This is the pride and joy of my shop. I’ve been doing some of the products that are delicious and amazing. I am in over the slicer, its one of the most beautiful devices that I've ever seen and it really treats the meat with respect. Here we have one of our favorite products, La Quercia it is a prosciutto that’s made in Iowa. The gentleman who makes this studied how to make prosciutto in Parma, Italy. He’s an American-born man and then he moved his operation to Iowa because they have the world’s best breed or Berkshire pork pigs.
A Berkshire is an heirloom breed of pork, very high quality with short, stalky legs and you can see the incredible quality of the fat here. It’s not appearing in giant slabs and swoops, there is a slab of fat at the bottom which is natural normally. In Italy, often 1 quarter or 1/3 of the meat will be fat. It adds a very buttery delicate texture but what’s really exceptional is the amount of kind of peppered in fat we have here. We have these lightning streaks of fat that just very small but really cover the face. That’s going to be a really delicate piece of meat. And what make the slicer so remarkable is that its hand cranks.
So normally prosciutto would go into a shop and gets sliced on in an industrial slicer that’s spinning about a 100 miles an hour. Here, I'm controlling the speed of my hand and I'm slicing it which means that the met isn’t heated at all, its not being rendered, its not cooking it or heating the prosciutto would bring out its saltiness instead of this wonderful mini buttery flavor. This is a pig that’s finished on acorns, that’s not thorough fed in Iowa, made with incredibly care. The facility that it is made in, in fact has 4 different rooms that are set-up as the 4 ecosystems, 4 seasons of Italy. It perfectly mimics the humidity, the amount of sunlight, the temperature especially of the 4 seasons of Italy so the salt can be a methody thing massaged into it in those environments. There are no nitrates in it; this is a natural aid product. It takes about 9 months or a year to age it that way. I would be a crime to cook with it, you really want to enjoy raw. I mean with a slice of melon or just on its own with a wonderful cheese tray.
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