How Master Butcher John Ratliff Is Making New York’s Best Salami — Prime Time

hey guys we're here at ends meet where our friend john is making what we think is the best salami in new york he's also making whole animal charcuterie which is both awesome and stupid but we still love him for it action here we are at ends meet and we're here with john hey your whole business plan revolves around uh whole muscles and whole animals you can make more salami you can get more pork trim but you create these specific products that you can only get so much of the one that is the hardest 100 percent of the time is the copa we get two of these per animal so what do you do we tell people they can't have them there's no question it's not even a thought process as to whether or not we attempt to make more of any one product outside of whole animal we get a pigs that are pretty large they're 350 400 pounds and we get 12 pounds of copa every day it's like i want copa i want copa i want copa and it's like cool i get it has nothing to do with the treatment it's the type of muscle it's just like this amazing balance of fat and extremely active protein it's weird to be a retailer when you can't curate specifically to what people are ordering it's like oh that's a no-brainer why would we sell anything else but these three things totally you know customers come in and everybody wants skirt steak yeah so like all right we like raised the price of skirt steak a little bit but we don't want to sell skirt steak for 30 dollars a pound so it just sells out every single day that we get that we get delivered everybody can't have skirt that's not whole animal it's an 850 pound animal and it's going to give you a pound and a quarter of a hanger we make a lot of sausage we don't make salami what's the difference in process higher salt higher sugar more intense uh muscle separation and then we do a pretty uh in-depth seaming process with our protein to remove unnecessary senu all that silver skin and you want all of that gone yeah all of that fascia and all that like really gnarly stuff that will get caught in your teeth so what we're really looking for here is an even mix and even distribution and we're relying on the denaturing of our proteins in fermentation so we're basically pickling this meat and then you know the four to eight months it takes that and then there's that part sell it to somebody yeah we're gonna make salami picante great our our take our version on salami picante the spicy salad the spice is nice does it get old i don't think it can get old the inspiration for this was wanting to utilize chili's from the home stadium from from new mexico we're utilizing a lot of lean from the hams and the shoulders gotcha this is going to be like a lot of work for a two second shot you all look so tiny from up here [Music] so we're doing a large grind on our lean right now and then we tumble it with all of our spices and we grind through our desired size plate so salt fennel new mexico chilies bird's eye chili sugar turbinado yeah and we're using culture that is a mixture of lactobacillus and staphylococcus so we're just doing a little mix what we're looking for is that clean separation right there we're noticing the little brighter orange areas where it does look like the fat is smearing but that's not as much smearing as it is uh the little bit of myosin that's being extracted yeah kind of coming together this is exactly this is how you get a salami where you see like the fat bit separated from the meat bits as you get like this clean this is our culture the powder itself isn't just bacteria it's also specific minerals and nutrients that kick-start the bacteria in the hydration so we're waking it up they're waking it up that's the alarm those minerals are the alarm that's like waking it up as soon as the water goes all right and if we were to just add it in here it would be a crap chute as to whether or not it would activate slowly add water i'm gonna slowly add our culture over here hey ben yo what's up beef bongs shimmy it gonna we're taking a very loose farce putting it in a very large slippery animal intestine and we want it to hang like this so what we need to do is not only make this little package as tight as possible but we also need to make sure that it is secure so that the loop doesn't come off the rod that it's hanging from in order to do that we need to have structure from top to bottom because if we just tied a loop around here this is like two and a half pounds it's gonna slip right off and that sounds gross and hilarious no it's not it's neither of those things it's extremely infuriating any possible air gaps that were in there we want to get rid of them if you want to know what the inside of a cowl smells like this is a good way to find out so once the products are cased we go into our fermentation chamber this mounts on there so what temperature is it in here right now it's at 40. the temperature goes too high the fermentation can happen too fast and then you don't get as much develop in this flavor you just get acid we're not going for a sour product right we're going for a high acid developed flavorful taste of protein taste the spices not acid it'll be coming out whenever 72 hours is from now and then it goes into into the big bad boy this bad boy we have a much larger room here this is what you guys just made oh wow here so this is our our salami picante these are beautiful at any given time we have eight to ten thousand pounds of product rotating through this room and then we we have a prosciutto scenario that we're starting we're going to hang a bunch of stuff from the ceilings three years into the game i'm like barely okay with putting a piece of product in here for two years that's such a massive investment yeah yeah and i get like everybody everybody first question is do you have christina i'm just like do you have any idea what that means yeah for like a small business that has zero financial investment from anyone like right and you want to pay three hundred dollars a pound yeah that's because that i made yeah probably not no like you know there's tons of people doing great prosciutto about that yeah and i mean for that matter there's tons of people doing way better product than i am like this is just kind of this little low brook low-key brooklyn spot that trying to figure it out so we think it's amazing thank you you guys want to go taste this yeah i'm pretty hungry now all right we have great fat definition in there uh-huh really nice separation there there might have been a little air gaps in there but i'm really happy with that you see every separate particle there's not a huge ring around the outside that that demonstrates that the outside's much drier than the inside it's pretty even all the way through which leads me to believe it was a really clean grind the fermentation was very active and it and it denatured properly and dropped the ph so without further ado man i've never had something like this before like still newly out of the walk-in where you can taste what that walk-in smells like the the chili it's like hits you up front and then it kind of chills out fennel seed action in there and the actual heat is coming from flakes of the bird's eye chili because the new mexico red chili is a powder it's dust so it's really what's giving it the color the fruitiness you can really see the importance of the truss here no separation no potential for mold to get in there on either side you see how much weight gets put on this lower side it's necessary to have that that vertical truss can't wait let's try this big dad jackson right here yes sir wow you can hold that up to the light and you can see right through it let's try the copa the aroma of this it's like nutty this is like an age sheep smelt cheese super independent it's completely different texturally intermuscular fat off the chain and really shames most prosciuttos i would never say that i can it's just been getting the people to pay attention to notice the fall in love with the product because they need this experience for this product they're like wow this is more expensive and it's less available why would i not just go to go to whole foods yeah exactly you know what what's special about this and what what's missing is what does that mean that interaction that discussion and yeah that's what you know we're we're trying to continue to give to people while operating a business no one gets into animal agriculture and definitely whole animal to make money you do it because you care about something you want to support a particular kind of agriculture and you want to do something that's truly different and unique and you trust that people will be along for the ride with you it was an honor to have you here um i'll go ahead and redo all this stuff you guys did but don't worry about it thank you so much for watching this episode of prime time click right here if you want to see more of this and mark you

Channel: Eater

Views: 2,951,430

Keywords: salami, best salami, how to make salami, new york, master butcher, butcher, how to butcher, whole pig, eater, eater.com, food, restaurant, dining, dish, foodie, chef, food porn, the meat show, charcuterie, new york's best, new york city, the meat hook

Id: iNsBH-udOAo

Length: 10min 37sec (637 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 26 2018