Pity the pig, reviled as a filthy glutton in our language and our literature. Fortunately, cooks, farmers and sausage-makers know better; they praise the pig, revere it as the embodiment of everything delicious.
Sadly, fresh pork spoils fast. It needs to be cooked and eaten before it decomposes, breaks down under the assualt of micro-enzymes...or else preserved somehow. Refrigeration slows decay, freezing kills unwanted bacteria. But man has long preserved his food in other ways as well: smoking, sweetening, salting, air drying.
Simply put, the harmful bacteria cannot live in a dry, salty environment. But the process of salting has many variables and success takes both a scientist and an artisan.
Cristiano Creminelli's family has been in the salami business for literally hundreds of years, for the last century with a thriving little company in Piedmont, 50 miles northeast of Turin in the foothills of the Italian Alps. But exports (to the USA, at least) proved impossible. When the 2006 winter Olympics were held in Turin, Cristiano crossed paths with Seattle marketing exec Jared Lynch, and the stage was set for an international expansion: a manufacturing facility, a website, distributors nationwide and a retail outlet at the Pike Place Market. It's a story Cristiano (with snapshots) tells on the Creminelli blog.
The product line is limited to "artisan meats." Six kinds of sausage you have to cook, seven or eight that have been air-dried. Number 8 is a salami made with white Alba truffles that's only available for a short time every winter.
And although you can purchase these delicacies at the Pike Place Market, you might wonder where this actually comes from. No, not from Italy but from a town called Springville, Utah, an artsy community of 20,000 on the shores of Lake Utah, some 50 miles south of Salt Lake City. Why Utah? Pleasant scenery aside, its location provides easy access to a consortium of sustainable farms of in northern Utah, eastern Oregon and southern Idaho. No less important is its exceptionally dry climate, because Creminelli's sausages aren't cooked; they're conditioned for at least three weeks, a time when the parameters of humidity and temperature determine your salami's future. Get it wrong and it's unfit. Get it right and it's heaven.
Creminelli, 93 Pike Place Market #2, 206-626-6328, www.creminelli.com
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