How I learned to stop worrying and love the culatello
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When I met Scott Lem — a hobbyist charcutier, or meat curer — at his small, makeshift prep space in South Pasadena last week, I had about a million questions for him.
I was there to help break down a pig leg, which we would then salt and turn into culatello and fiocco, two Italian cured meats. Before we could even pick up our knives, I started grilling him on every step of the process.
What salt percentages do you use? Do you have to cure it in plastic bags? How do you control the humidity during drying?
Truth is, I’ve wanted to cure meat at home for a long time, but I’ve always been too intimidated to take the plunge.
Why? Well, I think I’ve never totally understood what’s going on when you preserve meat — the levers to pull, the variables to control and how to control them, the safety.
Preservation was really my entry point into cooking (“The Art of Fermentation” by Sandor Katz was one of the first cookbooks I ever owned), though my first at-home fermentation experiments were hit or miss.
I turned apple scraps into apple cider vinegar (a fly got in and left a school of revolting little wrigglers swimming through my brew), attempted mead (used bread yeast instead of wine yeast and it exploded) and made kimchi out of cauliflower and then used that to inoculate cream for cultured butter (tasted like pizza, kind of awesome). I made gravlax, hot sauce, ginger bugs, bad mustard, mushy pickles.
I fell in love with the fermentation process and soon my kitchen was cluttered with bubbling, odorous jars. When it worked, it was magical.
More than just the magic, I was chasing this romantic vision of myself as the type of person that always has something unique, delicious and homemade tucked away, ready to be shared with guests.
Early in my preservation journey, I met someone just like that.
Some close friends and I were staying at an acquaintance’s old stone house in a small, forgotten village in northern Italy. One night, we made dinner for our host, and as we sat down to eat he ducked down to the cellar and returned with a gallon of local wine, a hunk of mite-infested cheese from a neighbor, and a mysterious, thick, milky-white block wrapped loosely in parchment.
It was lardo — cured pork fat — which I’d never had before. He sliced it transparently thin and told me to stick out my tongue. Never one to say no to a new friend’s request, I obliged, and he gently laid a slice in my mouth. It melted immediately into pure, porky, salty, Hitchcock-zoom-inducing richness. That might have been the moment I became determined to cure my own meat.
That was 10 years ago, and though it’s long been at the top of my culinary bucket list, I still haven’t done it.
This is the year that I overcome my fears.
Enter Scott Lem. Lem is mostly self-taught and has made a variety of salumi, forcemeats and cured whole muscles, which he shares at occasional Lem Party pop-ups, which he started with Cynthia Wong, his wife and business partner.
I asked Lem to explain the whole process to me. He did so very patiently.
For whole muscle curing, Lem butchers the meat, rubs it with 2% salt and 0.25% curing salt (nitrate for long-curing meats, nitrite for shorter curing) by weight, then vacuum seals it and puts it in his fridge for a couple weeks to a month to allow the salt to penetrate evenly through the muscle. Then he cases the meat (often in what can only be called a “beef bung”), dunks the whole thing into a mold solution and allows it to air dry at room temperature for a day. Then, he dries the meat, hanging it in a refrigerator he rigged to control the temperature (aiming for 45 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit) and humidity (aiming for 75% to 80%) until it has lost 35% to 40% of its weight, which might take four to six months. Then it’s often vacuum sealed again to allow the remaining moisture content to balance throughout the entire piece of meat. Finally, it’s ready to eat.
When I’d finished interrogating Lem, I felt like I was finally starting to understand the principles of meat curing — the variables, the levers, the safety.
Basically, you’re trying to get enough salt into the meat so that it’s protected from bad bacteria. The curing salt (which contains nitrates) helps to prevent botulism, and the mold on the outside helps draw out moisture and outcompete other unwanted surface bacteria. The drying process and humidity slowly reduces the water content of the muscle, which aids in preservation, as excess water would make it more likely to spoil.
After we’d finished breaking down the pig leg (Lem let me do this part — I did … OK), then salting and bagging the culatello and fiocco, Lem and Wong invited me to sit down for a meal.
Lem cut thin slices off a couple finished culatelli, some fiocco and some coppa. The meat — truly — was incredible. Among the finest cured meats I’ve had in recent memory.
As we ate together, I realized I’d found myself in another one of those beautiful moments where someone had welcomed me into their space and shared their work and pride and homemade creation with me.
I learned a lot from Lem. Am I going to buy a whole pig’s leg next week? Probably not. But maybe I’ll buy a coppa. Or it might be more appropriate to start with a nice big chunk of lardo.
I’ll keep you posted.
Happy eating,
Cody
Mak Kimchi
If you’re curious about fermentation, kimchi is a great place to start. It’s fun to make, highly customizable and — of course — very tasty. This version by Haejung Kim is made with Napa cabbage and is very similar to how I’ve made it at home.
Get the recipe.
Cook time: 2 hours 30 minutes. Makes 3 quarts.
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