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.

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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

Menu : Tuesday ... Chef Myles at Stella

Chef Myles Anton said this about PigstockTC 2010

"In my career as a chef, whole animal butchery is the next logical step. It makes sense environmentally, spiritually and financially. Since November 2010, I have handled countless different heritage pigs (Mangalitsa, Duroc-Yorkshires, Duroc-Berkshire), fifteen Suffolk lambs, and four half Holstein cows. Utilizing these whole animals has decreased Stella's footprint on the environment, challenged my creativity as a chef, and exposed our guests to unique cuts & preparations. At the end of the day, it makes my soul feel good to show the ultimate respect to these animals and celebrate them wholly."

Stella welcomes "Pigstock"

fat : lardo, rosemary, crostino

head : house perperonci, fennel, soft onions, lemon

skin : chicharron, currants, opal basil, tomato agrodolce, white potatoes, cracked black pepper

grind : warm county style sausage, Robiola Rocchetta cheese, bibb lettuce, arugula, pistachios, chives

belly : pancetta (al la Chef Brian), garganelli, golden & hothouse tomatoes, Parmigiano Reggiano, cream

loin : lightly smoked, caul fat wrapped & seared, savory & sage, braised red cabbage, five-hour sauce,         Marsala

blood : chocolate blood cake, porcini mushroom & gianduotto gelato, carmel
      

All set

All set to go ... this morning at Hagerty 

Menu : Mission Table

Chef Paul did a full on smack down tonight

"Not so Pigstock Dinner"

scallop: with santucci empire apple, cauliflower, turnip

pasta: with local leeks, eggplant, pigstock 2010 prosciutto

sweet breads: with braising greens, capers, radish, brown butter

chicken: bakers acres with cranberry beans, fig

venison: drettmann ranch loin, santucci chestnut, pear, baby carrot

cake : chestnut chocolate, apple, whisky, chestnut ice cream by jehni olsen

Coverage in Northern Express

TASTEmakers

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PIGSTOCK

Last week’s column on the Pig Roast event at The Cook’s sparked a few e-mails of protest. I guess not everyone is a pig roast fan. Amidst the e-mails against having a Pig Roast I heard from JT Hoagland telling me about Pigstock TC 2011, a second annual event that is all about hogs.

Now in its second year, Pigstock, hosted by Cherry Capital Foods of Traverse City, is a fourday event that starts Sunday October 16 and features an array of events from learning how to slaughter a hog to touring local wineries to how to cook whole animals along with a wine dinner.

“This event is about creating a new industry here in Northern Michigan,” said Hoagland. “My goal in continuing with this is to raise the awareness of issues like charcuterie Ideally, we’ll foster a charcuterie industry with several businesses, not just one, in Northern Michigan. This, in turn can enhance the local ag-economy.”

Pigstock will offer several classes featuring organ cooking and seam butchery (taught by Christoph and Isabel Wiesner, from Austria), as well as Charcuterie with Chef Brian Polcyn who wrote the award-winning book on the topic.

Participants are coming from all over and space does remain for some activities and classes. Chef Myles Anton will host a special Mangalitsa themed dinner on Tuesday night (these are hogs, bred for their fat, not a lean pig). Pigstock will wrap up on Wednesday night with Five-course wine and charcuterie dinner presented by Chef Brian Polcyn. For tickets and additional information check out pigstocktc.blogspot.com --Rick Coates


and

BOTTOMSup

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PIG PORTER

It seems like everything is “going to the pigs” around here. Pig roasts, now this week is Pigstock TC 2011 (see Tastemakers) and how much more pig do we really need? How about Pig Beer?

Yes, leave it to the inventive brew team at Right Brain Brewery to come up with this one. Last month they brewed Mangalitsa Pig Porter, a beer that actually has pig in it. The brewing process included four cold-smoked Mangalitsa pig heads—brains removed,—and bags of bones in each batch of porter.

The beer was a big hit at the 30th annual Great American Beer Festival (GABF) in Denver, where more than 500 breweries presented their brews to over 50,000 participants. The GABF is also a beer competition and the Right Brain Brewery Mangalitsa Pig Porter took home the Gold Medal in the Experimental Beer Category.

Okay so, it is very experimental but is it drinkable. Participants at the GABF thought so voting it was one of the top five beers at the Festival. It’s a virtual pig roast in a pint with a smoky, bacon fl avor and is remarkably very drinkable.

Produced in limited quantities this brew will not last long. It is available only at the brewery.

Speaking of Right Brain Brewery they have outgrown their Warehouse District location and are planning a move (still within the Traverse City limits) near Sixteenth and Cass soon. They are not able to keep up with production at their current location and need to double the size of their production to keep up with demand. No word if they plan to brew a second batch of the Pig Porter so try it while it lasts. --Rick Coates

Wednesday- Last Day for Tickets to Dinners!

Is your mouth watering yet?  Buy your tickets before Wednesday HERE.




Trattoria Stella Dinner Menu with Chef Myles Anton 


Fat
Lardo, rosemary, parsley, crostino

Head
house peperoncini, fennel, soft onions, lemon

Skin
Chicharron, currants, opal basil, tomato agrodolce, white potatoes, cracked black pepper

Grind
Warm smoked country sausage, Robiola Rocchetta cheese, bibb lettuce, arugula, pistachios, chives

Belly
Pancetta, garganelli,  golden & hothouse tomatoes, Parmeggiano Reggiano, cream

Loin
Leaf fat-larded , caul fat wrapped,  & seared, savory & thyme, braised red cabbage, five hour sauce, Marsala

Blood
Chocolate blood cake, porcini mushroom & gianduiotto gelato, balsamic & honey

Charcuterie Wine Dinner Menu with Chef Brian Polcyn


pairings with local wines and beers
Hagerty Center


Michigan Mangalista Lardo



Assorted Mangalista Charcuterie plate with house made Cherry Mustard



Hand rolled potato gnocchi with Spalla, Cippilini, onions and Lobster Mushrooms



Pan Seared Glacier Springs Trout, with white corn mash and Crispy Pancetta Vinaigrette



Mangalista Pork Shoulder Confit with roast garlic Sausage, fennel gratin, Pigs ears and Spuma


Dessert : TBA

We're changing the program

For qualified chefs and food service buyers, we're dropping the program fee.

Contact us for package pricing on rooms at the BayShore Inn.

Want to order a Mangalitsa before the event, contact Cherry Capital Foods 231-943-5010

Tickets for Public Events On Sale Now!

Can't wait to join us for Pigstock TC?

Join us for these events open to the public.

Buy Tickets Now

Not a professional chef or do you just love pork?

Details for the home chef and pork enthusiast will be posted soon.  We'll offer classes for the home chef and Mangalitsa dinners.

Check back soon for tickets and registration.

Pig Porter?

Yes
The word is out

Bacon Beer

Right Brain brewery has come up with Mangalitsa Beer !

We hope to be able to arrange a visit during PigstockTC

"This porter has a smokey flavor with a bacon finish and a big, pig mouth feel. 

This brew is a premium pour"

One more reason to come visit us!

Another feather in our cap!  BootsnAll Travel Network named Traverse City one of the eight Best American Small Towns for Foodies.

See full list here

Don't Wait!

Registrations are rolling in.  Don't wait and miss one of the coveted spots to join us this year!

Sign up today.

Sleeping Bear Dunes, Michigan Voted Good Morning America's 'Most Beautiful Place' - ABC News

For consideration before or after attending PigstockTC

News just in

Sleeping Bear Dunes, Michigan Voted Good Morning America's 'Most Beautiful Place' - ABC News

Half hour to 45 min drive from Traverse City.

Registration Open

Registration is now open for Pigstock TC 2011.  Don't miss your chance to snag one of the only 40 spots available for attendees.

If you have questions, please contact Allison Beers, Event Manager.  Allison@EventsNorth.com or 231.883.2708.

Information and the registration form can be found to the right.