NY Times article on dry-cured sausages

[StevenC]

Don't know if anyone has posted on this topic yet... I don't think so.

I would be very interested to hear reactions to Julia Moskin's excellent article in today's dining section of the New York Times, "Dry-Cured Sausages: Kissed by Air, Never by Fire".

There's an especially poignant quote from the owner of Il Buco, when health inspectors recently destroyed all the cured meats at the restaurant because the temperature in the curing room was six degrees above regulation, not because they found the meat contaminated: "'These are pigs that were raised for us... We knew their names. We were trying to do something sustainable and traditional, and this is what happens.'"

Personally, I am puzzled by the mentality that a supermarket ham injected with embalming fluid is somehow healthier than an air-cured prosciutto. I am also enraged and frustrated at how traditional, sustainable methods of food preparation in the United States seem to be constantly stymied and penalized in favor of anonymous mass production.

In a year of travelling up and down the length of Italy eating traditional cured meats wherever I could, I got food-poisoning exactly once: from a plastic-wrapped carton of industrial pancetta I bought at a supermarket.

[JohnL]

Great article!

Oddly enough yesterday before I saw the Times piece I was at Balducci's in Westchester and bought some Felino and some Hungarian slicing salami.

Both superb!

I would love to learn more--does someone have a good book on cured meats to recommend.

As for the complaints over regulation.

it isn't just America--the EU is looking to regulate for all its members.

It also isn't necc a bad thing.

Protecting a food supply is a good thing. Doing it judiciously is another.

The press and the food world can do a much better job ensuring that people are better informed resulting in rules and regulations that make sense. Instead of complaining we should be spreading the word and using our votes more wisely.

[Bombdog]

Oh my! You have got to come over to this topic where a bunch of us have been curing and making sausages since the Ruhlman/Polcyn book came out late last year.

[StevenC]

Great article!

Oddly enough yesterday before I saw the Times piece I was at Balducci's in Westchester and bought some Felino and some Hungarian slicing salami.

Both superb!

I would love to learn more--does someone have a good book on cured meats to recommend.

As for the complaints over regulation.

it isn't just America--the EU is looking to regulate for all its members.

It also isn't necc a bad thing.

Protecting a food supply is a good thing.  Doing it judiciously is another.

The press and the food world can do a much better job ensuring that people are better informed resulting in rules and regulations that make sense. Instead of complaining we should be spreading the word and using our votes more wisely.

←

The problem isn't the desire to protect the food supply. The problem lies in an approach to public safety that is inherently skewed towards methods of mass production. The same thing popped up in the debate over raw-milk cheeses a few years ago. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if some federal agency decided to require the pasteurization of wine one day.

You're quite right about the EU, but there's one important difference: artisanal meat and cheese have a strong popular base in Europe, particularly in countries like France and Italy. Prosciutto and raw-milk pecorino aren't fetishized yuppie foods; they're things your great-grandparents cured in their basement (yes, mine did) because the ingredients were cheap and the results were tasty.

Ultimately, the only answer lies in truly popularizing this stuff here, in large part perhaps by returning to America's own amazing traditional foods--the country hams of the South, the cheeses of New England, and so on.

[Sneakeater]

The first thing to say about these regulations is that they're different from the retarded movement to ban foie gras. These are an attempt to address actual health concerns, not an instance of political pandering.

The problem with regs like these is that they have to be universally applicable. So they end up overregulating the careful because they have to lump the careful together with the careless.

It's the same thing with the sou vide regs. Everybody got up in arms over what they perceived as a baseless governmental limitation on creativity. But the point is that it is only at this early point that sou vide cooking (by which I mean "housemade" sou vide cooking -- not heating pre-made foods manufactured in bulk) is done only by the kind of sophisticated and careful kitchens that you can trust implicitly. If the method catches on, you can expect that very soon it will spread to the kind of mid-level restaurants that can't afford to be as careful as, say, Shea Gallante. And that type of kitchen has to be heavily regulated when it deals with something that could potentially be harmful to consumers. But, unfortunate as it is for us, you can't exempt high-priced restaurants from the regs. It would seem (well, more than that, it would be) unfair.

Same for house-curing. I'm sure the people at Il Bucco were very careful. But they have to be subject to the same regs as people who can't be depended on to be as careful. (And, as bad as I feel for them about what happened, if they knew the regs were in place, would it have killed them to keep the curing rooms a few degrees cooler?)

I don't know enough to know whether the meat-curing regs need to be tweaked. But I think reflexive opposition to them is misplaced.

Edited May 17, 2006 by Sneakeater (log)

[NYC Mike]

Personally, I am puzzled by the mentality that a supermarket ham injected with embalming fluid is somehow healthier than an air-cured prosciutto. I am also enraged and frustrated at how traditional, sustainable methods of food preparation in the United States seem to be constantly stymied and penalized in favor of anonymous mass production.

I could not agree with you more.

-Mike

[StevenC]

I don't know enough to know whether the meat-curing regs need to be tweaked.  But I think reflexive opposition to them is misplaced.

←

Reflexive opposition to food-safety laws has nothing to do with it. The argument is whether the regulations go ridiculously overboard and have the secondary effect, intended or not, of destroying the last vestiges of pre-industrial food culture in America and quashing attempts at fostering a new one. I don't think I'm imagining this problem--again, we saw it six years ago when the federal government was toying with (or at least revisiting) the idea of banning all raw-milk cheese, despite the fact that Parmigiano-Reggiano doesn't seem to be killing off hoardes of people.

By the way, small temperature differentials can have a marked effect on fermentation.

Edited May 17, 2006 by StevenC (log)

[alanamoana]

i have to agree with both arguments here. it is necessary to have regulations for everyone, for the sake of fairness and safety...and, the regulations tend to favor industry over artisan...

something that is difficult when it comes to the health department...nobody knows the conditions which the curing room went throug in the course of a regular business day. did the inspector take the temp of the room after ten people walked in and out? there's no way of knowing.

[Todd36]

I'm quoting here from the USDA website (http://www.fsis.usda.gov/Fact_Sheets/sausage_and_food_safety/index.asp#addendum):

ADDENDUM TO "Focus on: Sausages"

USDA and Dry Sausage Industry Act to Reduce Bacterial Risk

Fermentation is one of the oldest methods of preserving meats. In this procedure, a mixture of curing ingredients, such as salt and sodium nitrite, and a "starter" culture of acid-bacteria, is mixed with chopped and ground meat, placed in casings, fermented and then dried. The amount of acid produced during fermentation and the lack of moisture in the finished product after drying typically have been shown to cause pathogenic bacteria to die.

"Dry sausages — such as pepperoni, Lebanon bologna and summer sausage, have had a good safety record for hundreds of years. But in December 1994, some children and adults became ill after eating dry cured salami and sausages from a California plant. Illnesses reported from this outbreak are believed to represent the first time this product has been associated with E. coli O157:H7. These illnesses have raised some questions about the effectiveness of processes for producing dry fermented sausage free of this deadly organism.

However, it is too early to suggest changes to basic handling recommendations for consumers since a complete scientific evaluation is not yet available. The presence of E. coli O157:H7 bacteria or a possible new strain of the bacteria could be due to continued survival during processing methods or contamination after the sausages were cured.

USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has developed a specific protocol to identify problems, which encompasses options to correct them. This protocol must be followed or the product must be heat treated. These products will also be included in the FSIS microbial sampling program for E. coli O157:H7."

I would surmise that modern information transfer has made it possible to detect food illness issues more readily than in the good old days. Two hundred years ago, no one might have known that home-made sausage killed three dinner guests. Food for thought is that the French started Pasturizing milk for a reason.......they did invent the process. As good tasting as many old fashioned products may be, I suspect that many of them are riskier than you think.