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www.gourmetnews.com Gourmet News • Oli e Aceti 9 What to Look for as American Charcuterie Movement Rises BY GREG GONZALES Dry-curing meats was a matter of survival hundreds and thousands of years ago, but in today's United States, charcuterie is all about flavor. Today's consumer will come to your store wondering where their food comes from and how its origin affects the flavor, and they're part of a growing move- ment that com- pares to that of gourmet cheese and craft beer, with no sign of slowing. To catch this rising wave, it's crucial to be able to tell the difference between true gourmet charcuterie and the rest. Being ahead in this movement before it gets big means attracting a customer who can afford high-dollar items. According to Ariane Daguin, CEO of D'Artagnan, peo- ple seeking out American charcuterie tend to have a higher salary, and they care about whether the meat came from a sustainable farm, whether or not the farm was local and how the animal was treated. And it's certainly possible to stay ahead right now. "I'm still talking about a very small niche, a very small part of the population," said Daguin. According to Phil Gatto, Co-Founder of True Story Foods, what makes truly good charcuterie is that craft producers use her- itage breeds of animals that are humanely raised, antibiotic-free and hormone-free. "Those breeds usually take a little longer to grow, and end up with a deeper color, more marbling, which gives them more in- ternal fat, and that natural fat brings a sweetness to the flavor profile," he said, adding that the exercise these animals get out on the pasture also helps with mar- bling. And it's not just pigs — Daguin cited a heritage breed of chicken used at D'Artag- nan that eats vegetable scraps and takes longer to raise, which results in a truly unique flavor experience. "A chicken that's 100 days old is basically three times more expensive than a chicken that was processed at 30 days old — and the taste is more than three times better, but the price is three times higher," she said. For Chris Eley, Owner of Smoking Goose, quality charcuterie really is all about the animal itself. "You can't make something great starting with a poor-qual- ity product," he said. "I used to work with a guy when I was young who would al- ways say, 'You can't make chicken salad out of chicken [manure].' So we're always focused on how the animals are raised. That's the key to the quality of our product. Our job — we buy a high- quality animal, a heritage breed raised properly, fed well, it was stress-free — our job is to not screw it up." Any additional herbs or spices, Eley said, are there to bring out the natural flavor of the meats — not to enhance or cover it up. That's not to say there's an absolute rule about ingredients in craft charcuterie. Bill Miner, Owner of Il Porcellino, said his company makes a variety of salamis, some traditional and some non-traditional, to keep curious customers coming back. "We make one salami called a Queso Salami, and we use a cheese in there called Queso de Mano from Haystack Moun- tain, which is a local creamery here in Col- orado," he said. "It's a Manchego-style cheese we put in there, so you get a bite of cheese in your salami. It's not a lot, just a little bit, and it's pretty unique. We're using local wine from Denver, local beers in some recipes, juniper berries, which is an indigenous ingredient from Colorado. But then we make traditional things like sopressata, finnochionna, coppa, things that people know. You can be different, but you also have to make products people are familiar with so they sell." In addition to how the animal was raised and how the meat is handled, re- gion plays a major role in the final flavor. With factory-farmed animals, location doesn't matter — no matter where they're raised, those animals are manufactured to produce a high quantity of meat that comes out tasting the same — but high- quality charcuterie producers take note of regional flavors. Smoking Goose products, for example, are all about Indiana from an- imals and ingredients all the way down to the name. Its Rustbelt Salami recalls the era of steel mills — in Indiana, Ohio, Michigan and Illinois — and it changes batch to batch, using a single-source and single-breed pig from one of those states. "The idea is to represent the flavor profiles of this region of the country, rather than trying to recreate regionally-traditional European styles," Elay said. However, when factoring in which char- cuterie is right for your store, think liter- ally about how a region affects flavor. Pigs raised at the foothills of the Ozark Moun- tains tend to eat acorns from nearby oaks and hickories, flavors that carry subtly into the meat. "It's called terroir," said Daguin. "It works the same with wine. You take exactly the same grape, you grow it in one place and another, and it makes a very different wine — sometimes, it's less than half a mile away, and it makes a huge difference." We can think of char- cuterie like cheese, too; milk from a cow that eats dray hay in the winter will taste quite different from milk made by the same cow grazing on fresh green grass in the spring. "You cannot say, 'I have the best terroir to raise a beef," said Daguin, but the origin certainly can be an indi- cation to charcuterie-seeking customers of what flavors to expect. Enamoring your customers to craft charcuterie is partly a matter of education. Even though consumers have constant ac- cess to a smorgasbord of beautiful charcu- terie with a single search of #charcuterie on Instagram, they'll likely be more en- gaged with your products if your staff can tell them all about the meats from your area, or how the wagyu beef raised in Texas you carry is truly one of a kind. Your customers will thank you. GN

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