought it was easier than it turned out to be. There was no written material to speak of, so there was a lot of experimentation. Of course the experiment time on a prosciutto is a reeeaally long time, about two years. … One of the best things about Chez Panisse was that you could take a project like that and run with it. Bless Alice for that.”
    A year or two into what Lee calls the “prosciutto project,” he started expanding into other forms of salumi. His trips to Italy to work with prosciutto makers in Parma and Tuscany brought new revelations. He became good friends with a legendary Tuscan butcher, Dario Cecchini, through whom Lee cultivated a network of salumi connections. “He’s more than a butcher,” Lee says of Cecchini, “he’s kind of an impresario as well as a conservator of traditional Tuscan foods and recipes. In Italy, things are very specialized—there are prosciutto makers, pancetta makers, places that bone the pigs just for this market and that market, but it really does spring out of making products
out of whole animals. That’s how I got interested in the other stuff, too.”
    Back in the states, through a fortuitous reference in a mail-order catalog, Lee looked up Francois Vecchio of Columbus Salame in San Francisco. “I was lucky enough to learn prosciutto making in Italy from a company called Pio Tosini, near Parma,” he says, “and then I became very good friends with
Francois, who gave me a lot of hands-on pointers on salame—how much salt to use, what the conditions should be and so forth. In this area, we all owe our craft to him. He’s taught us all in one way or another. He’s the god of it for me.”
    At Eccolo, which he opened in March 2004 after leaving Chez Panisse, Lee has limited space for curing meat. Each week he makes about 40 pounds of four or five different kinds of salami and pancetta. “I’m a traditionalist,” he says, “so I make salamis the way the Italians have been making them for a long time. Almost all of my salami recipes have wine in them, but I don’t do a lot of other flavoring. What I’m always interested in is the flavor of the pork.”
    Prosciutto, though, remains dearest to Lee’s heart. He tends to get a couple started each month so he always has some curing. “There are a million ways to use prosciutto,” he says. At Eccolo he serves it sliced by itself, uses it to make chicken saltimbocca or to wrap rabbit legs or beef filets before braising. “One of my other favorite ways is to make a white risotto with Parmesan cheese and a few slices of prosciutto laid on top.”
    Prosciutto is “the purest” of all cured meats, Lee posits. “Nothing else goes into those things but pork and salt and time. You have to have good pigs, and you have to have the right technique, pretty good conditions and a lot of time.”


Inspired by Gallo Salami
    In 1987, after graduating from UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Culinary Academy, and working in restaurants including the Union Hotel in Benicia and the Broadway Terrace Café in Oakland, Marsha McBride went to work for Judy Rodgers at Zuni Café in San Francisco. Two or three years later, to make use of leftover cuts of pork, she began experimenting with cured meats in a corner of the restaurants brick-lined basement. “It was all pretty experimental,” McBride recalls. “It started with salamis and coppa and bacon, pretty basic stuff.” But not as basic as the “cold cuts” she ate as a child in Lafayette, Calif. “I grew up on balogna,” she says, “and in this area, Gallo salami was the big deal. I loved it. I craved it. It’s that salt and fat that everyone loves.”
    By the time she opened Café Rouge in 1996, McBride was ready to champion a new appreciation of red meat from ethically raised and butchered animals from sustainablefarms and ranches. With the opening of a meat market on the premises, McBride also became godmother to a new generation of butchers, keeping alive a craft nearly extinct in the age of industrial food production. (Café Rouge veteran Taylor Boetticher went on to co-found the Napa-based Fatted Calf.) Currently, Scott Brennan, who started out in Café Rouge’s kitchen three years ago, is McBride’s point man for salumi in the meat market.
    “Everybody was doing it in their back kitchen for a long time,” McBride says of the Bay Area’s restaurant salumi movement, “but we were probably the first that took the cured meat we made in-house and sold it retail.”
    Although pork is the chosen meat for most salumi, at Café Rouge, Brennan and others make good use of the variety of animals—beef, goat, lamb, rabbit, duck—that arrive from the restaurant’s suppliers. “Coppa was the one thing I wanted learn how to do,” Brennan says, “and I’ve got that down pretty well. Now I can play with other things.
    “I like to experiment with the different flavor profiles you can get from different animals,” he continues. “If they’ve been eating acorns, you get a nutty flavor in the fat. That transfers into the curing process, which can take three months, but you can still taste that different flavor in each one. That’s exciting to me.”
    “I’ve had lots of good butchers, but Scott has an innate talent for it,” says McBride. “We’ll talk about something I had somewhere, especially Italy, and then he will be able to reproduce it without even having tasted it.”
    The Café Rouge butchers have more than two-dozen salumi in their repertoire (recently adding the cured pork loin known as lonzo) but work in relatively small batches of about 10 pounds or so. “We could sell a lot more, but we just do it here,” says McBride, who doesn’t rule out gradually making Café Rouge salumi more widely available if a resuscitated economy warrants it. The interest is there, she confirms. “We’ve had artisanal wine and cheese for about 30 years, and it makes sense that cured meat is catching up so we can round out the meal.”

Challenging the Hershenberger Phenomenon
    During the Slow Food Laboratorio of Salumi at Café Rouge in January, Boccalone’s Mark Pastore also associated the rise of artisan salumi with the path previously trod by wine and cheese, adding artisan bread and from-scratch ice cream to the list of pioneers, as well. And, like other salumi makers, Chris Cosentino, Pastore’s partner in Boccalone and chef at Incanto since 2003, explains that what began as passion-driven restaurant-kitchen experimentation assumed an inexorable momentum that virtually necessitated the creation a of retail operation.
    “I think it kind of decided for us,” says Cosentino, who grew up in an Italian-American community in Rhode Island and once competed on Iron Chef against Mario Batali. “Incanto is a small restaurant with a small kitchen, … and customers were asking if they could buy a whole stick to take home.”
    During the search for a small-scale facility that could withstand the meticulous daily U.S. Department of Agriculture inspection required of wholesale and retail producers, Pastore met with a USDA senior inspector at Nikkos Restaurant in Oakland. “That’s the guy you should be talking to,” said the inspector, pointing to an elderly gentleman nearby. It was John Correia of Moniz Portuguese Sausage, ready to retire and looking for someone to take over his plant on International Boulevard.
    Boccalone opened in 2007, quickly ramping up to production of nearly two dozen varieties of fresh sausage (including Easton’s Breakfast Sausage, from an original recipe found in Consentino’s late grandmother’s lock box) and dry-cured and cooked salumi—everything from salame, pancetta, mortadella and prosciutto to guanciale (salt-cured pork jowl), salted pork liver, sanguinaccio (traditional northern Italian blood sausage) and head cheese variations known as coppa di testa and porchetta di testa.
    From the outset, Cosentino and Pastore set their sights on selling directly to customers, at first through the Boccalone Web site and their CSA-style Salumi Society (with some 350 members) and then, since June 2008, through the Boccalone Salumeria retail store, which within two months accounted for 60 percent to 80 percent of total sales.
    “I’ve always believed that if you want to change the way this industry works, not only does your product have to be different, but you can’t sell it the same way either,” says Pastore. “But there isn’t an ultra-premium salumi market yet,” he adds, “and that’s a big part of what we’re trying to do with our business—give people a basis for appreciating the differences between the kind of cured meats we make and the kind of cured meats that a big industrial company makes.”
    But what if they’re so successful that a giant corporation wants to gobble them up in what Cosentino calls the “Hershenberger” phenomenon?
    “When Hershey’s bought Scharffen Berger, it was for the brand,” Pastore argues, “and we’re just at the beginning of anybody building a great national brand for cured meats. I think we’re quite a ways away from anything like that happening, because the market for our products is absolutely in its nascence, and we want to change the way the big companies have to do business, not by being part of one of them, but ultimately by challenging them.”

Boccalone 1924 International Blvd., Oakland, (510) 261-8700 www.boccalone.com
Café Rouge 1782 Fourth St., Berkeley, (510) 525-1440, www.caferouge.net
Eccolo Restaurant  1820 Fourth St., Berkeley, (510) 644-0444, www.eccolo.com
Fra’ Mani Handcrafted Salumi 1311 Eighth St., Berkeley (510) 526-7000, www.framani.com

Salumi Makers Weigh in on Fat

    More than a few baby boomers have lived through a salumi cycle: loving white bread sandwiches made with mass-produced bologna and dry Italian salami; cutting those meats out of their diets completely in the interest of health and sustainability; and cautiously dipping back into salumi with the same cholesterol-consciousness they might bring to artisan cheese.
    On its service-oriented Web site, Boccalone issues a Salumi Manifesto that notes, “Salumi celebrate the beauty of animal fat. Fat balances the flavor, texture, color of fine salumi. Contrary to common perception, pork fat is healthful: it is lower in saturated fat than butter and has twice the monounsaturated fat.”
    “The issue is how much we eat in this country,” Mark Pastore of Boccalone says. “Salumi is about moderation, and so much of American food culture is not about moderation. So the real enemy, in our biased opinion, isn’t fat or nonfat; it’s excess versus moderation. There’s a reason salumi is sliced really thin—the taste is intense. Our main unit of measure in our shop is not per pound; it’s per 4 ounces. If you’ve got three or four people in your household, you don’t need a pound of prosciutto.”
    “The key is moderation,” agrees Fra’ Mani curemaster Paul Bertoli. “Anything’s not good for you if you eat too much of it. Salumi is very satisfying. If you slice it properly, you’re not eating big chunks of it. When I eat this stuff, with family or friends, I usually just put a big platter out, and when we finish the platter, that’s it. We’re not going after more; we go on to the next course.
I also think that what people don’t talk about in the whole health equation is the pleasure that one takes in food.”
    Café Rouge, with its meaty menu and in-house retail butcher shop, was instrumental in re-educating East Bay diners about carnivorous delights. Laughing, executive chef Marsha McBride compares today’s more permissive culinary culture to the Woody Allen character’s experience in Sleeper, waking up in the future and learning that deep fat, steak, cream pies and hot fudge have been found to be the healthiest foods.
    “Salumi was a hard sell 20 years ago,” grants Eccolo’s Christopher Lee. “And there are still ultra low-fat people out there, obviously, but people are willing to come in and eat a plateful of pork meat, and that’s a nice thing.”

Slow Down for Salumi

    “Everybody found it pretty funny when I said I was going to start an aged-meat business,” says Incanto and Boccalone chef Chris Cosentino. “It kind of teaches you patience, which I have none of.”
    Salumi, done right and eaten judiciously, is a quintessential slow food. As in winemaking, the fermentation and aging take time. “It really is an art,” confirms Marsha McBride of Café Rouge. “It takes patience, and you don’t always know what you’re going
to get at the end.”
    Paul Bertoli of Fra’ Mani notes that “the whole time element” is more than a romantic notion: It’s chemically determined. “It takes a long time for two things to happen,” he explains. “One is called protealysis, the breakdown of protein; the other is lipolysis, the breakdown of fat. These are transformations that happen in the aging process, resulting from the application of mold and the microorganisms in the salami that transform the protein and the fat. It’s like bread—if you don’t bring the temperature up fast enough, you don’t get rise. Salami’s also like wine, where it needs time for those breakdown phenomena to happen.”
    During its first year, Fra’ Mani was producing about 20,000 pounds of cured meat per month. “We quickly realized we couldn’t make any more than that by making the process go any faster,” Bertoli says. “I had originally thought that, given the technology we’re using, we’d be able to get more cycles within the month, but we just can’t.” He realized he could increase scale, but not speed. “You just can’t rush these products. You have to do it gently, and take the time necessary to dry them really evenly from the inside out. Some of these products stay in process anywhere from 40 to 120 or 130 days.”
    Christopher Lee of Eccolo had been experimenting with prosciutto making for several years before he went to Italy and “really learned” the basics. “I was naïve about a lot of things—including the amount of time it takes and the conditions under which they’re cured,” he says. “It turned out that our [climate] conditions here are not very different from there, where it takes about 18 to 20 months to cure a ham.”
    According to Mark Pastore, Cosentino’s partner in Boccalone, the slow food aspect of salumi making carries over into their company’s business plan. “This is not a two- or five-year business bet,” he says. “This is more like a 20- to 50-year business bet.”