A Taste of Heaven

AAHHHHHH..... Doesn't this just look amazing? This picture is from a sad story printed in the New York Times about how cured meats don't meet the requirements for food safety set forth by the USDA. Let's go to Europe and eat some meats!

Dry-Cured Sausages: Kissed by Air, Never by Fire

The smell of rot — the ripe funk you breathe in Italian pork stores and French charcuteries — has always been part of the craft of curing. Traditional dry-cured sausages — the rough-textured, chewy ones like Italian soppressata and French saucisson sec — aren't cooked. Instead, the raw meat is stuffed into natural casings and left exposed to the air, picking up wild yeasts and cultures that start fermentation. Then, like wine and cheese, the sausages are aged in a cool, humid place to develop the rounded, savory taste that comes from slow ripening. White mold grows on the outside; water drips out as the sausage dries.

On Monday inspectors destroyed all the cured meats at Il Buco restaurant in NoHo. They did so, according to the owner, Donna Lennard, not because of any evidence of contamination but because the temperature in the curing room was six degrees higher than it should have been.

'These are pigs that were raised for us,' Ms. Lennard said. 'We knew their names. We were trying to do something sustainable and traditional, and this is what happens.'