Candido Preparing Lunch

Talking to Clotilde In The Curing Room

Clotilde holds up a lamp to show us the fire

The Passamontis are famous for all their various salumi ‘and have been famous for them for decades and decades. These are the pinnacle of porky products, gold medallists, award winners, the standard by which others are judged’. So wrote Matthew Fort about them and he wasn’t wrong.

We especially loved their ciauscolo, an unusual salami that is eaten soft and spreadable. The meat is minced very finely and then seasoned with salt, pepper, fresh garlic and orange peel before being cured for 6 weeks. At this point it has the consistency of paté and is delicious on toast, the heat bringing out the delicate flavours of citrus and garlic. I am planning to have a big chunk of it in the fridge over Christmas because our first delivery from the Passamontis arrived yesterday and included ciauscolo, fegatino (ciauscolo with 20% liver – just like a liver paté.), lardo (cured with a thick layer of rosemary, sage and bay leaves) and guanciale. Come and try some and remember that we are open the 22nd (all day), 23rd (all day) and 24th (until 2pm) in the run up to the big day. We hope you all have a very good one.

With him we drove to Lescun at the head of the Aspe valley (to the west of the Ossau Valley), a village surrounded by the high peaks of the dramatic Cirque de Lescun that form the border with Spain.

With Gilbert and Jean-Francois in the Saloir

A View to the Cirque de Lescun from Jean-Francois' farmhouse

Jean-Francois Making His Brebis Fermier

The Mass of Curd

Draining The Curds Of Whey

Coredo in the Val di Non. The orchards you can see are growing apples

Like prosciutto, speck is made from the hind leg of the pig but, unlike prosciutto, it has the bone removed and the 2 muscles opened like a book before being smoked and aged. This means it’s a flat piece of meat and generally won’t be aged more than 5 months. Ours, however, is like no other speck I’ve ever seen: it’s enormous. Massimo Corra knows the virtues of long ageing so he buys pigs that are reared extensively on a local farm for 14 – 16 months. Their legs have a much thicker layer of both fat and meat which means that Massimo can age his speck for well over a year until the glossy fat just melts and the delicately smokey meat takes on a delicious hint of the spices with which it is cured.

Schiena. Maturing Back Fat in Massimo's Cantina

Trentino is the southern province of Trentino Alto Adige and, until the end of the First World War, Alto Adige belonged to the Austro Hungarian Empire. Under Mussolini a program of italianization was planned and Hitler agreed that the German speaking population would be transferred to German ruled territory or dispersed around Italy. The outbreak of the Second World War prevented this relocation and the cooking of Alto Adige remains very obviously Tyrolean.

The cooking of Trentino is very different and has a variety of influences but is based on polenta (which is made in every valley using either water, wine or milk), potatoes and pork. Cured pork is king and is, for the most part, smoked. Massimo sells his range from his butchers shop in Coredo and it includes schiena, probusto (just like a frankfurter), prosciutto, a carpaccio of smoked loin and the Slow Food presidia salamis Mortandela del Val di Non and Lucanica Trentina which we will be in getting soon.

Massimo With His Pancetta and Mortandela Salami

The only problem is availability as Massimo butchers just 5 pigs a week but this summer he is frantically building new curing and smoking rooms to enable his tiny production to increase. Speed is of the essence because most builders in Trentino stop working in November as they are eligible for a winter grant from the State that covers almost 100% of their wages. Why? Because it gets too cold. How very civilised.

Stefano Montali Who Makes Our Parma Ham

There are 10 million Parma hams made every year by 189 producers. This kind of mass production in such a small, designated area means that the general quality is not exceptional and it will take a while (in our case 3 years for the Montali ham) to find a really good one.

Around the town of San Daniele in Friuli, 31 producers make ‘only’ 2.7 million hams. This looks set to change as production levels are rising rapidly (much like they did in Parma 20 years ago) but until now this fact has lent San Daniele ham a certain cachet in England, as it used to have in Italy too.

Is it deserved? Do the Friulani use less salt in their hams, do their pigs eat acorns, weigh more or maybe less, gambol around the conifer forests of the Carnic Alps? There’s so much misinformation about, that in the end I phoned up both the Prosciutto di Parma and the Prosciutto di San Daniele consortium to get the technical low-down and I can now confidently tell you that…. they’re pretty much exactly the same.  The pigs come from the same 5000 farms chosen from 10 different regions of northern and central Italy. None of them are eating acorns and the amount of salt used, within a given range, is up to the producer. Pigs for both hams have to weigh a minimum of 160kg when they are slaughtered and Samantha Gosparini from the San Daniele consortium told me that experiments using free-range animals had been unsuccessful as the pigs hadn’t reached the required weight.

Joel Dommett Slicing Our Parma Ham

Even the sweet mountain air that everyone goes on about in both Parma and San Daniele is slightly mythological: nowadays air conditioning has put paid to the old fashioned system of sniffing the air and opening or closing the windows accordingly. Only a handful of producers (including the Montali family) continue the tradition.

So really it all comes down to the skill and the culture of each individual prosciuttificio and the quality of their primary ingredients but I’ll talk about the unique approach of the Montali family in another blog. This is a rare photo of the lovely Joel: after his stand up gig on the Russell Howard show last week he has told us he can no longer  regularly work with us. We always knew this would happen sooner or later and he’s promised to make the odd guest appearance for us. Don’t act too starstruck if he slices your ham.

L'Antica Corte Pallavicina

Our Culatello di Zibello is made in Polesine by l’Antica Corte Pallavicina. This beautiful, 14^th century estate sits on the banks of the river Po and is made even more imposing by the relentlessly flat landscape of the Bassa that surrounds it. More precisely, it stands on the dikes that protect it from the waters of the Po when the river is in spate. The rest of the year the course of the Po is some 50m away. The 15^th century cellar is unusual because it was built specifically for curing meats, with just one original north-facing window to let in the river fog and a small west facing one to enable the air to circulate inside.

Fresh Culatelli On Their Way To The Cellar

The idea of thick river fog doesn’t immediately conjure up ideal conditions for dry curing meat and this is why Culatelli (the rump of pork) all have the bone and the rind removed. Only a thin pigs bladder protects the meat from the air to ensure that they don’t spoil. The fogs that blanket the area throughout autumn and winter prevent them drying out too much and even in summer when temperatures in the cellar reach 25ºC the air is still humid.

Culatelli Maturing In The 15th Century Cellar

They have counted over 1000 different types of bacteria in the cellar, each one of them friendly (mainly lactobacilli and leuconostocs) and working its own bit of magic on the 5000 Culatelli di Zibello that hang there, helping break down bland meat proteins and fats into smaller, intensely savoury and aromatic molecules.

Every four weeks the younger culatelli are brushed of their moulds to stop too much bacterial action in the meat but the older ones are left untouched in the stillest, dampest part of the cellar. Intricate webs of grey-brown mould hang thickly from their casings and this was where we found the sign in the photo below. S.A.R stands for Sua Altezza Reale or His Royal Highness: Prince Charles has got a taste for the good stuff as no more than 1000 of the total production will be aged beyond two years.

Prince Charle's Culatelli!

No other culatello producer can age for as long as l’Antica Corte Pallavicina (ours are up to 30 months old) because none can match the unique conditions of their medieval cellar or the experience of Massimo Spigaroli who makes them. It is unique among Italian cured meats and, as such, is worth a try even if, at £140kg, you decide to stick with Parma ham! We’ve been selling it for 3-4 weeks now and there is a small band of regulars who are hooked.

It’s just a shame that Elliott is eating all the profits…

You can stay in one of the 6 beautifully restored rooms at l’Antica Corte Pallavicina from 140 euros a night. The restaurant received its first Michelin star last November and the tasting menu has culatello in five of its seven courses. We even had culatello for breakfast.

Carlo Pieri With The Meat For His Porchetta

Italian porchetta is a whole pig that is very cleverly deboned and rolled up with a mixture of different herbs and spices. These change according to the region where it is made so in Umbria and Lazio it will always include fennel seeds, in Tuscany rosemary and in Sardinia myrtle leaves. After stuffing, the pig is slow roasted in a wood fired oven.

Markets in every central Italian town will have a porchettaio, a man in a van selling porchetta to be taken home and eaten for lunch with some salad or, more likely, devoured on the spot in a bread roll. The porchettaio should always ask if you want la crosta, the crackling, il sale, the salty stuffing and if you want your meat grasso or magro, fatty or lean.

The Porchetta With Its Rosemary And Garlic Stuffing

The most delicious part of the porchetta is the roll of loin and belly and Elliott will often roast a piece of this on a Sunday for us. Elliott is a perfectionist when it comes to his dinner (he has even been know to dry his pork with a hairdryer to ensure perfect crackling) so he was in his element when, on our trip to Italy, we spent the day with Carlo Pieri learning how to make porchetta.

The Finished Porchetta Ready For The Oven

Carlo Pieri is a Tuscan butcher and once a week he makes a porchetta from the loin and belly of one of his pigs to sell in his shop. He roasts it in the communal oven that belongs to the village of Sant’Angelo Scalo. When we arrived he was just removing the last of the ribs from the meat and he went on to cover it with a thick layer of rosemary, garlic and salt and a sprinkling of his secret spice mix and before rolling the whole thing up and tying it up with thick butchers string.

The Red Hot Oven

It was in the oven for 8 hours. This is key as it is the slow cooking that renders down all the chewy fat into the most delicious savoury butter and makes the meat so tender. For the first 3 hours it was covered in wet paper and foil to keep the meat moist, then just the paper and for the last part was left uncovered for the rind to crisp up. The whole time it was sat over a long tray of water to stop the meat drying out.

Over the summer we hope to be making our own porchetta in 1 Rope Walk, following the endless advice and instruction that Carlo gave us. If it turns out half as good as the delicious porchetta we ate that night I’ll be happy. And in the meantime you can now buy Carlo’s finocchiona, capocollo and pancetta arrotolata at 1 Rope Walk every Saturday. All at £35kg

He also came home with a chunk of creamy Persille du Malzieu from Mons, the French cheese people who are now trading from Stanworth Street, next door to Neal’s Yard.

At Borough Market there is finally someone selling raw milk in the new City and Country Farmer’s Market located in the walkway between the Jubilee and Green Markets. Hook & Sons from East Sussex offer raw cream, milk and buttermilk. They have a good website at if you want more information or to buy their milk online. It also gives a link to Radio 4’s The Food Program which was all about raw milk a few weeks ago and is definitely worth a listen.

And at 1 Rope Walk The Kernel Brewery’s Export Stout has just won SIBA’s (Society of Independent Brewers) UK Champion Bottled Beer! Come along to get some of Evin’s award winning beer and try our delicious new bresaola at the same time.

Mario With His Bresaola

Last week we were in Lombardy to visit Mario Cardinale Bosio who makes our bresaola in Lanzada, an Alpine village that sits 1000m up the Malenco valley, just off the famous Valtellina. Mario was a lawyer in Milan for 31 years before jacking it all in and buying the empty butchers shop in Lanzada. He spent the next few years learning the trade from Emilio Nano, an old salumaio from the valley and Mario is now one of the few remaining artisan producers of bresaola in northern Italy.

Mould Covered Bresaola In Mario's Cantina

For his production of 70 bresaole a week he uses mature, grass fed beef from either France or Italy and makes 3 different types of bresaola from three different cuts: magatello, sotto fesa and punta d’anca. All three cuts come from the leg: the first two, from lower down, are more chewy and salty. Punta d’anca is the tender salmon cut or eye of the silverside and is the one we bring over.

For a week the meat gets massaged every other day with Mario’s secret mix of salt, pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg and juniper, cloves, bay and garlic. It is then put into a casing and hung in a warm room at 18ºC for a week for the meat to relax and lose moisture.

Mario's Secret Spice Mix

After that the bresaola is cured for a further 6 weeks in cooler conditions: in spring and summer Mario wheels them outside every day to profit from the sweet mountain air. When it is ready Mario’s bresaola has lost at least 50% of its original weight. Industrial producers will limit this loss to 20% by not ageing for as long and using frozen meat. The finished bresaola is really tender and very delicately spiced. It is drier than industrial bresaola and will usually be served with olive oil and a few drops of lemon juice.

After the morning watching Mario at work he took us for a very long lunch that started with mountains of hot, golden sciatt (‘toads’ in dialect), a sticky batter made from local buckwheat, grappa and water that is rolled around a piece of cheese a deep fried into puffed up little balls. Many meat, potato and rice courses later I had understood that Italian mountain cooking is not for the faint hearted. Or narrow waisted.

Lanzada In Valmalenco

We parted when Mario headed back to a snow sprinkled Lanzada to make a batch of sausages for the local mountain refuge and to prepare the meat for his next batch of salami di cervo (venison). I don’t know what it’s like to be a lawyer in Milan but his bucolic mountain life seems to suit Mario just fine.

We are now selling bresaola at Rope Walk every Saturday. It costs £4.50 for 100g

We all know the Italians love pork but in the far north of Italy, however, beef is king. This is partly due to the relatively cooler climate: cows don’t like heat which is why olive oil, not butter, is the fat of choice in the south of Italy and also why sheep’s cheeses replace cow’s cheeses the further south you go.

When we went to Lombardy recently there were lots of beef dishes on menus but, with no knowledge of Italian beef vocabulary or butchery, it would be hard to know what you’re eating so I thought I’d give a quick Italian lesson. Firstly there’s vitello: this is always translated as veal but nowadays it generally only means milk fed veal if vitello di latte is stipulated. Vitello is usually an animal that is reared outside and slaughtered at about 6 months of age, similar to our rose veal. Manzo is beef and usually comes from bullocks killed at about 2 years of age. Occasionally you see manzetta which is meat from a heifer. It is much less common (most heifers are used for dairy production) and is more highly prized (it has more fat in it and is thus more succulent). In countries where the climate was traditionally too hot to permit hanging the meat without extensive refrigeration another classification exists for cattle that are older than veal but younger than adult beef. It is called vitellone in Italian.

The Italians also butcher their beef differently than we do, dissecting muscles to provide a higher proportion of meat for grilling and frying. For instance, a cut from the fore rib, which in Britain would be used exclusively for roasting, is divided by the Italians into the tougher muscles, which are sold for stew and tender ones, sold as best quality steak.

Beef has been on my mind as well as my plate quite a lot recently: last week we had a delivery from the Valmalenco, a valley that goes up into the Alps from Lake Como and is famous for its bresaola. Bresaola is made from cuts of the hind leg (Punta d’Anca is from the silverside) that we in England would normally roast but, in Italy, are air cured to delicious effect. Come and try it at 98 Druid Street or read about it next time.

Dom worked at Neal’s Yard Dairy for 9 years so he knew a lot about cheese but still had to learn the all practicalities of cheese making. To do this he spent 3 days with Garry Gray at Appleby’s Cheshire and also made small 1kg cheeses in his kitchen. The latter, he says, helped him to get familiar with the timings and different stages involved in cheese making.

For his Cheshire Dom uses the recipe that was published by MAFF, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, in the 1930s. It’s in a booklet that contains recipes for all the 5 big ‘territorial’ British cheeses (cheddar, Lancashire, Caerphilly, stilton and Cheshire) and was published to try and increase consistency among the myriad farmhouse cheeses that were being made at that time. It is detailed in the advice it gives right down to the acidity levels needed at different points in the process and the booklet continues to be used by the likes of Joe Schneider who makes Stichelton and Gary Gray who makes Appleby’s

Dom gets his milk from Sevenoaks and, using a 100lt cauldron and burner borrowed from William Oglethorpe (who makes cheese in our railway arch) and a press borrowed from Randolph Hodgeson of Neal’s Yard Dairy he is making really delicious cheese. And the reason he chose to make Cheshire? It’s his favourite cheese.

Production is still very much in its infancy. This means that if you’re lucky you might get to have a taste but you certainly can’t buy any yet. I’ll herald the news as soon as you can.