Quick audio reviw of Salumi

Registration

Because this is a blog format, where posts scroll down, we are re-posting the Registration link here

To register for the Event, classes for the home chef or the Polcyn/Ruhlman dinner please click 

HERE

Re-iteration of why to visit the area

The greater Traverse City Area continues to gain attention

Come early and/or leave late

Forbes Magazine coverage here

Hint: it's not marinara sauce ...

Excellent piece on Brian and Michaels impact

Detroit Free Press :

New book underscores Brian Polcyn's impact on dining

"In the grand scheme of things, not many chefs can legitimately claim to have made a tangible impact on dining in America. But Brian Polcyn, a chef and teacher in our own backyard, can.
Not that he does. Or would. But he could.

It's an accomplishment largely unrecognized here, where restaurant goers and serious cooks have known his name and patronized his restaurants -- from Pike Street to Five Lakes Grill to Forest Grill -- for more than two decades.

But as he and co-author Michael Ruhlman mark the release this month of "Salumi: The Art of Italian Dry Curing," their second book on cured meats, it's an appropriate time to step back for a broader view of Polcyn and what he has contributed to cooking in America.

As much as anyone in this country, he has helped ignite a renaissance in the artisanal crafts of French charcuterie and Italian salumi -- the traditional, Old World methods of preserving meats to make everything from prosciutto and salami to country patés and smoky bacon."

Tools of the Trade

Fundraiser : the PigstockTC Dinner

SOLD OUT 

but we're already planning for 2013 !!!


Pigstock TC Dinner

Tuesday, October 23^rd

6:30 pm doors open

7:00 pm dinner

Hagerty Center

$75 per person ~ Order Tickets HERE

Where do we even start?  There is  something for everyone to enjoy! 

Enjoy a seven course wine dinner prepared by some of the best local chefs.  Featured chefs include: Myles Anton from Trattoria Stella, Paul Olson from Mission Table, Guillaume Hazaël-Massieux from Restaurant La Bécasse and Bistro Foufou, Eric Patterson from The Cooks’ House, Fred Laughlin from The Great Lakes Culinary Instutite, Coburn McNaughton from The Hagerty Center and John Dayton from Black Star Farms.

Each chef will prepare a small plate course “loosely inspired” by Brian Polcyn and Michael Ruhlman’s books, including their latest book, Salumi: The Craft of Italian Dry Curing.  Polcyn and Ruhlman will be featured during the dinner where they will be interviewed, by Peter Payette from Interlochen Public Radio. 

 Wait, we’re not stopping there!  $10 of each ticket sale from Pigstock will go toward the nonprofit Michigan Land Use Institute’s farm to school program to build a 10 Cents a Meal pilot program for interested area schools. 

10 Cents a Meal, a joint project of MLUI and Traverse Bay Area Intermediate School District, will provide an extra 10 cents a meal to area schools to purchase locally grown fruits and vegetables, benefiting kids and the local farm economy!

For the Home Chef

Basic Butchery for the Home Chef

Monday, October 22nd

5pm-7pm

Garde Manger Lab, Great Lakes Culinary Institute 

$50 per person - More Information and Registration HERE

Learn how to breakdown primal cuts of meat for use in the home.  Not sure what to do with the pig from the 4H Fair?  Learn how to use these meats and more.  Sample some of the products like homemade bacon and sausage.  

Aprons will be provided.  Class taught by Chef Bob Rodriguez, Instructor at the Great Lakes Culinary Institute- Northwestern Michigan College.  Chef Rodriguez teaches classes in Garde Manger, meat cutting and charcuterie.  

Poetry

A note on meats

Note that this is an open blog, with no pre-screening for vegetarianism or pro-PETA attitudes.

The hogs used are pasture raised, treated humanly and with respect.

Slaughter is done with minimal stress, and respect for the animal

Besides - this provides the best meats

He's ready, are you ?

His quote : the Pig is King

come find out 

Who are these Chefs and what are they planning?

We'll have word out soon

In the meantime, mark your calendar for evening of October 23rd 

As guitarist Brian May plays it  ... We Will Rock You

A Cut Above

Come and learn what Paul did

What does he know that you don't

2012 PigstockTC Program Schedule & Registration

Printable version of the Program here

Printable registration form is on Facebook and here
Contact: Allison    allison@eventsnorth.com

Here's the tease : Salumi

From the opening of Salumi: The Craft of Italian Dry Curing

Michael and Brian hit the nail on the head, this is what we're all about

Are you ready for some magic ?

Making the Ancient New

Something truly amazing has been underway in America for more than a decade now. The issue is so vast that for decades we lost sight of it, maybe even never saw it in this country until recently: the importance of food. If you’d tried to argue that food was not “important” to one of our early ancestors, or to someone today who doesn’t have enough of it, they’d look at you as if you’d been living on another planet. But because food became so easily attained in the developed world, thanks to shipping, refrigeration, and infinite-shelf-life processing, we took it for granted. And we have only recently become aware of its importance on a national scale because our food supply has become imperiled and food-related illnesses, from bacterial contamination to diabetes, have begun to make us sick on an epidemic scale. The ramifications of this relatively new awareness are diverse: the FDA debates regulating how much salt companies can put in processed foods, physicians argue about whether or not food is as chemically addictive as alcohol or nicotine and why children’s food allergies have become as common as colds, and Congress debates farms subsidies. We’ve turned chefs, once anonymous tradespeople, into celebrities. Food issues and cooking as sport have become common entertainment, food bloggers are attracting six-figure book deals, and farmers’ markets are flourishing throughout the country.

Amid this sturm und drang, a few truly wonderful changes have moved in like soothing waves through our culture. Changes so fine and unlikely that Brian and I believe that there has never been a better time in this country’s history to be a cook and to take pleasure in the cooking and sharing and eating of food.

America has always been a culture that embraces the new. But in the case of our food post World War II, “new” was not good for us. New was in fact bad in a lot of ways, and we have only in the past decade begun to recognize it. The trans fats in margarine, a “healthy” alternative to butter, actually made it unhealthy. We learned that there was high-fructose corn syrup in our bread and that the dyes added to processed food to make it more appealing were harming our kids. The antibiotics used to keep our cows healthy created a new bacterium that has killed and maimed.

But thanks to a few voices in the food world, “old food” and “slow food” have become new. And America has embraced this. We can only hope that, as the newness wears to inevitable age, we still sense the pleasure in the weathered surface and the clean, simple food that looks on the plate as it did coming out of the ground, that we recognize the power and importance of a well-made cheese, or a braised beef brisket, or potatoes mashed with whole milk, butter, and salt.

As ever, chefs have led the way in our new understanding, and their work and knowledge has filtered down into home kitchens. Alice Waters fostered a recognition of the value of naturally raised food we grow ourselves or that is grown by farmers near where we live when she opened Chez Panisse in 1971. Larry Forgione asked us to pay attention to our regional cuisines when he opened An American Place in 1983, celebrating a country so huge that what we grow or catch in one corner is in the other corner vastly different: grapefruit and grouper in the southeast, apples and salmon in the northwest, and sour cherries and walleye in between.

In Italy, Carlo Petrini, a writer and eco-provocateur, appalled by the proliferation of American fast food outlets in Rome, spearheaded a food movement called Slow Food in 1986. It has spread its promotion of naturally and sustainably raised and harvested food worldwide.

In the 1990s, more and more chefs began demanding excellence in their products and found farmers and foragers willing to work with them to achieve it. And soon that same search for excellence filtered down to everyone who liked to cook, and supermarkets worked to satisfy their customers with once unheard-of ingredients: morel mushrooms, habanero peppers, and ostrich eggs in the grocery store.

It was these changes that allowed us to publish Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing in 2005 with uncommon success. Yet the unlikeliness of that has to be underscored. Charcuterie is a book devoted to the French tradition of preserving meats by curing and confiting them, with recipes whose two principal ingredients are fat and salt. Fat and salt: villains number one and number two on American nutritionists’ Most Wanted list. At the same time, America had become obsessed with the fast and easy meal, and even 30-minute meals took too long. We also became terrified of germs and bacteria, getting rid of perfectly good wood cutting boards and buying up all manner of anti-bacterial soaps, dumping everything in the fridge if the power goes out for more than four hours. Into this culture, we brought a book not just devoted to animal fat and salt, but also reflecting a full-on love affair with them, a sweaty, torrid embrace of them. Moreover, many of the recipes take not 30 minutes, but rather days, sometimes even months, to prepare—and recipes that ask you to add bacteria to your food, while telling you that if you don’t do it right, it can kill you.

And chefs and cooks far and wide, bless them, embraced the book. Hundreds of readers—and bloggers—took up the call to cure their own bacon and confit their own duck. This is a food culture Brian and I are very glad to be a part of. And it encouraged us to continue our exploration of the powers of salt and the majesty of the hog in salumi, the Italian version of the French craft we came to adore—the slowest food of all. But salumi and charcuterie are not the same craft with different names. Salumi is a narrower, more focused, and more difficult craft, one that should be approached the way one might hunt wild boar: with knowledge, respect, the proper tools, and the recognition that you might have a good day and you might not, you might catch something and you might come up empty-handed—and that is part of the thrill of it. Because when you find that boar, and you will if you are willing to work for it, you can turn it into cinghiale sausages, the dry-cured wonders found throughout Italy, and the result is as thrilling as magic.

Nature is the greatest artist, we are not the first to say, and this is what salumi is really about: taking what nature gives us and doing as little as possible to it to make it the best it can be.

Over the past decade, dozens of salumerias and charcuteries have opened throughout the country. Marc Buzzio, whose ancestors hailed from Biella in the Piedmont region of northern Italy, has kept the family business up and running by curing sausages in New York City the way his dad and granddad had for decades.

America has a long tradition of smoked country ham, yet that all but vanished in the wake of factory farming and factory production. With few exceptions, like Buzzio’s family and Nancy Newsom’s family, who has been curing small batches of meats—in this case superlative country hams—in Kentucky since 1917, not only was great salumi unavailable, most people didn’t even know what decent salami and dry-cured ham were. In the span of a decade, America went from a country that knew only cooked salami from Oscar Meyer and Boar’s Head, factory salami, to one where salumi every bit as good as the finest in Italy is available to all from numerous sources.

•

Let’s Not Get Confused Here: Important Definitions

Salumi is the Italian word for salted and cured meats. (Salume is the singular form of the word; we almost always use the plural.) Salumi include pancetta, prosciutto, coppa, and salami.

Salami are dry-cured sausages. If you have only one of them, technically it’s called a salame.

Dinner

OK, so here it is : Chef Polcyn will be joined by Michael Ruhlman as they launch their book Salumi: The Craft of Italian Dry Curing

Plan is for local NPR radio host, Peter Payette to interview/discuss with Chef Brian and Michael such topics as  meats, local food and Terroir - the "sense of place" 
As Chef Polcyn so brilliantly put it for last year's dinner, we had  Prosciutto de Leelanau ... not Parma, the meat was cured in Leelanau County, not Italy.

We're working on this as a fundraising dinner to help support fresh food in local schools 

Details as we continue with arrangements
Stay tuned

Pigstock TC 2012

SAVE THE DATE

OCTOBER 22-24, 2012

TRAVERSE CITY, MICHIGAN

Classes

Dinners

Charcuterie

Seam Butchery

Organ Cooking 

*****More Details to Follow*****

Please call Event Manager, Allison Beers at 231-883-2708 or email Allison@EventsNorth.com to  reserve your space.  Don't wait ~ space is limited for this event.

Review

Coverage by Jeff Smith, Traverse Magazine of the event

Pigstock, a Traverse City Premier Culinary Event

Thanks Jeff
And yes, we're already planning for next year

Menu : Wednesday @ Hagerty with Chef Polcyn

Closing dinner presented by Chef Brian Polcyn
with Chef Bob Rodriguez and Chef Corburn MacNaughton

Chef Polcyn worked up a menu featuring both Old World items and New World approaches

A real tour de force

Old World:

First : Michigan Mangalitsa lardo naturale

Second : Salumi
black pepper Coppa, orange fennel Lomo, Spala (4 month), Prosciutto de Michigan (12 month)

Third : Charcuterie
Pate Grand Mere, dried tart cherry mustard, sweet pickle chips
Chef Bob's Concord grape cumberland Sauce

New World:


Fourth : hand rolled gnocchi with guanciale, cipollini onions and lobster mushrooms

Fifth : Pan seared Trout
Egg & Bacon Palette, Sweet Corn Sauce, Parsley Fat and Spuma

Sixth : Confit of pork shoulder with smoked hunter sausage, fresh bratwurst (made this morning), fennel gratin, fall vegetables and port wine reduction

Desert : honey poached pears, with Greek yogurt, fresh bay leaf and Amaretto

All paired with various wines from Black Star Farms, Chateau de Leelanau, Chateau Chantal and Right Brain Mangalitsa Porter

Charcuterie

Brian getting started on Charcuterie Demo