Welcome to the La Quercia Blog!

Welcome to the La Quercia Blog!

Welcome to the La Quercia Artisan Cured Meats (La Kwair-cha) Blog.  This is where you can find our commentary about what we make, how we make it, how we see our farmers changing, what other people are saying about us, how we see the world (well our world anyway).  We'll post pictures here, put recipes and serving ideas here, and try not to get too wordy. Thanks for visiting.

May 24, 2012: Local/Sustainable Meets the Rubber Chicken Circuit

The Downtown Chicago Marriott on Michigan Avenue feeds a ton of people for all kinds of events, and they work really hard at offering local sustainable food.  They have a rooftop garden, apiaries, make beer, and do a field trip every year.  Last year 9 of them visited La Quercia and very graciously cooked a meal for our team--including sous vide short ribs--that was greatly appreciated.  I got this email from Chef Nathan there looking for ideas about where to source some special pork.  These guys deserve an award! 

"We are doing a farm to table dinner for a group of 600 people and we convinced them to do a pork pot pie as their entrée instead of beef filet mignon. We wanted them to do this because it is more sustainable to utilize a whole hog instead of using 1 cut of meat from 50 cows. We are really excited about this and we hope that we can change peoples ideas of what large volume banquet food is all about. So often people only want a steak or a chicken breast but if we can break that mold one group at a time it could be a huge impact for our sustainable cause."

AMEN

May 11, 2012: Happy to Announce....

We are happy to announce some changes at La Quercia. Sebastian Beumer is now our Plant Supervisor. Sebastian, born and raised in Iowa, is a graduate of the Iowa Culinary Institute and was in the Meat Sciences Program at Iowa State University. He is a crazed enthusiast of cured meats - pretty much 24/7, since he makes them at home as well as at work! Sebastian started out working for us one day a week last summer and the hours just kept on growing. We are so pleased to have him with us and are looking forward to years of collaboration in making fine cured meats together.

Johnny Jiminez is our Assistant Plant Supervisor, with special responsibility for the finished product side - all the final trim and packaging. Johnny has been with us for four years and knows all aspects of making La Quercia meats. He is a real talent with a knife and taught us how to do a proper job of breaking down whole pigs. He has great equanimity and gets along with everyone.  It's a real pleasure to work with him and we are pleased that he has this new opportunity.

 

 

 

 

 

(Johnny's on the left, Sebastian's on the right)

May 5, 2012: Acorn Tamworth Alert!

Just as the first round of Acorn Tamworth meats (guanciale, pancetta, coppa, lonza and lardo) are now available to fine restaurants on both coasts through Chef's Warehouse, we got news from farmer Russ Kremer that this year's group of pigs is now on the ground.  Plus we got this great photograph of how these pigs live.  This meat is tender and delicately flavored,  and the fat melts with no coating in your mouth.  Hope you get to try some!

April 17, 2012: Great day for People and Hams

It was a totally glorious day in Iowa today.  Perfect temps--49 to 72; air scrubbed clean by the rains; blue skies; leaves forming on the big trees now; grass green green green; the lilacs still blooming and casting their enchanting aroma.  And the kicker--bugs aren't out yet.  Opened up the plant to the fresh air and sat on the porch with a friend after work.  A great day.

April 12, 2012: The Prosciutto of Happiness

Last night I had some of our Acorn Edition III prosciutto.  This was purebred Berkshire pork, acorn fed at B & B farms and the ham had been aged for 28 months.  We decided after Acorn Edition I that this meat needed more time to reach its full potential and added 6 months to the aging from a minimum of 1 year to a minimum of 18 months.  We pushed the maximum from 18 months to 2 years.  After Acorn Edition II, we decided we hadn't gone far enough, so we added another 6 months to the minimum and the maximum.  It was the right move.

Our motivation for subsidizing acorn fed production, taking the risk of buying all the meat, cajoling growers into raising acorn fed pork were several.  Iowa, once an oak savannah, has a lot of stately oaks; the oak is the state tree; acorns have and are associated with superior dry cured ham quality; and it is our goal to make American dry cured ham that rivals the best in Europe.  In our eating experience, we always held the level of Jamon Iberico de Bellota as an aspiration.

 

 

 

 

 

When I ate the Acorn Edition III ham, I experienced that incredible depth of flavor and sweetness with only the faintest hint of salt that I sensed before only with great Jamon Iberico de Bellota.  We've been fortunate to receive a lot of praise over the years, and have sometimes had our Berkshire Prosciutto compared to Jamon Iberico de Bellota.  I always appreciated it, but didn't really feel worthy.  This was the first time that I ate some of our prosciutto and felt that we even belonged in the same sentence.  It made me very happy.  Ahhhh, the prosciutto of happiness!

 

 

April 4, 2012: Perilla, NYC La Quercia Dinner--April 24

Here are the details of the La Quercia dinner at Perilla--looks awesome:

	Perilla and La Quercia Dinner TuesdayApril 24, 2012   Four Course Tasting Menu $70 per person Join us and one of the country’s top artisanal cured meat producers, La Quercia, for a special tasting menu and conversation on Tuesday, April 24. Perilla is proud to serve cured meats from the venerable La Quercia and pleased to announce that Herb Eckhouse, the owner and founder will be joining us from his farm in Iowa for a special dinner showcasing the breadth of his products. Chef Harold Dieterle has put together a special four-course menu ($70 per person), found below, and Herb will be on hand to discuss the artisanal meats being served. Reservations are highly recommended and can be made by calling us at 212-929-6868. We hope you can join us for what’s sure to be an incredible evening.        Four Course Tasting Menu Selection of La Quercia Prosciutto Berkshire, Tamworth & Acorn Edition Organic - Skillet Braised Cuttlefish & Guanciale xo sauce, fresh water chestnuts & garlic bread - Speck Wrapped Local Rabbit morels, pea tendrils, sweet pea sauce & natural jus - Iowa White Lardo & Rhubarb Financier caramelized banana & peanut butter-bacon ice cream
Perilla  9 Jones St. New York, NY 10014 P: (212) 929-6868 http://www.perillanyc.com

March 31, 2012: La Quercia Dinner at The Kitchen Denver April 2, 2012

Hugo Matheson was one of our first customers at the Kitchen in Boulder.  We've eaten there several times and love it.  Hugo achieves that delicate balance with his cuisine--simple, ingredient focussed, hospitable, and still very fine.  He is honoring La Quercia with a dinner at his new venue, The Kitchen Denver.  This will be a great opportunity to experience the American Terroir of Heritage Breed pork with La Quercia Varietals.  They'll be offering our Tamworth Prociutto and our Berkshire Prosciutto side by side, and then Tamworth Country Cured Bacon and Berkshire Lonza.  The prosciutto will give you a chance to experience the differences in their purity, and then the spiced and smoked versions will allow you to verify their distinctive qualities.  Hope you can make it!

March 14, 2012: Perilla, NYC La Quercia Dinner--April 24

Harold Dieterle is the chef at Perilla (and yes, he did win the first season of Top Chef), a Greenwich Village favorite.  Here's the New Yorker's take on it.  Harold is spotlighting the "terroir" of Heritage Breed Pork in a dinner that will feature La Quercia Cured Meat Varietals.  Details to follow, but the appetizer will be a tasting of three varietals of La Quercia prosciutto, and Herb will be there to answer questions.  Stay tuned!

February 9, 2011 La Quercia Acorn Edition V - Berkshire Pigs

December was a wild month, a fitting end to a pretty crazy year. There were the Christmas and New Year's celebrations - people ordering gifts for friends, retail stores and restaurants organizing parties, all the attendant festivities that so often include delicious dry cured meats! And then we have our La Quercia Woodland Tamworth pigs and our Berkshire Acorn Edition V pigs to work with. That meat is a joy and since the acorns and other woodland nuts are seasonal, the meat must also be seasonal, so it all makes for a very busy time!

And now it's February. What happened?

I wrote earlier about our La Quercia Woodland Tamworth pigs raised by Russ Kremer in the Missouri Ozarks. The next group of pigs is from B & B Farms just south of Grinnell, Iowa. B & B is a highly diversified farming operation. Barney and Suzanne try to raise all their own feed for their pigs and cattle. When Barney goes to the mill, for example, he waits so he can get his own soybeans extruded (milled flat, like oatmeal, so the pigs can eat them - and they're pretty tasty to most palates!) and loaded back into his truck. Here are some of their pigs - purebred, pasture raised Berkshire:

 

 

 

You can see why I call them "Prairie Porpoises."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gabe and a marmalade kitten!

 

 

 

And here are some of their cows in a woodland lot:

 

 

 

 

 

Suzanne and Barney (and their adorable son Gabe) have raised acorn fed purebred Berkshire pigs for us for several years. The meat is amazing both fresh and cured, reflective of the breed and the excellent animal husbandry. This year, we brought in only front and hind legs from their pigs;Eden Farms took the rest of the meat to sell fresh and frozen. You can find out about it on their website.

 

I love working with the Acorn Edition and Woodland meat. It is so clean and fresh - great color and aroma even in the combos and on the rack before trimming and salting. I am very partial to Berkshire pigs in particular - they are delightful to look at, delicious to eat - and this year's meat from B & B was terrific.

 

Here are a few of the hams on a rack, waiting to be salted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

These were beautiful, big, fat hams and will be with us for up to three years. Aging right along with Herb and me - so exciting!

January 23, 2012: Ruth Holbrook Joins La Quercia!

We’re thrilled to welcome Ruth Holbrook to our team here at La Quercia to work with us in Marketing and Sales Support. Ruth will focus on supporting our sales efforts and distributor relationships, merchandising, product management, and marketing programs. Ruth has been a part time merchandising consultant for La Quercia for over a year, most notably editing the structure and content of our website and brochures so we are looking forward to getting the benefit of her talents full time. She comes to us with a strong background in specialty foods retail and merchandising, as well as a longstanding commitment to sustainable agriculture and humane animal farming practices. We are sure you'll like working with Ruth as much as we do.