Although only just listed in the Club section, I made this finocchiona salame back in November.  Since then, it’s been slowly fermenting and drying.  I donated some to Dan Schreiber’s tasting of 1000-year-old foods a couple weeks ago, and people ate it up and clamored for more, so it must be ready!  I loved Armandino Batali’s finocchiona, which we used to get at Persimmon, so when that was no longer available, I had to make my own.  Made with Triple S Farm’s pork, it’s simply seasoned, with salt, white pepper, black pepper, and just a little garlic and chianti.

And, of course, fennel.  I used to think fennel was fennel, until I tried the “wild mountains fennel” that Scott sells, imported from Italy.  These seeds are small and intensely licorish-y, but while conventional fennel has a caustic bite that gets you in the back of the throat, these have a mild, toasted nuttiness that makes them a perfect partner for meat.

And, thanks to the generosity of others!, I finally have some venison to work with again.  First, I combined some with more of Stan’s pork to make these venison bratwursts.  Mildly seasoned with white pepper, coriander, a hint of garlic, and a splash of white wine, then hot-smoked until fully cooked, this is a versatile sausage, like a Polish kielbasa.  You could grill it and eat it as is, but this time of year, I enjoy it mixed in with a heartier dish.  I took the broth I had left over from steaming pastrami and cooked a huge pan of cabbage, onions, carrots, and potatoes that I served with slices of the bratwurst.

It’s hard to know what to call my other venison sausage.  It’s loosely based on a sausage that’s considered the national sausage of Switzerland, where it’s called Cervelat in the German-speaking part (cervelas in French and zervelada or cervelato in Italian).  Switzerland produces 160 million of them a year, which works out to just over 20 sausages per person.

Originally made with pork brains (the name comes from the Latin cerebrum), it’s now made with a mixture of beef and pork, and sometimes bacon.  The recipe I have makes a firm, lean salame, like what we call a Summer Sausage, and so I substituted venison for most of the beef.  Studded with whole peppercorns and mustard seeds, fermented, and then smoked for the better part of a day over hickory, this is a dense, meaty, and flavorful sausage.  It’s fully cooked, so just eat it out of hand, as I’ve been doing!

Now I have to clear the decks and prepare for a 400-pound sow who’s coming this weekend (and I don’t mean any relatives)!

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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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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A few months back, I reviewed the Marianskis’ book, The Art of Fermented Sausages. Because they go deeper into the issues of chemistry, microbiology, sanitation, and equipment (for smoking, fermenting, and drying), I concluded that the book would be useful for amateur sausagemakers ready to attempt these more technically challenging sausages. But, as a hastily written and self-published effort, the book suffered from a number of problems which I belabored: poor organization, stilted prose, numerous typographical errors, no index…

So it’s heartening to see that Stanley Marianski has taken these criticisms to heart, revised this book (as well as two others), established a new publishing company to put them out, and then contacted me to ask if he could send me a review copy. Now that’s a class act!

The overall organization hasn’t changed much, but the prose has really been cleaned up. The new index is minimal but still helpful. Referring back to this book for information on molds, yeasts, and all the various bacteria present in sausages (both desirable and undesirable) is now much easier. The indexing of the recipes, however still leaves a lot to be desired. Since all the recipes are listed alphabetically in the Contents, listing them again by name in the index doesn’t offer any new help. If, instead, you want to find sausages by the kind of meat they’re based on (pork, beef, or chicken), by other ingredients they use, by the country or region they come from, or by the fermentation culture they use, the index still won’t help you.

But, all in all, this new edition is much more worthy of the wealth of knowledge and experience that Stanley Marianski brings to this subject. He is the first author to delve into the technical and scientific information on the subject that has come out in the last 60 years (some of which is only available in foreign languages), sift out what’s relevant and practical for someone working at home, and make it comprehensible and easily doable. In addition to this service provided by his own books, the recent establishment of his small publishing company (Bookmagic LLC) promises even more. Having a publishing company dedicated to bridging the gap between meat science and home hobbyists could be the key to bringing many other new books on meat curing, smoking, and sausage-making to market. For these efforts and for his dedication to this subject, all of us amateur meatheads are greatly indebted to him!

As of TODAY, the new, revised editions of his books are available through Amazon. Remember, you heard it here first!

Usually attributed to Otto Von Bismark, there’s an old saying that there are two things you never want to see: the making of legislation and the making of sausages.  If you’ve ever read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, you know what he was talking about, at least when it comes to sausages.  As the meatpacking business became industrialized, the sausage casing became little more than a garbage can into which all the nasty bits were thrown, masked, and fobbed off on the unsuspecting consumer.

In the face of this, I think I’m not alone in wanting to rediscover how good sausages can be if we make them out of the best materials instead of the worst.  This past weekend, two other people came over to help me make a batch of sausage and see how it was done.  Since I had some whole chickens, fresh from the farm, that I planned to hot-smoke in the Bradley, I chose a fermented sausage recipe that called for cold-smoking; this would give me a chance to try out the new, cold-smoking box that I had built to sit on top of the Bradley.

Moscow sausage is a semi-dry, Russian beef sausage from the Marianskis book, The Art of Making Fermented Sausages.  I used beef from the sacred bull that I put in the freezer this fall, and once again it did not disappoint.  In addition to giving it a rich, beefy taste and an incredibly deep, purplish-red color, bull meat is particularly high in the myosin protein that gives you a good bind in the sausage.  We made up this batch in a couple hours, and then left it in the Bradley overnight to ferment.  The next day, after brining, the chickens went into the Bradley, and these fermented sausages were bumped upstairs, to the cold-smoking box.  My cold-smoking box worked even better than I had hoped. With the Bradley at 170º F, my cold smoking box stayed at about 100º F or 25º F above the ambient temperature.  Even when I heated up the Bradley to 240º F to finish cooking the chickens, the temperature in the box above only rose slightly, to 125º F.  In the end, once the chickens were done, I actually had to move the sausages back down to the Bradley just to heat them through to 140º F.

Slightly smoky, and with just a little tang from the fermentation, this is a nice, clean beef sausage, with just enough black pepper and nutmeg to give it some spice notes.  After fermenting and cooking, it will hang for a week to dry out slightly, leaving a sausage that’s still nice and moist.  A pre-cooked sausage like this is the most versatile: take it on a picnic, add it at the last minute to scrambled eggs or anything else you’re cooking, or enjoy it by itself with a German rauchbier.  I cut into one early and ate it out of hand with some whole grain bread we baked this weekend and a little Colman’s mustard.

If you’ve followed my recent posts about “abliguritions,” then you’ve seen me plunging precipitately into the maw of hell.

My work on replicating a Calabrian nduja salame is the organoleptic version of the same quest.  Or the inversion of that quest: instead of being drawn into the maw of hell, it’s a matter of formulating the fires of hell, capturing them in a salame, and then popping it into my own mouth.  Devouring that which consumes you, eating and being eaten: it’s the ancient ouroboros from which there is no escape.

For those brave enough to follow after, the nduja is now ready!  As I explained in my initial recipe, there are two versions, one made entirely with pork, which is still fairly soft and spreadable, and one made with bison meat, which is a firmer salame.  The pork version can be spread on grilled bread or simply mixed with hot pasta and a little bit of liquid (such as the juice from a jar of roasted red peppers) until it dissolves and coats it.  The bison version is leaner and has a richer, meatier taste, but is firmer and should be sliced like a regular salami.  It would make a great sandwich with some provolone or a fiery addition to soups or stews.  Think Italian chili, with cannellini instead of kidney beans, with some cavolo nero (“Tuscan kale”), and with nduja instead of ground beef.

And it’s great to meet two others out there, travelling down the same highway to hell.  Over at Sausage Debauchery, Scott has just assembled his nduja, with an astounding 25% of the total mix consisting of a “blisteringly hot” concentrato di peperoncino that he tracked down in Brooklyn.  Scott also turned me on to another great blog out there, Foodie and the Everyman, where she is working on her own recipe and getting ready to mix up her own batch of nduja.  Welcome to the inferno!

I see that I posted on the nduja di buffala one month ago. Since then, it’s been hanging in the meat-curing fridge, slowly drying out and mellowing. Well, given the quantities of hot peppers in this sausage, “mellowing” is not exactly the right word; you don’t “mellow” a blast furnace; you might break it in, but you’ll never “mellow” it.

When it was fresh, the version I made with bison instead of pork shoulder was nice and spreadable, easily melting into hot pasta so that it needed almost no sauce. A month later, it’s still a fairly soft salami, but no longer spreadable. I plan on hanging the rest another month or so to see what kind of dry salami this makes. Interestingly, the more traditional version made with all pork was distinctly different from the start. While the buffalo one firmed up quickly, the pork version started out almost squishy and, a month later, is now soft and spreadable. I mixed some into whole wheat pasta yesterday for my local, semi-regular basque lunch club, and it got rave reviews. Just make sure you have a pitcher of water and plenty of beer on hand!

Now for the flavor. When fresh, the heat from the chilis was hot and bright, like a newly-formed star. Now, like an aging star, the heat is darker and more smoldering, but, if anything, it’s more dense, more concentrated. Fermentation and curing have contributed an earthy funkiness to the sausage. Munching on it causes a nice, cooling sweat to break out on the top of your head. The heat that I wanted is there, but not quite the richness or the depth of pepper flavors that I remember from the original, eaten at that stall in London’s Borough Market, almost two months ago. Scott, who has launched his Sausage Debauchery blog, has been indefatigueable in trying to track down Calabrian peppers in this country (you could say his imagination has been enflamed by this recipe), and it looks like he finally found some, for a very reasonable price, in Brooklyn. As soon as I get my hands on some of this concentrato di pepperoncini I’ll make another batch and report.

All in all, I’m quite pleased with my first attempt to reproduce this salami. I think the recipe is a keeper, and I’ll just keep experimenting with the mix of peppers–and probably never stop!