Ibéricos Roam New York
Two ways to sample Spain’s most venerated pig, jamón ibérico de bellota (a native breed of black-footed pig, reared in acorn-laden oak forests, and carefully salted and cured where the air is just so) here in the USA were plugged in today’s New York Times Dining pages. This is the cured meat people in the know here were buying futures in a couple of years ago.
In case you missed that whole story, The Wall Street Journal’s early account is still up on the Tienda website — tienda’s owners devised the “futures” scheme as they worked with suppliers to get a version of the ham approved for sale in the U.S.
Jamón serrano, especially the kind typically available in American shops, doesn’t begin to approach this stuff in texture or flavor (or price!). What’s on offer at Despaña Foods in SoHo at $120 lb (yes, you want to pay the extra five bucks to get it hand sliced off the bone) or at this importer/sausage-maker’s mothership in Jackson Heights is paleta — the front leg or “shoulder” ham, slices of which, says the Times are “burgundy-colored, streaked with fat, and taste like red wine” (also, dried fruits and hazelnuts come to mind). People in Spain argue about whether paleta or jamón is better; each has its devotees and I think of jamón as somehow lusher, though maybe that’s a placebo effect — it’s the bigger, rounder, sexier cut.
Next Wednesday is your chance to taste a variety of Ibérico products up against the pig’s long-lost cousin, the Ossabaw (pigs descended from those brought by the Fernando de Soto to the New World sometime around 1540, really, and which took up residence on the this island off the coast of Georgia) at Suba, the restaurant and lounge in the Lower East Side (109 Ludlow, 212-982-5714). The five course pig-centric dinner is $110 including wines. Chef Seamus Mullen knows Spanish food well, since he spent time cooking in Barcelona and San Sebastian. But this dinner came about after he had “the good fortune of meeting a pig farmer from Virginia, Bev Eggleston, who is raising Ossabaw Island hogs,” which, he says are “some of the most flavorful pigs we’ve ever eaten.”