[Photograph: Rachel Strawn] Frank Bruni and I have at least two things in common: We’ve both hung up our professional feedbags and we’re both over the moon about the lardo lollipops at Salumi in Seattle. I got to meet the author of Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater when he was in the city on a West Coast leg of his book tour. We had lunch at the renowned salumeria started by Armandino Batali and now run by his daughter, Gina Batali, and her husband, Brian D’Amato. But before he sat down at the head of the table for 10, my friend and former Seattle Post-Intelligencer colleague Rebekah Denn and I double-teamed the former New York...
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Learning to ride a two-wheeler is admirable, but learning to ride a Salumi-Cycle? Now that merits major cycling cred. This shiny red ride delivers pork orders from the Bay Area's recently-opened Boccalone, to nearby Financial District destinations. It's like the ice cream truck, only less carnival music and frozen dairy, more salted pig links. Does meat on wheels make anyone else really happy? [via Eater SF] Previously Boccalone's Chris Cosentino Explains the Bastard Step-Child of Mortadella Shopping Cart Bicycle...
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Chris Cosentino is the chef of San Francisco-based restaurant Incanto and has started the company Boccalone, which delivers cured meats on a weekly basis. In this video from the Salumi Meat Society, Cosentino shares his "everything but the oink" philosophy, explains the difference between bologna and mortadella ("Bologna is the bastard step-child of mortadella."), and we get an inside look at the factory where the salumi is made. Video after the jump....
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In yesterday's T Style Magazine, Oliver Schwaner-Albright says "the meat slicer could be the first appliance to earn a place on the kitchen counter since the espresso machine. That’s because American artisans are no longer hiding the salumi — Italian for cured meats. The process by which cuts of meat, usually pork, are salted and aged in a place that’s cool, dark and drafty, like a mountain cave (the traditional method) or a well-ventilated meat locker (the Food and Drug Administration’s preference), is now being mastered on these shores." Prosciutto we all know by now, but he also discusses seven other kinds of salumi—bresaeola, coppa, lardo, mortadella, salame, soppressata, and speck—as well as where you can find them online....
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