2019 | Issue 103

Great Aged (Fermented) Sausage

The Sham of “Uncured” and the Danger Lurking in Vegetables

By Edward Behr
Illustration by David Plunkert

Ever since refrigeration and freezing made life easier, the whole point of eating meat that is neither fresh nor cooked — that’s preserved by salt — has been the deliciousness that comes from skill and time. Cured, aged sausage can be one of the most gratifying foods: salami, saucisson sec, cotechino, chorizo, finocchiona, soppressata, to cite some better-known names. Knowing and loving French and Italian aged sausages, back in the United States I would buy each new, seemingly artisanal brand I saw. The packages were often labeled “uncured,” an official US adjective that baffled me. Some sausages had a sour edge or the fat had the soft granularity of lard or the lean was dry and tough or the flavor was overwhelmingly herbal, but overall they were just insipid. They had too little salt, too little flavor, and often no tang. (Well, to dive right in, great aged sausage arguably doesn’t have a tang.) I felt like a chump. Now when I see “uncured” on a label, it practically shouts: “Avoid! Avoid! Don’t buy me!”

The so-called “uncured” meats don’t have to be terrible, but, rather than sell deliciousness, most of the producers seem content to sell the false image of healthfulness that many Americans perceive in the word “uncured.” And in the fact-based world, these products are cured after all! Rarely, however, are they given enough time or care or understanding, and it’s a question whether they can ever be as good as the traditional kind. The best makers of aged sausage in Europe and North America add nitrate or nitrite or both to protect against deadly botulism and to give a deep red color; nitrite further protects against rancidity, and nitrate seems linked to more flavor. The makers of “uncured” sausage instead add powdered vegetable juice, usually celery. If you haven’t zeroed in on that, you may be thinking, celery?

It turns out that many vegetables — celery, beets, swiss chard, spinach, arugula, radishes, mustard, parsley, lettuce — are naturally high in nitrate. (So are cherries, and cherry juice is used by some makers of “uncured” sausage.) Vegetables are the source of almost all the nitrate and nitrite in the average Western diet, and nitrate is nitrate, nitrite is nitrite, no matter where they come from. The vegetable additives cure the sausage. There are plenty of excellent reasons to eat vegetables, but why on earth would anyone prefer “uncured” meats when skillfully cured ones are at least as safe, as natural or unnatural, and as a rule taste so much better?

Saltpeter, which scientifically is potassium nitrate, may have been used to cure meats for as long as 5,000 years (it’s believed to have originally been a contaminant of salt deposits), although its use in cures may have become common only around 300 years ago. Largely thanks to its usefulness in gunpowder, it was available in both mined and synthetic forms. During the 19th century, it was joined by sodium nitrate, called Chile saltpeter, used for the same purposes. During the 20th century, synthetic sodium nitrite widely replaced nitrate in meats, because it acted more quickly.

In the meat, nitrate becomes nitrite, and nitrite forms nitric oxide, and that’s what does the essential work, including fighting Clostridium botulinum and helping against listeria and other pathogens. Some producers still add nitrate, because it’s broken down slowly and provides extended protection over time. Industrial producers often use both, as do the few small-scale producers focused on taste. Certain EU controlled-place-name meats — saucisson de l’Ardèche, soprèssa vicentina — still specify only saltpeter.

But both nitrates and nitrites have a particular problem. They break down into, among other things, carcinogenic N-nitroso compounds, more of which form when you fry bacon. According to a 2018 study published in the Italian Journal of Food Safety, the same compounds form in your stomach when you eat vegetables, but it concluded, based on the diet in central Italy, that there was no danger from either meat or vegetables, except perhaps for infants and vegetarians.

Back in 1978, in response to the cured-meat danger, the US Department of Agriculture limited the addition of sodium nitrite to 120 parts per million in brined bacon, 156 parts per million in ground products, such as dried sausage, and 200 parts per million in dry-cured ham and bacon. In brined bacon with nitrite, the USDA also requires the cure accelerators (sodium ascorbate and erythorbate, not that you asked) to further reduce the N-nitroso compounds. Nitrate is excluded entirely from bacon. The European Union lays down similar limits for nitrates and nitrites, but with a much finer breakdown by item. Celery in cured meats is not a European thing. Generally, the good US sausage-makers who use nitrate and nitrite don’t raise the subject with customers or criticize the “uncured” meats, because the explanations are complicated. My own view is that, as with drinking wine, the key to eating meats cured with nitrate or nitrite is moderation.

 

The whole celery thing started in the 1980s because the USDA did and does ban regular nitrates and nitrites from meats labeled “natural.” Not that mined saltpeter is any less natural than mined salt or sea salt. The USDA then decided that “natural” meats could contain the vegetable powders as “additives,” rather than as curing agents, as long as the meats were labeled “uncured” and this information appeared: “No nitrates or nitrites added except for those naturally occurring in ingredients such as celery juice powder, parsley, cherry powder, beet powder, spinach, sea salt, etc.” That’s still the situation, although for years some people have been pointing out that the “uncured” label is plain wrong and dishonest. The USDA knows that the powder contains nitrate or nitrite and that it has an effect. Meanwhile, the “clean label” movement in the US has promoted the “uncured” products and kept the best cured meats out of some stores. To produce the vegetable additives, the plants are raised in soil pumped up with extra nitrogen, then the juice is often treated to turn the nitrates into nitrites, and usually it’s dried to a powder. In fact, the vegetable-additive meats are potentially more dangerous than ones containing old-school nitrites or nitrates, because the concentrations in the vegetable additives aren’t necessarily controlled and the amounts in sausage could be high or low.

Nitrate and nitrite from any source, to ensure they’ll break down and be effective in sausage, require acidity from a fermentation in the meat. Lactic bacteria turn the meat’s sugar into lactic acid, just as they do the sugar in milk to make cheese. The bacteria used to enter from the air or equipment; I’ve heard of ground meat being left out overnight to receive the ambient culture. One way to ensure an active culture is to hold back some of the sausage mixture from one batch and add it to the next. Commercial producers don’t do that today, because if there were ever a recall, the entire production would have to be recalled. But now, internationally, everything has been made so clean that nearly all makers of either sausage or cheese add a laboratory starter culture, and often they add chosen molds. Without a starter culture, the bad organisms could get a head start over the good ones.

Because meat on its own contains very little sugar (milk has plenty), sausage-makers add sugar to the meat to get the bacteria off to a fast start and drop the pH quickly for safety. Often, the sugar is the simple one, dextrose, which is really ready for the bacteria to eat. The amount of sugar influences the acidity in the final sausage, anywhere from nearly neutral to quite tangy.

Industrial producers commonly use one of the fast, aggressive Bactoferm starters produced by the Danish firm Christian Hansen, and industrial sausages as a rule have extra tang, although Hansen has one or two less-aggressive options as well. Once upon a time and sometimes still, the variable taste of a dried sausage reflected the local climate and wild microorganisms. The natural conditions together with a producer’s choices create an ecology in and on the sausage, just as happens with cheese. The idea is to encourage desirable organisms. In certain dairy regions, the indigenous organisms have been identified and turned into pure cultures that are supplied to cheesemakers. Here and there, sausage-makers are beginning to think the same way. Cheese and cured sausage, besides sharing parts of the process, have something else in common: there’s a world of difference between industrial and handmade.

Like so many recent North American sausages, the first wave of North American farm and artisanal cheeses in the 1980s and 90s was often simple and boring. But the cheesemakers had a goal, and they kept pushing and learning, especially from Europe, paying attention to tradition and science. Some makers fell by the wayside, but more started up, and now we have an impressive number of superior, even great cheeses. So far only a few US makers of aged sausage seem to have a clear vision of a superior product, but a change may be under way.

 

Photograph by Edward Behr

Sausages are aged slowly so as to dry evenly, initially in high humidity, which is when a coat of powdery whitish mold shows up. The French word is fleur, “flower.” When you see sausage without mold, it was likely washed off. In some cases the powdery coating is starch, but usually the white color is evidence of commercial Penicillium nalgiovense, which grows quickly and beats out other molds. The kinds that appear spontaneously can be more interesting. A 2010 Slovenian study sampled 75 dry-cured items of three kinds and found eight species of Penicillium, though mainly just three. A 2014 study of salami at a plant in Calabria identified a new species that was given the name P. salamii. (The studies of cured meats appear are beyond counting, though few consider taste.) Inside the sausages as they age, various components break down and yield further flavorful compounds, including amino acids with umami, another parallel with aged cheese.

Skinny sausages dry faster and are ready to sell sooner. Industrial sausages are pushed with the aggressive commercial cultures and higher temperatures and ready in as little as 20 days, too soon to develop much flavor. The bigger the sausage, the better, up to a point, because during the longer time it takes to dry and mature, the flavor increases. Smaller pork casings are 28 mm (a little more than an inch). Beef casings can be more than 100 mm (4 inches), but rather than the five or six weeks of many good sausages, a sausage that wide might take eight to 12 weeks or longer.

Taste is determined not just by time, size, temperature, and microorganisms but by humidity, fine or coarse grind, salt, pH, and interior moisture as well as ingredients and possible smoke. Most common in Europe is straightforward pork, salt, black pepper, nitrate or nitrite or both, and perhaps garlic. Those few items form an impressive synergy. Many sausages further contain spices such as fennel, cumin, clove, nutmeg, and hot pepper. Some have wine. Some are made of the best cuts and some use the least valued. Some are made with meat other than pork.

The Atlante dei Prodotti Tipici devoted to Italian salumi describes 327 items, including many aged sausages. A few more have been uncovered by Slow Food. Some of the interesting Italian options are soppressata del Vallo di Diano (which used to call for potassium nitrate and use neither starter nor, from Campania); salsiccia di cinghiale (wild boar, from Tuscany); salame d’asino (donkey, with Barbera wine, from Piemonte); salame prosciuttato di Ghivizzano (pork, tender, using the meat normally intended for prosciutto, from around Lucca); salame Napoli (pork and veal when properly made, with garlic, hot pepper, sometimes orange peel, from Campania); and salame d’oca giudeo (pure goose, sometimes kosher, from Friuli).

France’s range isn’t as wide. Among the country’s famous dried sausages are the moderate-size rosette de Lyon and the large Jésus de Lyon (from the gastronomic city); the judru (tied up in a wide casing like a sack, from Burgundy); the saucisson sec d’Auvergne (with garlic, its variable sizes show the link with the rural tradition); the saucisson d’Arles (beef with pork fat, said to have been originally made with donkey, which is still allowed, from Provence); saucisson de Savoie (sometimes smoked, with beech, from the Alps).

That’s to speak of only two countries, when so many have a rich tradition. Switzerland, to cite one more, in addition to the more expected kinds, has dried sausages with vegetables. The Kartoffelwurst, or in Romansh liongia da tartuffels, contains beef, pork, liver, back fat, blood, spices, and cooked potato. The saucisse aux choux vaudoise, which is sometimes smoked, contains pork lean, fat, skin, liver, and spices with a third or more cabbage. The saucisse aux racines rouges from Haut-Valais contains beef and pork, wine and garlic, and is dark with beets. Cabbage and beets among the vegetables available during the cool season when pigs were killed, but it’s presumably no coincidence that both have a high content of nitrates.

 

Tom Mylan, the butcher who started The Meat Hook in Brooklyn and was a leader in working with pasture-raised whole animals, emailed me this comment: “The nitrate/trite-free thing is a marketing ploy at best and a lie at worst.” He added, “When the ‘nitrate-free’ salamis first came out en mass in the late 90s I was working for Whole Foods in Southern California and everyone knew the celery juice powder thing was a scam or, rather an exploiting of USDA labeling law loopholes.” Salami is often the generic US name for dry-cured, dry-aged sausage. Mylan points to three US barriers to getting into the sausage-curing business: “access to quality pork”; “the expense of proper humidity, airflow and temperature-controlled ripening and drying rooms that meet USDA regulations”; and “cash flow” — the money tied up in hanging sausages. Pleasing the USDA is no small obstacle. A sausage-making plant must have an approved Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points plan, and the details of that haccp plan provide the real safety. Some producers instead use a “co-packer,” meaning they hire another plant to make their sausage. Mylan named three producers he admires. All those I talked to use nitrate and nitrite.

Photograph by David Reamer

Elias Cairo of Olympia Provisions in Portland, Oregon, made the first US dried sausage that I ever tasted and thought was good. Where some good US salami-makers jumped into curing, such as after receiving a gift of a 300-pound pig, and had an initial period of mixed failure and success, Cairo apprenticed for five years in the mountainous Obertoggenburg of Switzerland before he opened Olympia Provisions in 2009. Last year it cured almost one million pounds of meat. I asked whether it is possible to taste the difference between a sausage cured with celery and one cured with synthetic nitrite. “There is a flavor of nitrite,” Cairo said, meaning the old-school kind. And he added, “It’s hard to say what ‘cured flavor’ is.” Conversely, he finds celery-cured meat has a “very pungent flavor — I prefer chard.” The vegetable powders are “not as clean and clear” as traditional nitrate and nitrite. His basic dried sausage is a saucisson d’Arles — just “sea salt and mold and beautiful pig.” He and his co-workers use it as a medium to monitor the changing taste of the pork, notably when the pigs move from eating pasture to eating corn. About USDA inspectors, he said, “It’s totally changing now; it’s a very exciting time for meat.” He has sometimes faced USDA opposition to what he has proposed, but he’s a proponent of haccp and suggests that a novice devote six months or a year to studying and understanding it. “It was like learning German all over,” Cairo said. The USDA isn’t against traditional methods, but you have to show they’re safe: “They just want you to prove it.” When the inspectors saw the variations in the mold color of his sausage, “They were on my back for sure, but I think it’s a good thing.” He has a machine to measure water activity, and he could get a new one that measures the torque of sausage to determine when it’s ready, but he relies instead on “the squeeze test,” based on long experience.

“Sugar is not necessary,” Cairo said. Nitrate and nitrite in combination with just salt can work in sausage, and but for safety, to be a sure of pH drop in his sausage, he uses dextrose, not enough to create a lot of acidity. To him, sourness in sausage belongs to the category of “misplaced flavors.” On another aspect of taste, he said, “I love mold variations; it shows house flora, one of the ways a salami-maker can show terroir.” But if you don’t know what you’re doing, he said, it’s better to inoculate. In the food-conscious city of Portland, “the myth of what ‘uncured’ is is being exposed,” but he still makes separate “clean label” salami for Whole Foods.

In Madison, Wisconsin, Jonny Hunter of Underground Food Collective, when I asked whether the results with celery can be equally good, answered, “I don’t think so.” He commented, “The powder is not really natural. We’ve gotten a lot of push-back,” he said. Nitrite sausage has been “a no-carry item in the co-op and natural foods world,” but that’s no longer true apart from Whole Foods. “Customers are coming around.” Hunter first made a saucisson sec with garlic and salt and pepper; the simplicity “shows good meat.” Then he branched out, because customers like the fun of black garlic and “chiles three ways.” He makes three sizes of salami: “snacks” in 32 mm pork casings aged four to six weeks; others in 60 mm beef middles (from a long straight section) aged eight weeks; and the largest in 180 mm beef bungs (appendix) aged four months. He and his co-workers started with Bactoferm mold, and after ten years they have that and the flora that followed in its wake. They had their molds identified, and one was P. salamii. “We don’t try to do a massive mold,” he said. “We’re looking for more interesting things — B. linens, yellows.” (Brevibacterium linens is associated with stinky cheese.) He said, “White turns to green most of the time.” One of the things mold does is help hold in moisture. He also said, “We have a form email for customers who ask about mold.” There’s another one for customers who ask about nitrites.

In Chicago, Rob Levitt made his first experimental sausages ten years ago, and he’s made them for more than four years at Butcher & Larder, which is inspected by the City of Chicago to approximately USDA standards. Charcuterie, including salami, is trendy and high-end, Levitt volunteered, but preserving meat was a way for poor people to survive, to stretch the meat they had through the year. When I asked about nitrites, he said, “It’s a hot-button question.” Then he commented, “I guarantee you no one is growing local organic celery and turning it into curing compounds.” About starter, “I put in as little as I can get away with.” A room full of curing sausages will maintain the desired temperature and humidity more easily, he said, and will inoculate itself with wild mold. But his brand-new room is large and only partly full: “The room is trying to pick a fight with the salami.” So he inoculates with Bactoferm mold. He won’t cure sausage for other people — “Don’t bring your atmosphere into my room.” You can check the sausage’s pH, water activity, feel it, weigh it, to tell when it’s ready, but “at a certain point, none of that matters; you just cut up a slice.” If the sausage isn’t ready, you hang it back up and it grows new mold over the cut. “Every batch of salami will be a little different, from the meat and the atmosphere of the room.” It’s not, to him, that a bigger sausage is better, although he acknowledged that it can taste more delicate, but that size is related to style and where a salami is from. It’s a question of typicity: “You appreciate it for what it is.”

Levitt, like nearly all the sausage-makers I spoke with, also cures whole muscles in casings, including coppa, bresaola, and lonza, and sometimes he cures country or prosciutto-style hams. Curing whole muscles in salt is older than curing sausage. I think of the small pieces in casings as being miniature hams. Are cured whole muscles superior to salami? “It’s apples and oranges,” Levitt said. “People celebrate whole-muscle more. A whole ham hangs longer, so it gets more intense flavor and a silky texture — it can hang two years. It makes an impact. But a well-crafted salami, it’s a wonderful thing, and it’s far more difficult technically.” Because salami is made of cut-up meat, cleanliness is extremely important. “There’s a lot that can go wrong. That’s why there’s so much bad salami and so much weird industrial stuff.”

I went back to Elias Cairo to hear his view. By email he said: “Two different disciplines. A truly perfectly fermented simple seasoned salami can be one of the greatest meat-eating experiences you can have. It all comes down to hogs being raised and a talented patient hand for both to be amazing.”

 

Photograph by Kimberly Behr

Vermont, where I live, has two USDA-inspected sausage-making plants. Mad River Food Hub opened in Waitsfield in 2011, originally funded mainly by grants. It’s a shared processing space, currently used by five sausage-makers; it also runs a nearby bright, modern shop called the Mad River Tasting Place. The sausages for sale there — saucisson sec, finocchiona, and soppressata — come from Babette’s Table, which is to say Erika Lynch. She grew up in Kentucky, and she has a warm face and a rural directness and modesty. She’s a member of the Butcher’s Manifesto, a group founded in Copenhagen in 2016 to promote traditional butchering. That was the year she learned her craft, spending nine weeks in southwest France, which she acknowledges isn’t a long time, but it was formative. She worked with Dominique Chapolard, who with his brothers learned from their father and grandfather; the family continues to raise and butcher its own pork. The pork for Babette’s Table comes from four or five small farms in Vermont and New Hampshire. The casings are mostly beef middles, slightly larger than pork, and most of the sausages age for 30 to 40 days. Tasting them, I found it hard not to draw a line to the full flavor of Kentucky dry-cured hams. Cured meat, Lynch pointed out, fits well into the trend toward eating smaller amounts of superior, ethically produced meat.

Jasper Hill Farm is known for its cheeses, but it has been also raising pigs and feeding them whey from the cheesemaking. Last September, it opened a small USDA-approved plant to make sausage. (The cheeses have the reputation, but Andy and Mateo Kehler, who started Jasper Hill, have done some of the most important big-picture thinking in the US about ways in which conscientious small farms can succeed in an agricultural economy dominated by vast scale and international markets. Their farming successes may be a bigger achievement than the cheese.) Jasper Hill’s focus, insights, skill, and experience with cheese and haccp, together with its distribution network, lowered the bar enough for it to start the plant.

The location is inside the hangarlike “wash house” at Pete’s Greens, an organic market-garden business next to the village of Craftsbury, Vermont. The pigs’ recent move to a new farm disrupted the supply of pork, so for now most of the meat comes from other Vermont farms. When the new farm is fully up and running, all the pork will come from Berkshire sows bred with a Tamworth boar. Evan Bendickson, who heads the meat project, has an air of calm and competence. On a wintry day, even in the office he wore a knit cap over shaggy black hair. At 31, he has been a sous-chef, a charcutier, and, at Jasper Hill, a cheesemaker and ager. When I was first in touch with him, months before I thought of writing this article, he said, “Don’t even get me started on the nitrate-free craze.” In person, he said, “There are a lot of salumi-charcuterie fanatics,” and there’s also “a lot of education to be done.” We put on white lab coats and boots, and I put on a hairnet, before we crossed into the plant’s austere world of white fiberglass-reinforced plastic and insulated steel cooler panels. The plant was quiet; Bendickson’s one employee is part-time and wasn’t working that day. The only aged product so far is a basic salami, stuffed into the largest pork casings.

A little rancidity is part of the rustic flavor of old-fashioned home-cured hams and sausages in North America and Europe, and it has an appeal, if there’s not too much of it. But when I first exchanged email with Bendickson, I remarked that the dried sausage I’d tasted from Jasper Hill had significant rancidity under the rind. He responded candidly, “That is due to our co-packer not having the ability to grow a mold rind on any salami they produce, as their particular USDA inspector is under the impression that all mold is dangerous.” The co-packer was in another state, and with Jasper Hill’s production now in-house there’s no problem.

Photograph by Edward Behr

Past a big Hobart grinder and up an elevator were the three curing rooms. The first was hung with sausages from that week’s production, fermenting at 70 to 75 degrees F (21 to 24 degrees C) in high humidity. Bendickson pointed to off-white yeast just beginning to appear, a necessary precursor of the mold to come. The mold, he explained, “is absolutely critical for oxidation and flavor development and raising the pH back up. The rind cultures feed on the lactic acid and pull the pH back up near neutral.” Longer aging allows more time for that to happen. A second room held sausages in the next stage, still in high humidity but with low heat for more even drying from outside to in. A third room held sausage finishing its maturation in lower humidity at 55 degrees F (13 degrees C).

Bendickson compared the taste of the standard commercial sausage mold to cardboard. At the cheese cellars, Jasper Hill has a lab to identify microorganisms for both safety and flavor. As an experiment, Bendickson applied a particular mold isolated from the cheese caves to the sausage, and tasters liked the result. Rather than a commercial mold, that’s what’s now in use on the sausage.

Bendickson unhooked a 43-day-old sausage, took out a pocket knife with a honed blade, and cut thin slices, for tenderness. The translucent mahogany color, he said, was a positive sign of a minimal pH drop. If the rind tastes good, you eat it, he advised. The mold had an appealing mushroomy flavor, though later when I tasted on my own, I wondered whether it was a distraction. Bendickson aims to have his salami reach a peak of flavor a week or two after it’s packaged, about the time a customer may be slicing it up.

 

Some makers say that saltpeter, besides its other advantages, gives more cured-meat flavor than nitrite alone. James MacGuire, a former chef in Montreal (and an AoE contributor) who has a particular interest in fermentation, confirms the effect on taste from his experience: “I made trials of cervelas with and without saltpeter and there was a big difference.” He pointed to nitrate-and-flavor citations in his collection of charcuterie books: Le Livre de l’Apprenti Charcutier says nitrate is “slow,” while nitrite is “fast” but doesn’t produce the “bouquet and savor specific to a slow cure”; La Charcuterie Crue says nitrate gives the “characteristic taste of slow cures”; L’Encyclopédie de la Charcuterie again points to “characteristic taste.”

And yet Parma and San Daniele hams in Italy are cured with only salt, no nitrates or nitrites, and they have an appealing rose color and excellent flavor. In Iowa, La Quercia produces fine, flavorful hams in an Italian style using just salt. Among traditional American producers, so does Colonel Newsom’s in Kentucky. Harold McGee writes in On Food and Cooking, “Fat breakdown is also one of the sources of desirable ham flavor, and nitrite-free Parma hams have been found to contain more fruity esters than nitrite-cured Spanish and French hams.” He doesn’t say they’re necessarily superior, except in that particular way.

Going back to the concerns about frying bacon and the N-nitroso compounds that started the whole celery thing, an intact muscle or slab of bacon is sterile inside. The cure penetrates from the outside in or it’s injected. Compared with the cut-up pieces in a sausage, the intact piece is less vulnerable to contamination and doesn’t have the same need for nitrate or nitrite. For anyone who wants flavor without nitrites, Southern Country bacon cured with just dry salt is so flavorful as to make “uncured” bacon or the usual brined supermarket bacon taste watery. Dry-cured bacon, like dry-cured ham and sausage, doesn’t need refrigeration. It’s ready to eat in just two weeks. After that, unless there was nitrite in the cure, the exposed fat starts to oxidize and the flavor goes slowly downhill. But nitrite can take bacon to a higher level. Italian guanciale (pork jowl) that’s dry-cured with nitrite improves over six months or more. And some bacon and fatback is protected from air by being immersed in brine. Lardo di Colonnata in Tuscany, kept in salt and saturated brine (no nitrate or nitrite), can improve in flavor and become tenderer for two years.

Great cured meats taste sweet. Not in a sugar sense but in their clean, focused flavor, which comes from the quality of the meat itself and from a flawless process. Fat provides flavor and texture, counterpoints to the saltier lean. And beneath the salt and cured flavors, you can taste the animal flavor of good outdoor-raised pork.

When you buy cured sausage, look for mold with a beige cast and hope for some beneficial green. If you’re given a slice to taste, notice how easily it folds and how moist it is. Any sense of acidity should be no more than a hint. Eat the sausage soon after you buy it, because it’s probably already at peak, and anyway you don’t have the conditions needed to ripen it further at home. Wrap it in wax paper and put it in the coolest part of your refrigerator. Like bread and cheese, slice good sausage only just before you serve it. If you slice it ahead, it will lose moisture and aroma and taste like an everyday version.

Bread, including whole-grain and seeded kinds, flatters the intensity of dried sausage and normalizes the salt. Light beer is good, and wine’s acidity and refreshment help. A tannic red wine can give an iron taste, and the sausage and wine will dull each other, but a light, low-tannin red from a cool climate works, as do light white and rosé. The spice in some sausages competes with good wine; with those, opt for a simple, inexpensive bottle.

So many people around the world appreciate great dry-cured ham. North Americans love Southern Country ham, imported European ham, European-inspired hams cured in North America. There’s surely a large potential demand on this side of the Atlantic for flavorful dried sausages. The most delicious hand-crafted ones — from the best pork, cured with nitrate, ripened by indigenous cultures, and given time — are a luxury. As with great wine and cheese, they create an exciting image that helps to sell more affordable but honest versions (without celery). Cured truly is better. ●

Photograph by Edward Behr

US sources of dry sausage:

Babette’s Table  Mad River Taste Place (store), Mad River Green, Waitsfield, Vermont; tel 802.496.3165, babettestable.com, madrivertaste.com

Butcher & Larder  1427 West Willow (store), Chicago; tel 312.432.6575, localfoods.com/butcher

Jasper Hill Farm  (it’s dropping its trial name of VT99 Meats) Craftsbury, Vermont; tel 802.533.2566, jasperhillfarm.com

Olympia Provisions Portland, Oregon (widely distributed); tel 503.894.8275, olympiaprovisions.com

Underground Meats  Underground Butcher (store), 811 Williamson Street, Madison, Wisconsin; tel 608.467.2850 (mail-order), undergroundmeats.com

From issue 103

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