Leave the beautiful region of Calabria and travel north to the much beloved Tuscany or Toscana and you’ll find biroldo or sanguinaccio – a traditional blood-based salumi.  Biroldo is a pork blood sausage and you’ll often find it infused with raisins, pine nuts and cinnamon or flavored with fennel (blood sausage is also referred to sanguinaccio in many part of […]

Book Review: Salumi by Micheal Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing was a popular and more general look at making cured meats.  In the author’s latest pork crazed book, Salumi, Ruhlman and Polcyn focus on eight basic categories of Italian salami (plural salumi), including: guanciale, coppa, spalla, lardo, lonza, pancetta, […]

Like many Italian families in southern Italy, we make our own salumi from pigs raised on family land.  My grandfather would often slaughter a carefully raised pig and thereafter make wonderful cacciatore, coppa, salt pork, etc. (and today  our cousin Guiseppe continues the family tradition). Herb and Kathy Eckhouse correctly realized that the tradition and process mentioned above could be […]

An Easy Guide To Making Guanciale (Cured Pork Jowl) at Home   The following is a guest post (on homemade guanciale)  from our friend and Scordo.com super fan Dr. K. (make sure to read all of his wonderful guest posts and recipes) . All photos courtesy of Dr. K. Charcuterie originated as means of preserving meats for extended periods. Cured meats (e.g., […]

Pizza Gain Aka Pizzagaina, Pizza Rustica, or Italian Easter Ham Pie Recipe PizzaGaina goes by many names including Easter Pizza, Pizza Chiena, PizzaGaina, Italian Ham Pie,  Pizza Gaina, Pizza Rustica, Italian Easter Ham Pie, Stuffed Easter Bread, Pastiera, etc. And just as there are many names for Pizza Gain there are various versions of the classic Easter dish.  For example, in provinces such […]

One of the most ubiquitous panini (plural for sandwich) in all of the Italy is prosciutto and cheese.  In fact, I made so many of the aforementioned panini in Italy one summer (helping Zia Teresa in her small shop) I thought all Italians survived on prosciutto (or prosciutto cotto <steam cooked Parma ham>) and cheese alone. Italian’s fascination with panini is easily understood when you begin to […]

You have to love any establishment that sells over 200,000 pounds of Italian cheese in a given week, in turn we’ve fallen deeply in love with the Pittsburgh based, Pennsylvania Macaroni Company.  The Italian food store was started in 1902 by Sicilian immigrants from Trabia and they now carry well over 5,000 Italian specialty items, including an online business that will slice […]

(photo: Columbus Artisan hot sopressata sliced by hand) Peperoncini and Salumi If there’s one food item that the southern province of Calabria is famous for it would be peperoncini (or red chili peppers). Peperoncini are used in pasta dishes (Penne all’Arrabbiata, for example), cured meats and vegetables (including the trendy salumi spread, ‘Nduja), soups, and an eggplant stew dish called […]

Easy Italian Sausage and Peppers Recipe As Clifford A. Wright, the author of the wonderful book A Mediterranean Feast, writes: The daily consumption of fresh meat began to decline by 1550 as the population was now fully recovered from the Black Death of two centuries before, and, as a result, more land was devoted to the more labor-intensive agriculture rather […]

  (photo: left to right: Creminelli felino, sopressa,mocetta, Calabrese, Milano) The Working Life and the Italian Deli I’ve held many odd jobs as a young lad including garbage man, janitor, landscaper, handy man assistant, electrician’s assistant, travel agent, HTML editor, maintenance man at a women’s clothing shop, and, my personal favorite, salumi slicer / panino maker at Zia Teressa’s beloved […]