- This is my happy place, like this is my happy place right here. The smell is like moldy but just like overwhelmingly meaty. It like really makes you hungry. - We are here in Portland, Oregon about to see our good friend Eli Cairo at Olympia Provisions. - We think Olympia makes some of the best charcuterie in the country. We've known Eli for almost 10 years. We're excited to finally see where he makes all of his stuff. We know how we make sausage. We're making 40 pound
batches of something. - [Brent] We're just supplying
just our butcher shop. - [Ben] You're obviously
a lot bigger than that. You guys are butchers and
own a butcher counter. I've never sold a steak in my life. I'm a sausage maker
and a charcuterie maker and that was kind of my whole philosophy, was to make value-added meat not to run a full fresh meat program like you do. - So what are we going to do today? - I think we should make
Pecorino parsley sausage. We're going to also show you around the entire plant, kind of give you guys hopefully the feel of what we really do, what makes it special. - [Brent] Can we suit up? - [Eli] Yeah. - [Ben] Lets do this. - [Eli] Alright. (upbeat music) - This is the spice room, super duper unique to us. We get all the spices, weighed out, real spices, ground 15 minutes before it actually goes into the batter so you can actually taste everything. We try to keep 'em within about a half an hour to an hour from when they're grind and mixed into the meats. Quick test for the butchers, what's that? Pork fat, idiot! - Ahhhhhh! - That was so simple! I like to keep all the emulsifications under 40 degrees, if possible. - Which is why we're in a
very cold room right now. - And the fat is frozen and we're going to be using ice. Take that first one, dump her in there. Good job, Brent. I knew you could do it. Slowly add it to the meat. That is a viovia. So that is a rosemary extract
and distilled vinegar. This allows it to give
it a better shelf life. I'm going to help you, then
the ice will go in there. (loud grinding) Shut it. You let this run to a minute fifty. Look at us making sausage. - Wow - Together, as friends. (loud grinding) - [Brent] Ahhhhh! - [Eli] Parsley. - [Ben] Oh that's good. Doesn't that smell good? This is so much easier than what we do. - Our mixer is fine, it's a great mixer. - [Ben] Yeah! - [Brent] We're not
comparing mixers today. We're going to make sausage. - Yeah! - It's like Toys-R-Us but it's nice. Come on. - You guys smell an Emmy
coming out of this one or? - Oh man, yeah. (loud grinding) - Let's just say, that's
the ticket right there. - [Eli] That's starting
to form onto itself. You're getting like individual piles. - Cut it. Oh, excellent. We got to try it to make
sure we're happy with it. - Thanks Eli. - That's really great, wow. - Imagine if that was warmed or cooked. - Definitely taste the difference in the fresh garlic. - Yeah. - You get the parsley. You get the cheese. - Yeah, I mean what does dry parsley taste like? - (beep) Who knows? - Exactly. - Nothing. - Nothing. It's terrible. - So why would you do that? - You're lying if you're
using dry parsley. - You're actually using fresh garlic. - Yes. - Not just a bunch of garlic powder. - A lot of other people, you know, they pre-buy this packaged shit there's no consistency. - [Ben] And that's what it's tastes like. - [Eli] That's it. - [Ben] Alright. - [Eli] We're ready to go stuff it. (upbeat music) (Ben singing) - [Ben] Oh nailed it! - [Brent] How often do you not nail it? - [Eli] So often. (laughing) - Casing? - Yep, seen it? - Familiar? - Yeah. - Cool. - Very familiar. You're also doing a natural casing, which a lot of people don't do. - No, this would be synthetic and you can bang that out in no time. That's not how you're supposed to do it right there, it's supposed
to be inside of the casing. - You want it inside of the casing? - Inside. - See, I knew we would learn something. (upbeat music) - [Eli] You ready, break, look at that. It's doing pretty good. - [Ben] How do I stop it now? - [Eli] Hit it again. - Whoa!
This is awesome. This is so cool. Ours doesn't do any of these things. First off, it's like 20 seconds to do that and this did it in three. And then these are like perfectly - Perfectly stuffed. - No air. The biggest part is there
is a vacuum in there. So if your emulsion isn't good and you have like a clump of air
inside of your sausage, it's going to get pulled out in there. It pulls all of the
oxygen out of the sausage so you get a perfect bind every time. - I want to try. I want to try. - Alright. - [Ben] This is why... - Good thing you're good looking. (laughs) - [Ben] Hey Brent. - How do I stop it? I have no idea why this
went so poorly for me. - Just to point out, three masters of their craft. (rhythmic knocking) - This machine runs 100 a minute and usually when you're really humming, it doesn't stop. You know, yesterday,
if you'd been in here, both machines just running fresh sausages for 10 hours. In this plant, we
operate around 60 people. - How big is this place? - [Eli] 40,000. - This is 40,000? - [Eli] Yeah. - Who's making a sausage?
la la la la la That was good. We're just rolled in the
Pecorino parsley sausage and it's going to take about an hour and a half to cook. Time it. - [Ben] We sell all of our sausage raw. - [Eli] Yeah, this is cooked. - We make raw sausages mainly because we would need a lot more space, more equipment. We need this. This has like humidity control so they make sure it stays like really nice and plump. - Okay, so we did it. We stuffed them. For steaming, that will take an hour. - Okay. - Then we can show you
around everything else. (upbeat music) Thank you, you'll see there's very little in here but this is going to smell super special right now. - Whoa! - Yeah. - That's intense man! - [Eli] That's not what you want to be smelling. It's literally rotting meat. This process takes me three days. In most salami factories, they do this in about three hours. You know, you have a
super live active culture. You put in the smokehouse, a ton of sugar, you ferment it super duper quick and you get that lactic tang pH drop real real quick. - So what's the advantage of you taking three days rather than three hours? - Yeah, so I can drop
my pH really really slow and in doing that, it
allows the spices that took so much effort and the pork flavor to actually marry into the flavor as opposed to just being
like pork, salt, spices. For me, a true salami
should only have like very little tang. You should never taste
that it's fermented. It should just be like pork, salt, spices, and then of course the mold which we'll go talk about right now. - [Brent] Yeah. - So after it's fermented, the salami comes in here and
we talked about grinding it lightly so the moisture can
come out to the outside. What we're having here is salt bring meat yeast to the outside, that's attracting our mold, our bloom. In my cookbook, I gave away
every one of my recipes. And the reason why I feel comfortable about doing that is you have to have this environment with the slow fermentation, the real meat, to actually
replicate my product. And it's a pain in your ass. - All you want to do
when you're on this scale is to control every variable. - Yeah. - It's all about control and you're actually like deliberately
stepping away... - You're just kind of
at the whim of the molds and figuring it out. - I wanted to actually
just see if we could just for the (bleep) of it, like us playing hide and seek in here. - Totally, of course. - Close your eyes. Count to 30. Go! - 2, 3, 4 - Oh let's go! (upbeat music) (laughs) - [Ben] Found me. (yelling) - Salami camouflage. Oh my God! I can't believe you walked right past me. Swear to God, you didn't see me. (laughs) This will be the blast chiller, Cool down everything real, real quick. Boys, you're going to
need your summer sausage. Oh man. - This is so cool! (laughs) - It's the small things, huh? This is the final QC check for everything. - This is like what I want for Christmas, roll stock machine. - This could be in a bu bu bu. Salami, salami. Sausage there. Salami's here. - I've never been happier. - Yeah. (upbeat music) - Those are done. - Ready for a hot sausage? - Oh do you smell that? These are going to be cheesy. - Thank you Eli. - Well you guys made them. - Cheers everybody. - ---that you made a sausage. - We did a good job. (upbeat music) - That bind is really good. The cheese is great. - Is that good? - Mmm hmm. - The parsley nice and fresh,
black pepper and garlic. - I think you might have career in this. - I might think about it. I might look into it. (upbeat music) That's it. We're done. We're here in the staff room. We made it. - Thank you for all the goodies. I think you've fed us an entire meal along the way, just trying sausages. - I'm so jealous. - Eli, I really really appreciate it. - Really good work. Look at you. - We're going to eat the salami shaped like a football
but if you want to learn about football, head on
over to ESPY nation here. - [Announcer] Can you believe that? - [Narrator] The execution of
this play needs another look. Jerard Rabb faked the screen--
