I was a devoted vegetarian in high school—for about eight months. I passed on the Thanksgiving turkey and turned down the filet mignon on Christmas Day. I abstained from roast lamb on Easter and put a stop to our longtime family ritual of T-bone steaks and baked potatoes on Saturday nights.
Prosciutto was my undoing. As a young child I had earned the nickname Prosciutella, or “little prosciutto,” from my Italian aunts. Every summer they would purchase a whole leg of prosciutto. From June through August, we would slice away at it, to eat as a snack with cheese or as a simple second course, or even draping it over fried eggs (my favorite). I loved that combination of creamy fat and tangy red meat. As a teenager I proved unable to resist it. Even today, I rarely crave a hamburger or steak; it’s those tasty bits—sausage crumbled into pasta sauce, a flavor base of sautéed pancetta in Zuppa di Pasta e Fagioli (page 129), or rich strips of guanciale in Pasta alla Gricia (page 233)—that I can’t do without.
Like cheese making, the art and craft of curing meat dates back centuries in Italy. And like most preserving techniques, it was born out of necessity. If you were fortunate to have a hog to butcher, especially in remote mountainous areas, you darned well better utilize every part, because you had to live off it for months. To this day, many salumi are named for the part of the pig used in their making: testa (head); coppa (back of the head and neck); spalla (shoulder); guanciale (jowl); pancetta (belly); and so on. Included in the salumi spectrum are also sausages and salami, made from ground or chopped meat.
The herbs and spices used to flavor these various cured meats differ from region to region. In Tuscany, where wild fennel grows in abundance, fennel is a predominant flavor. In Umbria, truffle is the star flavor, and in Calabria and other southern regions, some of the cured meats are a deep red from the addition of ground pepper—both sweet and hot.
As with the cheese section of this chapter, the recipes that follow are intended as an introduction to simple Italian meat-preserving techniques: You’ll learn how to make fresh sausages and how to cure pancetta and guanciale. These are gateway recipes and techniques, and you may find yourself wanting to know, and do, more. You’re not alone; the DIY food community in the United States has embraced the craft of meat curing in recent years. There are Web sites and Facebook pages devoted to it. For professional chefs and restaurateurs, having a house-made salumi or meat-curing program has become almost a requirement, and there are a handful of restaurants that have built their entire menus around the theme. For more in-depth information, techniques, and recipes, I recommend the books Cooking by Hand, by Paul Bertolli; Charcuterie, by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn; and Dry-Curing Pork: Make Your Own Salami, Pancetta, Coppa, Prosciutto, and More, by Hector Kent.
Before you start, carefully read the section introductions, as well as recipes and instructions; curing meat is a serious pursuit, even for a beginner, and proper preparation is essential. Keep in mind that your salumi will only be as good as the meat used to make them. Buy your pork from a reputable source. I rely on an organic butcher and a local farmer who raises a small number of pigs. The meat from these animals is deeply rosy and marbled with sweet, creamy fat. I may pay more per pound, but in the end I win because I am stocked with enough sausages, pancetta, and guanciale to last the better part of a year.
You don’t always have to cross the ocean to find the right expert on Italian food. My friend Carolyn Van Damme is our local sausage maven. Every December she invites a bunch of friends and their kids over and together everyone grinds, mixes, and cranks out about 100 pounds of sausage—hot and sweet Italian, chorizo, merguez, and more. There is music, lots of food and wine, and at the end of the day we all go home with enough sausage to enjoy throughout the winter.
Carolyn’s heritage is Italian and German, so sausage making is pretty much in her DNA; she has been doing it since she was a child, when she used to assist her maternal grandfather. The operation has grown in recent years, to the point where she recently graduated from using the sausage attachment on her stand mixer to employing a motorized meat grinder and a heavy-duty, 10-pound sausage stuffer.
My own sausage-making ambitions are more modest; with my hand-crank grinder and 5-pound stuffer I can turn out 8 to 10 pounds of sausage in a few hours. There is nothing like homemade sausage, especially if you start with good-quality meat and fresh, aromatic spices to punch up the flavor. Carolyn uses a mix of pork and beef in her sausages (2 parts pork to 1 part beef); she prefers the heartier flavor that beef imparts. I’m more of a traditionalist and so I make mine with all pork.
Don’t be alarmed at the generous quantity of pork fat called for in the following recipes; good sausage requires a fair amount of fat to help bind the meat and produce an appealing texture, as well as to keep it from drying out when cooked. Look for good, fresh pork fatback, or ask the butcher in your supermarket’s meat department to set some aside for you. You can also use more fatty cuts of pork shoulder. I sometimes set aside extra-fatty pieces of home-cured guanciale or pancetta and use those. Both Carolyn and I like our sausages highly seasoned with lots of black pepper and fennel. Carolyn’s grand-father taught her that the best way to tell when enough pepper had been added was when you could see individual grains stuck to your hands after mixing.
To make sausages you need a couple of special pieces of equipment: one to chop or grind the meat, and one to stuff the mixture into casings. If you have a stand mixer that comes with the option of meat-grinding and sausage-stuffing attachments, you can use those. However, if you are planning to make sausages more than just once or twice I recommend investing in a stand-alone grinder and stuffer (see Sources). Most grinders come with two dies, one for a coarse grind and one for a fine grind, and some come with more. I have a small cast-iron grinder that clamps to my kitchen countertop and is perfect for churning out the amount of meat required in the following recipes. I also have a hand-crank sausage stuffer that fills up to 5 pounds of sausage at a time. Follow the manufacturer’s instructions for setting up the grinder and stuffer, or for assembling the grinding and stuffing attachments for the stand mixer.
I use and recommend natural hog casings for stuffing sausages. You can buy them at butcher shops or special-order them from the supermarket meat department, but they are also available online, packed in salt and vacuum-sealed (see Sources). Casings come in a variety of widths; those labeled “32-35 mm” are ideal for Italian sausages. If you have any left over after sausage making, pack them in salt water in a container with a tight-fitting lid and store them in the freezer.
Following are instructions for making typical “sweet” (that is, not spicy) Italian-style sausages, with a variation for “hot” (spicy) sausages, and a recipe for garlic, cheese, and wine sausages. Once you are familiar with the process, you will be able to come up with your own favorite flavor and spice combinations.