Salumi Workshop: Ruhlman & Polcyn, Good Food Festival

We're excited to have Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn coming to Chicago in March to carve up a Gunthorp hog and discuss different butcher styles and curing. I thought folks here might like to read this great excerpt from their book we were able to publish:
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Our Good Food Festival Master Class this year features cookbook and culinary writer Michael Ruhlman and chef Brian Polcyn, owner of Forest Grill in Birmingham, Michigan and a professor of charcuterie at Schoolcraft. Together they’ve co-authored Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing and Salumi. Their book is an homage to the wonders of meat curing and we are excited to offer you this preview of their workshop with this glimpse into their book Salumi: The Craft of Italian Dry Curing, which compares Italian Salumi with American, and makes the point for preserving our slow food ways!

More info about your chance to see them in action here: http://bit.ly/GFFestival


Italian Salumi Versus American Salumi Is Not the Issue: Some Perspective

From Salumi: The Craft of Italian Dry Curing by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn

Is authentic Italian salumi possible in America? No, nor would we wish it to be. But can we make extraordinary American salumi? Yes, and artisans and cooks make it every day throughout the country.

The distinction between the two is an important one. Italian salumi is the result of a specific landscape and an atmosphere providing a consistent range of temperatures and humidity fundamental to the creation of exquisite dry-cured meats. The breeds of hog differ from ours, as does what they eat, and this in turn affects the flavor of the finished salumi (see Hog Breeds, page 27). The same is true of all the animals we eat, but the effects of environment, species, and diet are especially significant in dry curing, which is a way of “cooking” meat without ever bringing it above room temperature.

Yet, as with wine, Americans have proven to be fast on the uptake, aggressive learners, as the products of the salumi makers mentioned above attest. Italy is where it all flourished, however, and it is from Italy that we have taken our inspiration and education.

Etruscans and Romans put their environment—an atmosphere favorable to dry curing, and terroir that favors the hog, the most valuable and extraordinary animal we eat—to good use to preserve their food. And the care of their salumi was a matter of survival. As a present-day salumi maker put it to us when we traveled to the mountain town of Colonnata, “Sixty years ago, there were no roads up here. We lived off the hog.” His statement does not have the gravity on the page that it did on hearing it after we’d navigated a dozen impossibly narrow hairpin turns a thousand feet up into the Apuan Alps, the sheer white faces of the famous marble, carved out of the earth, shining in the sun along our way.

The people of Colonnata, who have mined marble there since before Michelangelo worked his own art with it, have always had to rely on the hog for survival. They preserved all cuts, surely, but they discovered that when the back fat (lardo) was cured in boxes made from the marble the town was built on, it was uncommonly delicious, far better than when simply cured in salt and aged in a cellar, as so much of the hog typically was. The hog fat was so delicate it melted on the tongue. A fine layer of crystalline salt coated its exterior, and when it was sliced thin, it retained a crisp line of salt to season and contrast the sweet soft fat.

Their lardo di Colonnata is the very definition of a regional specialty. It uses a material, marble, unique to the area, which gives the fat from hogs grown in this area qualities that cannot be developed in any other place. This is how local specialties happen. And sometimes local specialties become so popular that other marketers try to feed off the name. One lardo curer there told us that 200,000 kilograms of lardo are cured in those hills each year, but 9 million kilograms are sold with the Colonnata name. That is why the DOP stamp was created—DOP (Denominazione di Origine Protetta) indicates that the origin of the product is protected and that specific standards are maintained and overseen by the government.

Curing the hog in these isolated mountains began out of necessity, but the tradition has endured because the result is delicious. And because it’s been made here for thousands of years, the salumi makers have gotten really, really good at it.
Pick up a signed copy at our Bookseller's table

Pick up a signed copy at our Bookseller’s table

Culatello is another example of an extraordinary local specialty. It is the top and bottom round of the ham, the back leg of the hog, which is salted, sewn up in a hog bladder, tied, and dried for at least two or up to nearly four years. It’s made in and around the city of Zibello, on the Po River in Emilia-Romagna. This area of Italy is probably best known for Parma ham, prosciutto, the dry-cured entire ham. The makers of culatello say that the air along their stretch of the Po River is too moist for whole hams to dry properly. Early settlers of the region took off the main muscles of the ham to make the large culatello and, from the other side of the ham, the cut called fiocco. Both cuts dried beautifully in the moist cellars along the Po. They hang for so long that they take on a flavor and texture that is unique to this small spot of earth.

However, the culatello tradition nearly died out, say its current producers. But, led by two brothers, Massimo and Luciano Spigaroli, farmers who had bought an ancient crumbling estate to cure culatello, the makers of this local specialty lobbied for and got a DOP designation for their product, culatello di Zibello. Culatello is unique because of the hogs that thrive here—the Large Whites, the Nera Parmigiana, and the Mora Romagnola—and the humid storage areas at or below the river’s level. (The Spigarolis’ cellars are about 85 percent humidity). Thanks to the Spigarolis (for not only their exquisite product but also their savvy marketing skill), the culatello is alive and well, worth seeking out if you happen to be traveling along the Po River. It is, in fact, the best form of prosciutto we have ever tasted.

So, the craft of salumi is alive and well in most regions of Italy, but, with only a handful of exceptions (such as the Spigarolis), small producers now use electricity to control humidity and temperature. That control results in a consistent product, as previously salumi makers had to use their senses and experience (knowing when to open or close the windows to control humidity, for instance) to a greater degree. Unfortunately, electronic control has also ushered in an age of large commercial interests steamrolling myriad small producers out of business with the cheap prices that come with volume and speed. Yes, this happens everywhere: it’s not just McDonald’s in Italy, Italian producers do it as well—that’s business.

It’s clear to the people who create such food as culatello di Zibello and lardo di Colonnata, that the work and financial risk involved are worth it. But only some people are cut out to do the work. America is not the only country vulnerable to business bottom lines. Concern for what was happening to food in Italy, aided by entrenched sensibilities regarding food there and a fierce territorial pride in its products that pits one region against another, resulted in the rise of the Slow Food movement.

Salumi is an example of Slow Food and a testament to its importance.

Let’s examine, by way of comparison, the food America has for nearly the past century worked so hard to put out. We don’t have a food culture that developed over millennia. What food culture did arise was based on local subcultures created by huge waves of immigrants.

Food cultures evolve out of necessity. Throughout history, the bottom line has been to protect family and community, making sure all have enough to eat. Food culture has always been about making sure first that your family had enough to eat and, then, that those in your community upon whom you relied, for work, for commerce, for protection, also had enough to eat. Societies ate what was native to the area, because it was easiest; life was hard, and you made what food you could grow, gather, or catch taste as good as you could with whatever resources were at hand. And this became each group’s food culture, its heritage, and it endured long after that society needed it for survival—the salumi of Italy, for instance, the confits of France, the smoked hams of Germany, and the preserved fish of both tropical and northern regions.

Resisting the forces of big business and globalization is hard, especially if you have so little to protect, so when frozen food and processed food began to pour into American grocery stores after World War II, there was little thought of losing anything in particular; there was, instead, an embrace of the new and an acquiescence to the advertising that promised ease and convenience.

But salumi is one example of old food that America is now embracing as new, and that we hope endures long enough to become old in this country. Indeed, among the main motivations of this book are, first, to ensure that this form of food preservation never dies and, second, that Americans come to understand both the historical importance of the craft of salumi as well as the pleasures of eating it.

Salumi is easy to do on a general level: throw some salt on some meat and let it dry, slice thin, and eat. To do it with excellence, however, takes an elusive combination of terroir, passion, and luck.

This book is about salumi, the Italian technique of dry curing and preserving meat, but it is also a continuation of our exploration of meat curing and sausage making in general. And although it’s about curing different cuts of meat from different animals, primarily we embarked on this project to deepen our understanding of the hog, the culinary miracle upon which so much of the world has survived, and to deepen our knowledge of this ancient craft of salting and drying meat, once practiced as a matter of survival, today practiced for the unparalleled pleasures it provides, a reminder of our deep past, and a reflection of our humanity.

Excerpted from Salumi: The Craft of Italian Dry Curing by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. Copyright © 2012 by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.