Ode to the Honorable Dry-Cured Sausage

[Ralph]

From The New York Times:

May 17, 2006
Dry-Cured Sausages: Kissed by Air, Never by Fire
By JULIA MOSKIN

LIFE. Death. Salami. These are the elemental forces that shape each day for Marc Buzzio, one of New York's last and best makers of traditional dry-cured sausages. "There's no substitute for morbidity," he said recently, raising a 12-pound soppressata to his nose.

The smell of rot — the ripe funk you breathe in Italian pork stores and French charcuteries — has always been part of the craft of curing. Traditional dry-cured sausages — the rough-textured, chewy ones like Italian soppressata and French saucisson sec — aren't cooked. Instead, the raw meat is stuffed into natural casings and left exposed to the air, picking up wild yeasts and cultures that start fermentation. Then, like wine and cheese, the sausages are aged in a cool, humid place to develop the rounded, savory taste that comes from slow ripening. White mold grows on the outside; water drips out as the sausage dries.

"When I was a kid, the salamis used to drip on the customers' heads, and the smell was fantastic," said Louis Faicco, an owner of Faicco's Pork Store in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. "Now they are all locked away upstairs where no one can see them or smell them."

Mr. Faicco said that, to comply with state agriculture regulations, he now ages his salamis upstairs in climate-controlled lockers. He and other producers in New York City say they are spending more and more time each day addressing the concerns of state and federal officials, who are responsible for food safety, not flavor. For salumieri committed to traditional methods, keeping uncooked meat around for up to a year is inevitable; for the government, it's an avoidable public health risk. Today, most salamis and dry sausages in the United States are cooked, not cured. That is because regulations require a "kill step," such as cooking or irradiating, to destroy all pathogens. After the kill step and until it reaches the consumer, the meat must be kept pristine — whether by chilling, heating or being dosed with artificial curing agents.

"Without taking these steps, you can't be sure that the meat is safe," said Steven Cohen, a spokesman for the federal Agriculture Department. But each step interferes with the curing and each is resisted by artisanal producers, who say that there are traditional ways of making the product safe.

"The U.S.D.A. understands under 40 degrees or over 140 degrees," said Brian Polcyn, the chef at Five Lakes Grill near Detroit and an author of "Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing."

"But they don't understand this process," he said.

The intricate chain of events that produces dried sausages has many built-in safety measures, producers say. According to Mr. Polcyn, the acids that give cured salami its deep flavor also inhibit the growth of bacteria. Mr. Buzzio said the liberal use of salt — preferably Mediterranean sea salt, rich in natural curing agents that keep the meat pink — also keeps the product safe.

And the makers say it's easy to tell when the occasional sausage goes bad: it develops air pockets, brown spots or a hardened exterior. "When I don't see mold on the outside, that's when I get worried," said Sal Lioni, an owner of the A&S Italian Pork Store in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. "If the mold isn't on the outside, it's on the inside."

But state and federal officials say that none of these steps guarantee safety to their satisfaction. And even if some producers could meet government standards, the steps needed to prove that they had, and the daily inspections needed to sell cured meats wholesale, are onerous for the producers.

In 2003 Agriculture Department inspectors shut down Mr. Buzzio's business, Salumeria Biellese in Manhattan, because he was not using an approved kill step. Rather than change the production method, Mr. Buzzio and his partners spent more than $100,000 on laboratory testing and legal fees, finally satisfying officials' safety concerns — mainly by showing that pathogens were killed by the curing process.

"I would rather go out of business, like all those other guys, than ruin my product by freezing it or cooking it or irradiating it," Mr. Buzzio said.

Death has already claimed many of the pork stores that used to dot the New York area, including Danny's on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx and the Corona Heights Pork Store in Queens.

"The landscape has totally changed," said David Greco, whose father, Michele, started making sausages in the spicy, gnarled style of his native Calabria on Arthur Avenue in 1951. David Greco said he moved production of his dried sausages to Canada in 1999, when inspections became too intrusive.

Many have simply stopped making their own product, like Pasquale Sciannantena at Bari Pork Store in Bay Ridge. Even John Esposito of the legendary Esposito's Pork Store in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, said he believes the tradition will die with him. "Making sausage is hard work, and on top of that to have to answer questions and fill out forms, it's too much," he said. "All I know is that people love my sausage, we never had a problem and it sent my kids to college."

To chefs the incomparable flavor of the real product is worth preserving at all costs. "We realize that raw meat at room temperature is the kind of thing that keeps U.S.D.A. inspectors up at night," said Frank Falcinelli, who serves beautiful platters of old-school soppressata from Faicco's at Frankie's Spuntino locations on the Lower East Side and in Carroll Gardens. "But there is no other way you can get the right flavor."

"Salami is a funky product, no question," said Sara Jenkins, the chef at Bread Tribeca, who grew up in Tuscany and now serves thin slices of imported salami with bread, butter and anchovies. "When I was growing up, everyone made their own — it was the first thing you were offered when visiting someone's house — but the commercial product seems to be taking over."

Some large European producers, notably Vismara in Italy and Palacios in Spain, have built plants that are inspected by the Agriculture Department so they can export dry sausages to the United States.

In New York, restaurant chefs who make their own cured meats, a sideline that has become a badge of culinary honor, must follow City Health Department guidelines. Chefs say that they are careful to follow the rules that they are aware of, but that modern notions of food safety and traditional methods of curing are an uncomfortable fit.

On Monday inspectors destroyed all the cured meats at Il Buco restaurant in NoHo. They did so, according to the owner, Donna Lennard, not because of any evidence of contamination but because the temperature in the curing room was six degrees higher than it should have been.

"These are pigs that were raised for us," Ms. Lennard said. "We knew their names. We were trying to do something sustainable and traditional, and this is what happens."

The process of curing meat has been refined over thousands of years by people who are on intimate terms with their handiwork. Food historians believe that the Romans picked up the craft from the Lucanians, a tribe that for almost 1,000 years ruled part of what is now Basilicata in southern Italy, developing a reputation for sausages while fending off imperial conquerors. The Greek sausage loukanika and its Mediterranean cousins the longaniza (Spain), luganega (Italy), and linguiça (Portugal) are all descendants of the ancient lucanicus.

Unfortunately, it's impossible to do a complete taxonomy of salami: it's a big clan whose members all bear a strong family resemblance and are given to taking one another's names at whim. Variations show up in the fat-to-meat ratio, the grind and the seasonings — usually garlic, wine, hot chili peppers and peppercorns, black or white. In Central Europe, sausages are smoked before drying to make German landjägers, Polish kabanosy and Hungarian salami.

In Italy, itinerant pig butchers called norcini long roamed the peninsula (as some still do), making hundreds of regional salamis like cacciatorini (small portable "hunter's sausages"), finocchiona (a fine-ground salami with fennel seed) and soppressa vicentina, a specialty of the Veneto. (Though so-called Genoa salami is popular in the United States, in Italy, Genoa is not known for its salami.)

Next month Paul Bertolli, a longtime chef and advocate of handmade foods in the San Francisco Bay Area, will release his first batch of soppressa vicentina — "a beautiful mosaic of meat," he said — along with five other dry salamis. Mr. Bertolli has spent four years building a company — Fra'Mani Handcrafted Salumi — and a large-scale government-approved plant, with computer-controlled aging rooms for each stage of a salami's life: gocciolamento, dripping; asciugamento, drying; stagionatura, ripening.

Even so, Mr. Bertolli said, "you can't make salami by computer."

"You have to touch it, feel it, smell it," he said. "The machine is dumb. You need the person to go in, see that the mold is growing faster on one side and turn the rack around."

Finding Salami and Its Cousins

REAL dry-cured sausage is famously difficult to make — one salumiere called it "the pinnacle of the art of meat."

It is also increasingly hard to find. Salamis drying over the deli counter have mostly been replaced by commercial products, most of it cooked, not cured. Look for sausages that are not shrink-wrapped, short ingredient lists, natural casings and a firm, dry texture.

Thin-sliced salami makes an especially appealing appetizer in the summer, served with good bread and sweet butter, before an entree of pasta with seasonal vegetables or a composed salad.

In general, cured sausages made in the Mediterranean tradition (Italian, Spanish, French) are simply air-dried; ones from Central and Eastern Europe (Hungary, Germany, Poland) are smoked.

These are some places that make or import traditional dry sausage:

All kinds of Italian salami:

SALUMERIA BIELLESE 378 Eighth Avenue (29th Street), (212) 736-7376, www.salumeriabiellese.com.

Italian soppressata and dry sausage:

A&S ITALIAN PORK STORE 8614 Fifth Avenue (86th Street), Brooklyn, (718) 238-6030.

CALABRIA PORK STORE 2338 Arthur Avenue (186th Street), Bronx, (718) 367-5145.

ESPOSITO PORK STORE 357 Court Street (Union Street), Brooklyn, (718) 875-6863.

FAICCO 260 Bleecker Street (Avenue of the Americas), (212) 243-1974; 6511 11th Avenue (65th Street), Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, (718) 236-0119.

MIKE'S DELI in Arthur Avenue Retail Market, 2344 Arthur Avenue (186th Street), Bronx, (718) 295-5033, www.arthuravenue.com.

Hungarian salami:

YORKVILLE MEAT EMPORIUM 1560 Second Avenue (81st St.), (212) 628-5147, www.hungarianmeatmarket.com.

Polish kabanosy and kielbasa:

W-NASSAU MEAT MARKET 915 Manhattan Avenue (Greenpoint Avenue), Brooklyn, (718) 389-6149.

Imported Spanish chorizo:

DESPAñA 408 Broome Street (Lafayette Street), (212) 219-5050, www.despananyc.com.

German salami:

SCHALLER & WEBER 1654 Second Avenue, (86th Street), (212) 879-3047, www.schallerweber.com.

KOGLIN ROYAL HAMS 303 Grand Central Terminal, (212) 499-0725, www.koglinroyalhams.com.