Local Charcuterie 101

Prosciutto, guanciale, lonza: I’m talking cured pork products, here. Salumi. Charcuterie. The stuff that’s in a refrigerator somewhere right now maturing and destined to hang for several weeks or several months before ending up razor-thin-sliced on your plate at a restaurant or in the cooler of your favourite specialty food shop.

You could say it’s fancy-pants cold cuts, but with the good quality meat in the hands of the right charcutier they are an ethereal bite of pleasure no matter what you call them. At Verses Restaurant in Kitchener, chef and co-owner Brett Shantz prepares avian charcuterie: he loves duck for its versatility and workability. He ages the duck several days, curing it with salt and sugar and perhaps a touch of spice.

“It’s one of my favourite meats because I love the fat-to-meat ratio. You get the foie gras, the fatty duck legs, the breast, so it’s nice to come up with different ways to do things with the different parts,” Shantz says.

Over the past few years, the art of salting, curing, and smoking meats has muscled its way into just about every type of food outlet, from basic supermarkets advertising “Charcuterie 101” to specialty delicatessens, and meat-heavy Toronto restaurants such as Cowbell and Beast where you’re lucky to find a seat—and where carnivore reviewers rave.

The interest continues.

Destined for guanciale: Darryl Haus' trimmed pig jowl.

Charcuterie—literally “flesh cooked”—has a growing presence in local restaurants, too. While you may not discover horse bresaola or baby goat salami, you can sample some excellent prosciutto or sopressata and other in-house cured meats created by local chefs, including Nick Benninger of Nick and Nat’s Uptown 21 Food & Drink in Waterloo who makes his own smoked sausages for choucroute garni.

“This is the craft of preserving,” says Darryl Haus chef at Peter Martin’s The 41 restaurant in Kitchener. “At the end, we want quality. The final flavour is paramount.”

It’s a nose-to-tail endeavour at The 41 with Haus making head cheese, prosciutto, shoulder-cut coppa, lonza from the loins, and pork belly for pancetta. His next prosciutto crudo will be ready in five months (at the time of this writing), and the restaurant serves up his in-house sopressata (a southern Italian salami), a merguez lamb sausage, and a cranberry salami.

Merquez sausage from Waterloo's The Bauer Butcher.

Haus travels to Lassdale Farms in Punkeydoodle’s Corner to meet the pigs and see how they are doing for size and fatness before farmer Mark Lass books the abattoir and 20 King get its pork. “The quality of the pig is essential. We break them down and nothing goes to waste. Our charcuterie board is 95 percent pork, and all of it is from the pigs we bring in. It’s very natural. All we are adding is salt and time,” Haus adds.

The process—taking raw meat and making it deliciously edible with only salt and the passage of time—has been a tradition ever since humankind started consuming and preserving meat thousands of years ago. Ancient charcutiers had three strategies: hang the meat in the sun and dry it so there can be no bacterial growth; smoke it thoroughly thereby coating it in compounds inhospitable to unwanted organisms; or, salt it to protect and develop flavour.

Pepperettes from Blanbrook Bison Farms in St. Marys.

That’s the essence of charcuterie that is still at work today. Take the ham-end of a pig, pack it with kosher salt for a couple of weeks, put it under some weight to shape it, then hang it for about a year. Presto: prosciutto; nice and slow. The word itself derives from the Italian prosciugare meaning “to dry.”

The combination of sodium chloride and Father Time results in fabulous flavour, notes Michael Hodgson, executive chef of Waterloo’s The Bauer Kitchen.

“You can taste so many subtleties from the cure and the aging. It’s perhaps like wine: the process is a practice of patience. The longer you can wait, the greater the payoff,” he says.

Rustic--and delicious--pistachio pate from Jake & Humphreys' Bistro in New Hamburg.

For Shantz, at the end of the process of making duck prosciutto there’s a certain personality and expression that sits on the plate—perhaps one swaddling white asparagus. “It’s our own flavour and our own product,” he says. “It’s a pretty simple process, but it allows us to do make something that nobody else is making.”

Head cheese made in-Haus at The 41.