One of the guys who ate up Colonel Nancy’s Kentucky ham recently said that it reminded him of something he had eaten growing up in Switzerland: bündnerfleisch.

For those of you, like me, who had never heard of it, bündnerfleisch (or buendnerfleisch) is a traditional, dry-cured beef product that has been made in the Graubünden valleys of Switzerland time out of mind. Made from the top round muscle, it sounds very similar to the Italian bresaola made just over the border from the smaller eye of round muscle. But presumably bündnerfleisch uses a different mix of herbs and spices in the cure, and I need to know what they are, because now I’ve got a request to try and reproduce it!

Any help out there? Anyone?!

In addition to what goes into the cure, bündnerfleisch is also distinguished by its shape. As you can see, over the period of drying, it gets pressed until it takes on this loaf-like shape. Much as this appeals to the woodworker in me who has just about every variety of clamp and vise (that’s viSe, with an “S,” not a “C”), I have to wonder what reason there could be for pressing the flesh like this. Some say it’s to squeeze moisture out. (Not buying that one.) Most say that it helps to redistribute moisture evenly within the meat. Is there any evidence for this?

Shaping the meat this way is similar to what the Germans and Austrians do with their dry-cured landjaeger sausages. So, at the risk of falling back on a regional stereotype, is there more going on here than some Germanic compulsiveness? Is there any reason to press the flesh other than to reduce it to a regular, rectangular shape and alles in ordnung machen?

Wow, it must be that time of year again. A little over a year ago, I wrote one of my first posts about my visit to Colonel Nancy Mahaffey’s country-ham curing operation in the small town of Princeton, Kentucky, just south of the Ohio River from Illinois. If you haven’t ordered yours already – what are you thinking! Click on the photo to the left or the “Meaty Link” to the right to order yours today.

Fresh (as a mere one-year old infant), the ham can be hard to slice thinly and still tastes quite salty from the cure. It’s best used as a flavoring ingredient in a meal. But after a few more years aging and drying, the saltiness mellows out (damned if I know why), and the ham can be sliced super thin and served like the finest European hams. In fact, Newsom’s ham was the first American ham invited to the World Congress of Dry Cured Hams (I kid you not), and one of Colonel Nancy’s hams now hangs in the collection of the Jamón museum in Aracena, Spain.

Pictured is a ham than Nancy, Loni, and Jessie cured almost 4 years ago. It’s been aging in my meat-curing fridge since, and I sliced this up for lunch recently. I thought I’d have some to bring home, but everyone ate it up. They ate it up plain. They wrapped Jerry’s oven-baked potato chips in it. Hats off to David for pointing out how great each bite of steak tasted wrapped in a slice of ham. As far as I can recall, the only things we didn’t wrap in ham were the fruit tarts and the pecan pie. (A mistake that – not trying the pecan pie with a slice of ham.)

As I said last year, if there’s an outer limit as to how long these hams can age before the flavor begins to fall off rather than improve, I haven’t reached it yet!

What better way to spend your birthday than breaking down a side of beef? Or–just as good–watching a master butcher carve up a cow that he has carefully left hanging in the back of his cooler for almost 2 months?

This past fall, I wrote about the titanic struggle to get a local butcher to hang a Dexter bull for a measly 3 weeks. (In the end, I had to butcher and finish aging the rib and loin sections myself.) Every so often (about once every 2 years), a cow passes under Chuck Stites knife that he recognizes as truly superior, as having the fine marbling and the cap of fat to make it worthy and capable of aging for a good long while. Then he gives us a call, sticks the carcass in the back and forgets about it until it has hung for 3 times longer than any local meat locker would consider.

My buddy Jerry emails me: “Chuck has a cow for us.” “What kind of cow?” I write back, pestering him with all kinds of questions about the age, the breed, the feed, the marbling, etc. “Chuck says he has a cow,” Jerry replies, as if I’m being singularly dense, implying “how much more do you need to know?” He’s quite right, of course; after 25 years, Chuck has a pretty good idea what he’s doing.

So on the appointed day, we show up, watch Chuck break down a side of beef in next to no time, divide up the spoils (“one for you, and two for me”), and then immediately retire to the grill to assess how sacred cow III compares to cows I and II. Jerry seared the hell out of a 2″ thick porterhouse steak on his Hibachi (at which point, the interior is just beginning to warm up), and then stuck it in a 300º oven to finish warming through (we like to take it out when the internal temperature hits 120º). When we cut into it, it was a beautiful, bright rosy pink all the way through. With just a little salt and pepper, and a dusting of shaved Parmigiano, it was beefy perfection. Jerry worried that a steak that thick would be too big for just the two of us, but we gnawed it right down to the bone.

So how did this cow compare? It might not have been quite as sublime as Sacred Cow I, and the meat did not have the same brothy depth and iron tang of the Sacred Bull, but, damn, it’s mighty fine. Since I don’t eat a whole lot of beef, I’m very fortunate that the only beef I eat is probably better than most people ever taste in a lifetime. And the price for the luxury of dry-aged, prime beef, for which you have to look high and low just to find anymore?  A mere $2 a pound, since a group of us bought the whole side. Many thanks, Chuck and Jerry, for reminding me just how good we have it here!

The process of curing meat is part science, part craft, and part inspiration or imagination, but sometimes the results seem more like the work of alchemy or magic. When I shaved off the first slice of this bresaola and held it up to the light, it no longer looked like meat at all; it looked like stained glass of the deepest crimson. Even in the mouth, it seemed as if this beef had been transformed or transubstantiated: earthily meaty, minerally, and chewy, yes, but somehow as if it had become so concentrated or reduced to its essence that it had become ethereal, otherworldly.

I can only take so much credit for the magic. First, it takes a healthy, happy, grass-fed animal in the prime of life, in this case a Dexter bull. After slaughter came the epic Battle of the Beef (parts I, II, III, and IV), in which we fought to get the meat properly hung and ended up butchering it ourselves. Then the eye of the round muscle (a lean cut from this lean animal) went into the cure for two and a half weeks, where salt, pepper, sugar, rosemary, thyme, and juniper all contributed their flavors. Finally, it was hung up to dry for more than a month, harmonizing and further concentrating the already rich flavors. The end of all this time and labor is this little snapshot of beauty, a small taste of magic. It’s good to feel that I did alright by this bull, that its life and sacrifice have been properly honored.

Some of this bresaola will be going out to Morsel of the Month Club members, but there is a little extra to offer to regular Club members. It comes in two-ounce packages (approximately 20-30 slices). Not so much sliced as shaven. Must be 18 or older to order. I took a plate to the wine-tasting on Friday, and it simply evaporated. As his pupils dilated, all Doug had to say is, “That was one happy cow!” Serve as an antipasto, drizzled with just a little good olive oil. Accompany with a salad of rich baby greens (including Bull’s Blood beet greens, of course) with shavings of Parmigiano. Mop up the oil with good bread; lick your fingers clean. You will not taste its like again.

Here’s a recap for those of you who just tuned in. About six months ago, I announced that I was setting off on a quest to round up some great beef. Not OK beef, not just good beef, but great beef, beef as flavorful as possible. This means meat from a beef (not dairy) breed, a mature animal, raised only on natural pasture, and hung for as long as possible. Six weeks and two days ago, a three-year old Dexter bull went to slaughter. Three weeks ago, the butcher at the locker, Chuck Crupper, was shitting his pants about how long we had left our side of beef hanging and basically refused to have anything more to do with it. A little more than two weeks ago, we butchered the beef ourselves (with some much appreciated help), but left both the rib section and the loin (from which the ribeye, t-bone, and porterhouse steaks come) intact to age further.

It was T-day: Taste Day. The night we butchered it, we treated ourselves to the tenderloin or filet. Now it was time to cut off a nice, honking steak and see if we were approaching the pinnacle of beefiness or, as Chuck had warned, I had only managed to ruin a perfectly good (and expensive) piece of meat. Our third musketeer just got back into town, and the three of us were getting together for lunch, so it was a perfect occasion to pull out a 15-pound primal cut of beef and ponder, “How thick would we like to cut that?”

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I had it all planned out. I was going to write a completely different kind of post about this fabulous side of beef. After almost three weeks of hanging at the locker, today was the day it was scheduled to be cut up. I was going to bring the whole loin and sirloin home with me, like an early Christmas present, and talk about my plans to age these chunks of beef in my fridge for another 2 to 3 weeks before I cut off a perfect rib roast for the Christmas holiday.

But Noooooo!

Instead, I haul my sick carcass out of bed at 6am this morning, pick up my buddy Brandon, and we spend close to an hour driving on icy roads out to Chuck’s Locker in Ivesdale, only for Chuck Crupper to tell us that he’s not willing to touch the carcass until he has it reinspected to certify that it’s still wholesome. (Thanks for the fucking phone call, Chuck!)

What IS the problem?!! What is his beef?

Any book you read written by anyone who’s after great-tasting beef will tell you that you need to let a beef carcass hang for a MINIMUM of 3 weeks before the meat starts to get good. Chuck cuts his sides up after a week to 10 days, and he’s freaked that I’ve had him leave this carcass for almost 3. Part of the reason he’s freaked is that this cow was raised only on natural grass, and so it’s not covered with the thick mantle of fat that he’s used to seeing on grain-fed beef. Without this layer of fat to protect it, Chuck was worried about two things. First, he thought the meat had dried out so much that there would be a lot of waste trimming off this dark, purplish-black outer layer. But the color he mistakes for dessication is actually a good sign: it indicates the preponderance of myoglobin-rich, “slow-twitch” muscle fiber (where the flavor is) that you get with a healthy, active, mature bull–something Chuck is not used to seeing apparently. Second, he was worried that even such moderate hanging had allowed the surface to get contaminated with bacteria, even in his scrupulously clean locker.

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