Like music, art, and movies, there are key words in food, and charcuterie in particular, when you hear them, you know that you are talking to someone who knows. To me, when I heard someone talking about nduja, regardless of how they pronounce it, I knew that I was talking to someone when knew. The thing is, even those who know do not have access to enough examples to really assess what is good, bad or other – myself included. Lately however, it has popped up in more spots to results that have not met my limited expectations of what nduja should be – a spreadable Calabrian pork product made with a heavy dose characteristically red Calabrian chilis that bring serious red color and major heat.
Of the 7 or 8 versions that I have tried over the past few years, I have thought most were decent, but in all of the reading that I have done, only two really fit the bill for what I expected from nduja. The first was made by Rob Levitt, while at Mado, which featured the right texture and face-melting heat, but not the deep red color that I expected (likely because Rob opted for local chilis instead of the Calabrian variety) and the other was made by Craig Deihl and Bob Cook at Cypress in Charleston, which featured the texture, color, and flavor that I had in my mind every time that I searched out nduja. Other versions lacked heat, spread-ability, or flavor generally, but in every case, an nduja sighting became a Paul Revere-type announcement within the appreciative community. Continue reading »
Like this:
3 bloggers like this post.
In April 2010 when I took a Slagel lamb belly and made both bacon and pancetta from it, there were virtually no examples of either in the real food world, online food world or in books. That made things difficult for a novice meat curer, but recently lamb bacon has been a very popular item not only on menus and blogs, but in cookbooks as well. Hell, even lamb pancetta made it to a blog or two since my first go around. Continue reading »
