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I've Got the Cure
May 4, 2007

Today, after more months than I care to enumerate, I got to concentrate on some form of cooking again, specifically in regard to Terroir.

One of my absolute-favorite cured-meat products is guanciale, the cured hog jowls traditionally used in Spaghetti alla Carbonara from the Lazio region in Italy. Mary, my wife, and I became friends with Armandino Batali (yes, Mario’s father) and his consigliere, Bill Gould, when they used to come down to southern Oregon for the Shakespeare Festival and dine at my previous restaurant. On one trip, Bill brought us some of Armandino’s guanciale (below). We went home, cut it into lardons and sautéed away. We were a bit skeptical when the house started to have that “beef liver” smell. We worried for nothing. It was the best-tasting cured pig product we’ve ever had.

After that day, we set out to cure our own, and cure we did. Fast forward a number of years. Terroir is a few weeks from opening, so now is the time to start curing hog jowls and rolling up pork belly for pancetta. I called my natural game supplier and my suckling pig farmer and picked up some pork. I’m using a variation of Mario Batali’s guanciale recipe. For step-by-step instructions on how to cure your own pancetta, check out this article.

I’ll let you know it turns out. Next up: infusing alcohol for our house cocktails, then on to the remaining recipe-writing and testing.

And the journey continues.

Cheers!

Stu

Posted by Stu Stein on May 4, 2007 | Comments (0)