For all you tired, you poor winter-weary masses, yearning to breathe fire, I bring you tidings of great joy: you can make your nduja and enjoy it in the same day!

“And-Do-Your-Worst!” means many things.  It’s the Retort Courteous, a riposte to my good friends Scott and Porsha, who have turned up the heat once again in the nduja wars.  (Where would we be without friends to challenge us to try new things, to egg us on, to say “You think that was crazy?  Just watch this!!”)  Over at his Sausage Debauchery blog, Scott posted this past week about his latest batch of nduja, in which a full one-third of the mix consisted of hot chilis.  No slouch, Porsha cut into her nduja, whipped up an nduja burger, and has now unleashed upon an unsuspecting world the nduja chocolate truffle.

“And-Do-Your-Worst!” also tells you how to pronounce my new creation, my secret weapon: nduja-wurst.  Dat’s right, I’m dropping da bomb, unleashing the weapon to make all other weapons obsolete.  While a traditional nduja salame can take days to ferment and then the better part of a year to smoke and slowly dry out, imagine an nduja sausage that is ready to eat the same day you mix it up and that tastes every bit as good or, dare I say it?, even better! 

This is not my first attempt at a meatier and mellower version of nduja.  Back in the spring, I created an nduja pâté, which got rave reviews, and just a couple weeks ago Scott inspired me to make a mortadella with the same Calabrian chilis that go into nduja.  I liked this emulsion-sausage version, which we christened ndujadella, but missed the liver and the garnish of sweet, roasted red peppers that went into the pâté as well as the deep smokiness of the original, slow-cured salame.  Then inspiration struck (or full-blown insanity descended, depending on your point of view): why not make a liverwurst, which traditionally gets hot-smoked, but season it with the Calabrian hot chilis Scott has in his store and garnish it with the sweet peppers? 

Such a chimera might indeed seem like a case of doing my worst, taking a mild, inoffensive sausage like liverwurst and dousing it with hot chilis.  But having been baptized in fire, this liverwurst is reborn as a glorious new creation that outshines its parents.  It has the intense, smoldering heat and smokiness of nduja, with all its rough edges smoothed over by the silky richness of liver, brightened and lightened by the sweet red peppers.

This ain’t your grandfather’s liverwurst, but then he probably didn’t listen to rock ‘n’ roll either!  Spread on one of Stewart’s bagels and bathe in the glow of the Calabrian heat.

Scott, over at Sausage Debauchery, has been my supplier, my dealer, my main man, for all things Calabrian (and, with his new, virtual store has now become my go-to-guy for all hard-to-find Italian food items).  He recently got a crazy request from the owner of Coluccio’s, where he gets the chili peppers that go into nduja.  The owner gave him some lardo, some pancetta, and some guanciale, and told Scott to make him some nduja with those.  Fuoco! As Scott asked in his appeal for help, what kind of clusterf**k of a salame was he supposed to make with all of that?!

Then inspiration struck: he wants crazy? He came to the right guys; we can show him crazy!  If nduja is known as the “the red nutella” because it’s often spread on grilled bread, then why not come up with an ndujatella, a cooked version that would be ready to eat right away?  Since I enjoy making emulsified sausages, like mortadella, while Scott has sworn off them, he put me in charge, and this is what I came up with: the same, basic procedures as mortadella, only Calabrian chilis (both concentrate and powder) substituted for the usual, delicate spices.  Ndujadella was born!  And, as if all those “picantissimo” chilis weren’t enough, why not add some cubes of pork tongue, marinated in my Thai chili fire water?

So, while my nduja di buffala (made with bison meat) ferments, dries, and mellows for a few more weeks, and while my nduja classico (the latest batch made with 50% more hot peppers than the previous one!) needs a few more months, this lighter, less spicy, intro or “gateway” version of nduja is ready to eat now.  It’s soft enough that you can still spread it on toast.  (Try it with some of Stewart’s chipotle and sun-dried tomato bread!)  Fry it up with some scrambled eggs.  Or just cut it into chunks and eat it as an appetizer – you’ll find, surprisingly, that the hot chilis actually accentuate the fruit in red wine!

After last month’s NY Times article came out, my stash of Nduja was depleted in 9 hours, 41 minutes, and 17 seconds.  Lots of interesting comments have been coming in.  As the largest maker of Nduja in the country, Chris Cosentino’s Boccalone got the lion’s share of the coverage, but a number of correspondents, including a few Calabrians, have confided to me that they have tried it and found it wanting: disappointing, inconsistent, or even downright “terribile!”  So you might just have lucked on the best Nduja in the US, right here.

One of the interesting points in Julia Moskin’s article was how nduja gets “translated” when it’s made over here.  The Calabrian original is rude and crude, rough and tumble, and “absolutely takes the top of your head off,” as Nancy Harmon Jenkins says in the article, so there’s plenty of room for a “meatier and mellower” version.  In addition to the pâté I created, I like this version made with bison meat.  Besides, a more traditional nduja salami, made entirely from pork belly, can take the better part of a year to ferment and dry, while this one should be ready in a little more than a month.  Hopefully it will be enough to keep the ravenous hordes from pounding down my door, while the killer nduja slowly cures.

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Julia Moskin has a good article on nduja in the Dining Section of today’s New York Times.  She’s done her homework on this somewhat vulgar, somewhat uncouth salami from the toe of Italy’s boot.  In the last paragraph, she’s quite right to place nduja in a tradition of cucina povera or poor folks’ cooking, which involves “making the best food from the poorest ingredients.”

Like southern barbecue in this country, which evolved as a way of cooking and spicing up tougher and less desirable cuts of meat, nduja “is just a notch below respectability,”  as Nancy Harmon Jenkins is quoted as saying.  Just as northern Italians tend to look down on southern Italians, barbecue was the food of slaves, of blacks, and of “white trash” (in other words, white people in danger of losing their whiteness).  It’s messy, you eat it with your fingers, and, like nduja, it bathes in smoke and the fires of the chili pepper.  Elegant or refined, it’s not.

Given this historical or anthropological context, it’s pretty laughable how much mystery the chefs and restaurateurs in Moskin’s article surround their nduja with, treating their recipes or their suppliers like some secret guarded by a code of omerta.  Of course, all this secrecy is highly bankable; it’is a magical way of taking nduja uptown and converting a sow’s ear into a silk purse.

So here’s a little secret I’m going to let you in on: (more…)

Ho-leee sheeet!

For those of you untouched by the nduja (pronounced “n-do-ya”) fever, here’s a quick recap: last spring, I stumbled upon this soft, spreadable Calabrian salami at London’s Borough Market; since then, I’ve been experimenting with several versions (including an nduja pâté), and finally settled on this recipe, which is about 1/5 hot chilis (both concentrate and powdered) to 4/5 pork belly; after fermenting and cold-smoking, this salami has been sitting in my drying chamber for the past two months, waiting for someone to step up to the plate.  (Although, in Calabria, they age them for up to a year, so I wasn’t worried, just dying of curiosity.)

Finally, two requests came in within days of each other, and, as long as I was cutting some up, it was a chance to try it myself.  The leaner version that I made with buffalo back in the spring had dried out fairly quickly, so I was pleased to see that this pork belly version was still soft enough to squeeze out of the casing like toothpaste.  I threw some whole wheat penne in boiling water, threw in a bunch of spinach right at the end, and then simply tossed the hot pasta and wilted spinach with the nduja, a little water from the pot, and a splash of olive oil.  Now there’s fast food!

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OK, all you Nduja lurkers out there, hitting on this site just to get your pork fat and chili fix: here’s a recipe to rewind your minds and rethread your heads.

Nduja pâté. Yes, that’s Nduja – the crude and rude, rough and tumble, Calabrian salami that meatheads everywhere are plugging in to fire up their search engines – and pâté – the suave and elegant embodiment of classical French cuisine – together for the first time. A marriage made in heaven or al inferno?

What inspired such a culinary creation – besides the obvious explanation that I’m “crazier than a shithouse rat,” as Scott so succintly put it? It all has to do with texture. The Calabrian Nduja I had a chance to sample in London has a smooth, creamy texture, exactly like what you get from the Liver Terrine a la Parisienne in Frentz and Poulain’s Charcuterie book. Not surprisingly, the mix of meats is about the same, a 2:1 ratio of pork belly to liver. The final reason for nduja-izing pâté is pure greed. Pâté I can eat the same day, instead of waiting for it to ferment, smoke, and then slowly dry for weeks or months.

Here are the main ingredients for the meat mix:

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This recipe comes from one of my running buddies. She can be quite a firecracker (“Get back muthafukkah! You don’t know me like that!”), and when she feels like jazzing herself up a bit, she likes to tint her hair with a color called “firecracker.” Now, these sizzlin’ little bundles of organo-leptic bliss she made for a basque lunch are also called Firecrackers. (Coincidence? I don’t think so!)

They take a little time but are really quite simple. Sauté some red onion in butter until soft but not brown. Combine with chevre (fresh goat cheese) and a little freshly-ground black pepper. Then you just cut the ends off fresh jalapeño peppers, scoop out the seeds and ribs, and stuff them with the goat cheese mix. To complete the ensemble, wrap each pepper with a partial slice of bacon (1/3 to 1/2 a slice per pepper is good for me), and secure with a toothpick if you like. Then bake in a low oven (250-300º F) for 45 minutes to an hour. Then devour. Just crack open a cold one to cut the heat.

I served these as an appetizer last night, and my better half liked them so much that she made a meal out of them and skipped the main course altogether!

Armed now with the fresh concentrate and dried powdered Calabrian chile peppers that Scott sent me, I’m ready to try my hand at a second batch of Nduja.

This time around, I’m taking a much more experimental approach and making several small batches, with a mix of meats and fermentation cultures. For my first batch, I’m going to try the recipe that Jason Molinari originally sent me, which calls for pork belly as the only meat, mixed in a 2:1 ratio with the chiles, in the hope that this pure pork belly version will recreate the creaminess of the Calabrian original.

After that, I’ll experiment with mixing the pork belly in a 1:1 ratio with other meats, shoulder, tongue, liver, and see how that changes the texture and flavor. As a whole new take or twist on Nduja, I might even make a pâté version, using the pâté parisienne technique.

For now, here’s the recipe for the pure pork belly version I’ve worked out:

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Christmas has come early this year! Red, green, and white, in addition to being traditional Christmas colors are also the colors of the Italian flag. And that’s what I got: a little taste of Italy in a box.

Anyone like me, whose has gone nuts for nduja, the soft, spicy, and spreadable salami made in Calabria owes an immense debt of gratitude to Scott, over at Sausage Debauchery. He has found authentic Calabrian chile peppers, both concentrate and dried, at D. Colluccio & Sons in Brooklyn, NY. Not only did he track them down, but he was willing to buy some for me and send me a goody box!

You can tell how genuine this stuff is by all the misspellings. “Genuin Italian Chilly.” “Italian Wild Mountains Fennel.” And I love the ingredients list: “hot pepper, salt” for both the dried and the concentrate. That’s the way it should be. No fucking preservatives. No fucking additives. No fucking artificial colors. Just the real stuff, minimally processed.

And, as you would expect coming from an Italian place in da city, this stuff arrives packing some heat. Big Red was over here when the package arrived, and just sniffing the powdered chile through the plastic packaging was enough to cause a coughing fit. It has a deep, lingering, front-of-the-mouth burn, on the sides just under the tip of the tongue, but it’s not so hot that heat is all you taste. It also has a rich, earthy flavor – in my imagination, like the red soil of Mars, scorched by the sun. In contrast, the concentrate has a brighter, fresher pepper flavor, and it rolls (or is that roils?) across the top of the tongue like a wave of napalm, passing on up through the sinuses, opening everything up, and finishing with a beautiful tingle on the top of your scalp.

Some combination of the concentrate and the dried should be just what I need to make the ultimate nduja! I’ve got two pork shoulders and two pork bellies in the fridge, and now I know what I’m going to be doing all weekend!

And of course one good turn deserves another. Scott expressed a desire to wrap his mouth around some of the stuff that I’ve been cooking up around here, so I packed up a little styrofoam cooler with some of the cocoa bacon, some pancetta, pâté, and of course last week’s mortadella, and sent if off to him yesterday. It should be in his greedy little mitts by Friday. I expect it will all be gone by Sunday. Buon appetito!

Thanks for being so patient, Scott! You are first among the Princes of Pork!

Back in the spring, when I first encountered the smoky, fiery, spreadable Calabrian salami called nduja at London’s Borough Market and posted on it (on April Fool’s Day, no less), I had no idea that nduja fever would sweep American meatheads and that my posts on trying to recreate this salami would become the most frequently viewed of all I’ve written. Apparently, you don’t have to taste the real thing to catch nduja fever; its regional nickname, as “the Red Nutella,” is enough to enflame the imagination.

The biggest obstacle I faced in reproducing what I had tasted is that I don’t have access to any of the Calabrian peppers that traditionally go into this salami. Seeds from Italy had already sold out of Calabrian peppers for the season, and Scott over at Sausage Debauchery is the only one to have tracked down some concentrato di peperoncini with peppers from Calabria at a reasonable price – almost a kilo for a little more than $10 – but I have yet to see a can of it! (Hint, hint. If he can’t send me a mail order address, maybe we’ll just have to do Christmas early this year, and mail him some goodies from the clubhouse in exchange for some cans of fire concentrate.)

In the meantime, I am working on perfecting a secret weapon of my own to turn up the heat.

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