When I recently got some of Coluccio’s canned San Marzano tomatoes from Scott’s Sausage Debauchery Store, I decided that I should put them to a test and organize a tomato taste off.  For this rigorous test, I waited for the perfect occasion (namely, the next time I needed a can of tomatoes), and then I scientifically proceeded to open all four cans in my pantry and taste them.

Although I long ago concluded that Scott must be a brutha from anutha mutha, we’re just as likely to give each other shit as a handout.  So, without any favoritism (drumroll, please!), here are the results from last night’s taste test:

The hands-down loser was Full Circle organic Crushed Tomatoes.  Full Circle is the organic line of products for Schnuck’s Supermarkets, based in St. Louis, and we have a couple in the area.  Upon opening the can, what greets you is the nasty, dark, reddish-brown color of oxidized tomatoes.  This mush had little flavor, and none of it was fresh.  Blech!  This brand give the lie to the general rule that fruits raised organically will be sweeter and have better flavor.

Muir Glen organic used to my favorite brand of canned tomatoes.  I discovered them long before Cook’s Illustrated proclaimed them the best.  After that, they were quickly bought up by a big food conglomerate.  Whatever the reason, the thrill is gone.  Open a can now, and, despite the citric acid added, you see the same brownish-red color of oxidised tomatoes.  Without any added sugar, their tomatoes still had a good amount of sweetness, but the flavor was tired, wan, reminiscent of Campbell’s tomato soup.

First place was a tie between Coluccio’s and Bella Terra, and, not surprisingly, both cans contain tomatoes from San Marzano, which remains the gold standard, in my book, for tomato sauce.

Bella Terra is the organic line of the big Italian food company Racconto.  Although their tomatoes are canned without any citric acid or calcium chloride, the color was a bright, fresh red, and the tomatoes had a good, sweet flavor.  Interestling, they claim on the label that their tomatoes come from the “San Marzano region,” but the can doesn’t carry any D.O.P. guarantee of their authenticity, so there might be less here than meets the eye.

In contrast, Coluccio’s can comes festooned with seals to guarantee that its tomatoes come only from the San Marzano region of Italy.  In comparison to Bella Terra, I would say the flavor was a little more austere, a little less sweet, mild, and easy-pleasy.  Maybe it was just the hint of citric acid and salt that gave it a little more bite, but I would say this had a “classic” taste.

In case you haven’t picked up on it already, I have a thing for sweeteners.  Which is not to say I have a sweet tooth; I don’t really care for white sugar, and I can go for weeks or months without dessert and not miss it.  While the great triumph of white sugar is that it’s had all flavor stripped from it (New! and Special! Now with Absolutely No Flavor!), I revel in the unique flavors of other sweeteners: palm sugar ground with ginger, fireweed honey, blue agave syrup, sorghum, treacles or molasses, panela, demerara, turbinado, and muscovado sugars.  If you recall, I’ve even made my own fruit syrups, by soaking prunes in bourbon and armagnac, apricots in Sauternes, and dried apples in applejack… 

And now I’ve added vincotto to my flavor arsenal.  Vincotto is Italian for “cooked wine.”  It’s not actually made from wine, but from the “must” or juice of red grapes that would usually go into wine.  It’s basically the same product as saba or sapa, which come from northern Italy, while it’s called vincotto down south.  Apulia, in the heel of Italy, is a traditional area of production, whereas this hand-produced version hails from Sicily.  All these sweeteners date from the days before refined sugars, when honey and reduced fruit juices were the only sources for a little sweetness in life.  Cooked down for the better part of day, the result is still a free-flowing liquid, but one with all the flavor of a rich molasses, except that it’s still got a grapey, fruity lightness at the heart of it, and maybe just a whiff of smoke from the cooking fire.

What do you do with vincotto?  In addition to pouring a little over fruits, ice cream, baked goods, and desserts (or even oatmeal for breakfast), it’s great in salad dressings and also provides a wonderful counterpoint to savory foods.  Drizzle it over chunks of a firmer, grating cheese, such as Italian Piave or Parmigiano Reggiano.  Vincotto is also a great ingredient to use in meat sauces.  For my pickled tongue (the pork tongue in the Club, not the tongue in my mouth), my favorite sauce is a mixture of vincotto with an “essence of fig purée” that comes from Tuscany.  Adding a splash of good, but inexpensive, balsamic vinegar balances the sweetness.

At $16 for a 250 ml bottle, it may seem pricey, but not for the flavor it packs.  A bottle will last you many months, if not the better part of a year.  Many authorities on Italian cooking will tell you that if you blend a little vincotto with a good red wine vinegar, the result is actually superior to a real 15- or 25-year old balsamic vinegar from Modena, which costs $100 or more.

This vincotto is available from the Sausage Debauchery Store.  But, if you’re a local and a Club member, send me an email to place your order instead of ordering directly from the store, and you will pay just a fraction of the regular shipping and handling charges as Scott will bundle our orders together.  In a few weeks, Scott is bringing in a fig vincotto and a peperoncino vincotto, and then we’ll be cooking!  When I grill under my grape vines for the first time this year, I’m gonna drizzle the finished skewers with that peperoncino vincotto and dream I’m in Calabria!

Nduja, nduja, nduja.  Nduja is the bane and balm of my existence. I had never heard of nduja until I chanced upon it at London’s Borough Market last spring, and yet my posts of this salami consistently turn up as the most popular. Nduja is a blip on the world/historical screen of charcuterie (so minor and obscure that even most Italians have never heard of it!), and it is poised to become the NBCT (Next Big Culinary Thing).  After a few bites, your brain feels as if it’s turning into “boiling hot magma” (as Doctor Evil gleefully says) and might erupt through your skull, and yet it seduces you back again, and again, and again.

From the start, I lamented how difficult it is to find the Calabrian chili peppers with which to try and re-produce this burning fire from which, like love, the moth never learns.  Through the wonders of the www, Scott, over at Sausage Debauchery took heed of my plight and tracked down both canned and powdered Calabrian peppers, at a very reasonable price, from Coluccio’s in Brooklyn.  The first hitch?  Coluccio’s has no mail order business.  The second hitch?  After one blessed shipment from Scott, Coluccio’s dried up.  Out of Stock.  For month after friggin’ month!

Now the drought is over.  Now, chiliheads everywhere can rewind their minds and rethread their heads.  Scott has secured a supply of Calabrian chilis from Coluccio’s, and he has taken on the task of making them available to the rest of us.  Head over to Scott’s site, and leave a comment or shoot him an email to secure your supply.  First come, first served.

And, in addition to these bags and cans of scorching southern sun, Scott has access to more of Coluccio’s riches for all of you who are interested.  Not only “wild mountains fennel” from Italy, but branches of Italian oregano or of Italian rosemary, etc.  I can still remember the days when I thought, “oregano is oregano, rosemary is rosemary.”  Then I grew some Tuscan Blue rosemary and it blew my mind; then I compared Italian, Mexican, and Turkish oregano and marveled at how different they are.  Scott, born-again Italian that he is, says he wants to throw up every time he bites into some sauce that’s supposedly Italian only to find some other oregano at the base of it.

So, if you’re craving anything Italian that you just can’t find – fennel pollen, salt-cured anchovies, dried Borlotti beans – give Scott a shout and see what our savior can deliver.

UPDATE January 15: Now Scott’s got the first of his goodies loaded into an ebay store, so you can go directly there to place an order.  Mark him as a favorite seller, sign up for his newsletter, and keep checking his store for new listings, as this is just the beginning of a beautiful and zesty relationship.  Me, I’ve put in a request for salt-cured anchovies!

Meat Geek is a new series of posts that I’m starting to focus specifically on charcuterie ingredients and processes, old and new.  This series is for anyone, like me, who wants to understand about the science as well as the technique (the “why” as well as the “how”), and who is always interested in learning more – even from their mistakes.  And, hey, if you’re just looking to pick up some new conversational gambits (such as “Whoa!  The protein matrix in that baloney looks seriously denatured!”) this is your source.  (It may be hard to believe, given my rep, but I still turn heads when I announce, “Gotta get home and ferment my sausage!” or “My beef bungs are waiting to be unpacked!”)

Sodium phosphates have been approved by the USDA as a food additive and are commonly used as an emulsifier to prevent fat from separating out in foods such as processed cheeses and meats, but also in soups, soup powders, and even instant oatmeal.  The interesting thing, for us meatheads, is that sodium phosphates work to stabilize sausages such as baloney (where finely comminuted fat particles are dispersed in a mixture of water and meat fibers), even though, strictly speaking, the meat mixture is not an emulsion.  As C. Lynn Knipe emphasizes in her succinct article on Phosphates as Meat Emulsion Stabilizers, “a true emulsion is a stable suspension of two liquids (oil and water), which are not normally soluble in each other.”  Whereas the “meat emulsion” in a sausage like baloney is more properly described “as a matrix, whose stability is dependent upon the water-holding capacity or binding capacity of the meat proteins in the matrix.”

That’s where sodium phosphates come in.  In several specific ways, they keep the meat mixture from losing moisture during cooking, and the fewer meat juices you have leaking out, taking flavor with them, the moister, more tender, and more flavorful the final sausage.

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