He Ate Well: Pig and Salt

I wrote this entry last summer -- and promptly forgot to post it! But I met an Italian woman living in Bhutan on my recent trip there, and when she told me she was from Fruili we got to talking about San Daniele's wonderful proscuitto. So here's a post from my Italy trip this past summer:

Here's the ingredients list for Italy's San Daniele proscuitto: Pig and salt, or more accurately, "Italian Heavy Pig" and coarse Sicilian sea salt. Okay, there's one more critical ingredient: charming San Daniele itself, or rather the village's unique microclimate between breathtaking mountain ranges in the country's northern Fruili region.

While Parma prosciutto may be more famous in America, here in tiny San Daniele they've been air-curing ham for, oh, since the middle ages. Both hams use pigs from the same areas but the two prosciutto taste different (the San Daniele is a tad sweeter) because of curing styles and, of course, geography. I visited this village and was lucky enough to check out a traditional prosciutto producer. Make that traditional meets high tech. The brightly-lit, immaculately clean facility was modern industrial, processing 6,000 hind quarters a week thanks to an array of robotic arms zipping and zooshing legs to and fro, conveyor belts auto-salting and pressing hams, winches, computer monitors, stainless steel racks, and walk-in coolers the size of basketball courts. What struck me, besides how fresh those pig legs -- with trotter attached -- looked when they arrived from the slaughterhouse, was how this producer was able to adhere to age-old curing methods while injecting 21st century moxie into the process. Despite the stampede of hams, just 25 people worked in the place, handling what the machines couldn't -- hand-trimming, inspecting, managing the curing.

After four weeks of being salted, ventilated and rested the legs are ready for air-curing. I boarded a freight elevator 20 feet tall for a ride upstairs to the curing room. The contrast was stunning. No clack and purr of machinery, no bright fluorescents, no air conditioned coolers. Instead, 60,000 prosciutto rested silently in a 16,000 square foot space, tied to the stainless steel racks hoof up and ten high. The huge room was dimly lit; the prosciutto gave off a rich hammy smell. Instead of A/C there were banks of ten-foot high windows on two sides of the buildings. Here's where technology gives way to a thousand years of tradition. To the east the windows opened to the peaks of Slovenia. To the west they opened to the Aviano mountains. The breezes swirling down from these two mountain ranges and meeting here -- exactly here -- in San Daniele is what infuses this prosciutto with its indelible magic. The hams peacefully waft in these mountain currents for nine to ten months until they're cured and preserved. Then they're ready to be sliced gauze-thin and enjoyed with a fine glass of Friulian Tocai.