Wabash professors Jeremy Hartnett ’96 and Brian Tucker ’98 participate in a very interesting extracurricular activity: meat curing. Working out of Professor Tucker’s basement, the two professors salt, hang, and dry meat, following instructions prescribed in the ancient practice of charcuterie. The professors have been curing meat since last winter as an alternative to cooking in order to supply their own gourmet food. As Professor Hartnett attested, "There are a bunch of faculty members who cook, and cook really well."
Everyone knows, of course, about Dr. Rick Warner’s previous career as a professional chef. But why do these professors cure their own meat?
"There are some really good places to eat in Crawfordsville," said Hartnett, "but not a whole lot. I was on a trip once to Seattle, and I went to a salameria that was owned by Mario Batali’s father. A salameria sells salami, which is the generic Italian term for cured meats. When I went to Mario Batali’s father’s place, I ate some terrific salami, prosciutto, etc., and it inspired me to try it on my own. "So I asked for this book, Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing, for Christmas, and I got it, so we dove right in."
Professor Tucker saw the practicality of meat curing immediately. "Curing is the traditional way of preparing meat," he said. "If you can only cook and eat so much, then you should cure the rest so it won’t go bad. Beef jerky is an example of cured meat. It is cooked at low temperatures and then dehydrated."
Living in Indiana, Professor Hartnett, before beginning to cure meat, was unable to find meats comparable to those he first tasted in Italy.
"I traveled to Italy a lot, and there are some terrific cold cuts there," said Hartnett. "You can’t get them here in high quality, or, if you do, then they are prohibitively expensive.
"Also, there are some really terrific native foodstuffs in Indiana, like tomatoes, and sweet corn in the summer," said Hartnett. "And there are locally some people who raise and slaughter their own animals, but not quite to the standards of being able to be certified organic. It is really good meat."
"So we thought, ‘We like to cook, we like the foodstuffs, and there is a good source of meat," said Hartnett, "so we thought we would just lump all those things together. So we tried it. We ordered a bunch of specialized materials and got started. Right away we tried three different things: duck breast prosciutto, pancetta, and bresaola."
Prosciutto is a type of ham, pancetta is Italian bacon, and bresaola is cured beef.
"We’ve done many different things," said Tucker. "We did the prosciutto, the pancetta, the coppa (which is pig shoulder in a casing); we’ve done a number of different things."
Also, the hobby has turned out to be very easy for these colleagues. "The process is remarkably simple," said Hartnett. "There are basically two steps. First, pack the meat in salt and herbs. You need a salt with either nitrates or nitrites. Typically a duck breast will soak overnight, but a pork belly takes one to two weeks.
"Second is rinsing," Hartnett continued, "then more packing with herbs and spices. And then you hang it. You hang it in a cool, moist place so it will dry evenly, or else you have raw meat on the inside and dry meat on the outside. People have been doing this for millennia, so we try to stick to the recipe."
Although the process sounds time consuming, it is very simple, and consists mostly of grinding
and measuring the spices and observing the progress of the meat. "And then you eat it, and you hope you don’t get sick!" joked Professor Hartnett.
"No one has actually gotten food poisoning from this," added Professor Tucker. Also, while some meat curers typically smoke their meat, the professors have chosen not to smoke theirs.
"We just use salt and air curing," said Professor Tucker. Because Professor Tucker’s basement is cleaner, the professors use it for the drying chamber. Professor Tucker designed the chamber himself, using a humidifier, a step ladder, bed sheets, packing bubble, and instruments borrowed from the chemistry department to measure temperature and humidity.
The duo has been curing meat for nearly a year, buying their supplies from Moody’s Meats in Ladoga, and their interesting partnership has resulted in a great team.
"The angle of the story is that you have the guy who does archaeology in Italy, and has this sort of Italian bravado, and brings to the table the spices and crazy cuts of meat," said Tucker. "Then you have this German guy who is very technical and brings a digital scale to exactly measure out the salt needed for the meat."
"We strike a good balance," agreed Hartnett, "Tucker and I do, because he is a man who really has a nose for detail (which is good when you’re talking about meat that might be spoiling), whereas I tend to be somebody who thinks about it in broad conceptual terms."
Meat curing has definitely found a place in the lives of these professors. "I now have ninety feet of pig intestine in my fridge as a casing," said Professor Hartnett. "We have also tried experimenting, including doing a duck leg poached in fat. We’ve done a number of other things. The only disappointment we’ve had was the bresaola; it didn’t have an interesting taste."
What is really interesting is that the meat curing professors didn’t even know each other while they were students at Wabash. They went to college simultaneously for two years, and during one of those years Professor Hartnett studied abroad, leaving only about one year when they were students together.
"So you became colleagues, friends, and meat curers together?" I asked Professor Tucker. "Not necessarily in that order," he laughed.