“NEXT TIME YOU ENTER TASTE CROATIA, LOOK UP – THERE’S OFTEN A WHOLE PRSUT HANGING FROM THE CEILING”

Through this series we’ve discussed cured meats in general, Italian regional variations at length, and the two other giants of European curing – Spain and France – in detail too. Hopefully I’ve added context to what you already knew and loved, and the articles provided some encouragement to try a few slices of something new next time you walk around the Market (the rolled pancetta at Bianca Mora is looking particularly fine (and fatty) at the moment…).

While those three regions are the places most Brits think about when it comes to cured meats, there’s more to it than salumi, charcuterie and charcuteria.

Germany and Scandinavia in particular have fine traditions of curing – often with a smoky edge, most likely because their climate necessitated that element more than the natural curing chambers provided by the caves of Emilia-Romagna and the Iberian Peninsula. At the Market, another region is also represented: Croatia.

Croatian cuisine is varied and regional. To knowingly over-simplify things: food in coastal areas take a distinctly Italian and Mediterranean turn, with olive oil, rosemary, sage, bay leaf, figs and truffles; further inland, the influence of Hungarian and Turkish cuisine is clear, so think paprika, black pepper and lard for cooking (rather than olive oil). One thing is consistent, though: traditional cured meats.

Pršut

Next time you enter Taste Croatia, look up – there’s often a whole pršut hanging from the ceiling. Pršut is the dried rear leg of a pig so, basically (but not specifically), the same thing as prosciutto or serrano ham.

I am told that you will find pršut across Croatia, though the two areas that this meat tends to be produced are Istria and Dalmatia. These are coastal regions that benefit from climatic conditions which are favourable to curing and air-drying pig’s legs, with both steady winds from the Adriatic and dry winds from coastal mountains.

Dalmation pršut is lightly smoked for flavour, but otherwise simply salted, and often matured for a couple of years. Istrian pršut is unsmoked, but (unusually for this style of meat) skinned before the curing process begins and seasoned with pepper, bay leaves and garlic, and aged for a year.

Kulen

Kulen is like a very meaty, slightly crumbly chorizo seasoned with paprika, garlic and white pepper. We need to head east and inland to understand it and, again, there are a couple of different varieties.

Both are oval shaped and large, often up to 10cm in diameter, on account of the fact the sausage meat is stuffed into a pig’s intestine. But kulen from Baranja, the Croatian-Hungarian border region, is smoky and spicy and paprika-heavy; kulen from Slavonia, on the other hand, includes already-cured bacon among the pork mince, and less paprika.

Wild boar, venison and salami

Other meats exist beyond the stars of kulen and pršut. As with the other regions we’ve discussed, premium products and styles develop over time, but the prime reason for curing was always to preserve the meat of an animal for as long as possible, so every bit would have been used.

As one might expect, small salami-style sausages are prevalent. At Taste Croatia you can find salamis from Istria featuring Istrian black truffles, and also plainer ones using wild boar. The flavours and styles that differentiate regional salamis are so often based on meats or seasonings local to the sausage makers, and it’s no different here.

Istrian artisans have also turned their hands to curing wild venison and boar in a prosciutto-style for slicing – each really worth sampling.

“WINTER IS MY FAVOURITE SEASON IN THE MARKET. IT IS THE BEST TIME FOR EATING CHEESE – AND I ABSOLUTELY LOVE CHEESE”

Interview: Viel Richardson / Image: Christopher L Proctor

1. I knew while I was still at school that I wanted to work in restaurants and hotels. I started in the kitchen but soon realised that I wanted to move front of house because I liked dealing with people – that’s why I love this job so much.

2. I decided to come to London because of a missed opportunity. I had a chance to work in a hotel in northern Italy and went to the interview with a friend of mine. There was only one position and they gave it to my friend because he could speak better English. So I said, “Okay, I will go to London for three or four months to improve my English.” I never went back. I started at Borough Market in 2009.

3. Working here, you have the chance to talk with customers and build relationships with them. For example, an Australian regular was here earlier and he stayed for half an hour talking about his life, what he’s up to, it’s really nice. At Gastronomica, we have regular customers from many parts of the country, they know a lot about food and they like to try different things. The nice thing is every day we have something different to recommend for them.

4. It is really important for me to know our products. I need to know the seasons, how things should look and taste. Sometimes the transport might damage the product and I need to be able to spot when this happens, whether it has affected the look, flavour or texture. I need to know the shelf life and how to store things. I love this level of involvement. This is why I am still here after nine years.

5. For me, the nice thing about autumn at the Market is the way it comes to life again after the summer when people are on holiday and things are a little quiet. You see the energy beginning to build up again.

6. One of the things I would recommend is a cheese called testun al barolo, made with 40 per cent goat’s milk and 60 per cent cow’s milk. Before it is aged, it is covered all over in the grape must left over in the barrels from making nebbiolo wine. It is a very rich cheese, with the dark red colour of the must infusing the cheese with its flavour and the edges with its colour. Gongonzola dolce is also wonderful in the autumn – its intense tang goes very well with the sweetness of the pears and apples that are also coming into season.

7. Winter is my favourite season in the Market, though. It is the best time for eating cheese – and I absolutely love cheese: eating it and talking about it. Once I start talking about cheese, it is difficult to get me to stop.

8. One of the best things about working here is the relationships you build with other stallholders. The guys from Northfield Farm, who sell wonderful meat, are good friends. The people at Ginger Pig, Brindisa, La Tua Pasta. We buy some products from Grovers, the wholesalers. And Turnips – they are very good friends of my boss.

9. There is a real community with the traders. We all buy products from each other. When we have new products, we ask each other to come and try them. You discover so many new things this way. We usually meet other traders after work on Saturdays to have a beer and talk about the week.

10. It’s very hard to leave Borough Market because working here is unique. I have seen people leave for other jobs but many of them return. It’s completely different to anywhere else. Each morning I spend half an hour getting through the Market and into work. I drop by to say hello to my friends from other stalls. Every evening, I leave from the other side, because I need to say hello to the people working over there. It’s a kind of routine: if I don’t, people will wonder what’s happened.

“LIKE ANY FRUIT, ONCE IT HAS BEEN PICKED AN OLIVE WILL START TO LOSE SOME OF ITS CHARACTERISTICS”

Interview: Viel Richardson

What is extra virgin olive oil?

It is very simple. To make extra virgin oils, the olives are crushed with a press. A separator device then separates the crushed olive pulp from the oil itself. That is the end of it – no other processes are allowed. While they are all referred to under the umbrella of ‘olive oil’, there is a massive difference between extra virgin olive oil and generic olive oil. In the generic olive oil industry, they take the olive pulp and crush it again, then introduce additives to clean and get the most out of the oil that has been produced.

When do you harvest the olives?

There is only a short window when they will be at their best, so you have to keep a close eye on the olives. The harvest can start any time between early October and early November, depending on local micro-climate and the environment where the olive trees are located. It is quite possible for different olive farms in the same region to be ready to harvest at slightly different times. Then there is the variety of olive, which may have an impact on the harvest. Part of the skill of the farmer is knowing exactly when to start.

Why is timing so important?

You have to pick the olives when they have just started to ripen and are still green. When you do this, you get just half of the oil that you would get if you left them to fully ripen, but the quality of the oil is much higher. There is a trade-off between higher yields and lower quality. Picking them just as they start to ripen means they are richer in all the characteristics you want. It is also better to take them from the tree and not wait for them to fall to the ground.

How do you pick the olives?

The most efficient way to harvest olives is to shake the fruits until they fall. Some farmers use machines that shake the whole tree. We do not use that method, because it places the tree under a lot of stress. Instead we use a mechanical pole, which works as an extension of your arm. The pickers use this device to grab a single branch, which they then shake. This is much gentler on the tree, while also being safe for the pickers. Olives used to be harvested by people climbing ladders, but this could be dangerous, as the nature of the soil and the terrain can make the ground unstable. Accidents were common, with people falling from ladders. Using the harvesting pole is a much better method.

What happens after you pick the olives?

We press them the same day. The sooner you press them, the better. We start the harvest at around 6am and aim to be finished picking by 11am. We then transport the olives to the mill, where they are separated from the leaves and loaded into the olive presses. It is a long day – it can go on until midnight.

Why the hurry?

There are two main reasons for this. Like any fruit, once it has been picked an olive will start to lose some of its characteristics. But there is a more technical reason, too: the olives are taken to the mill in containers that weigh 50-60 kg. If they are left in these overnight, the ones at the bottom with no air circulation will start to ferment, and this is something you really want to avoid. That is why you have to do the whole thing in one process.

How are they pressed?

They are loaded into a crushing machine, where the actual crushing is done by a set of very heavy stone wheels that roll around a metal bin. The resulting paste is spread over a series of fibre discs, which are placed on top of each other in a pressing machine. The piles of discs are then slowly pressed to extract the oil. Any water in the resulting oil is drawn off, and then that is it: you have unfiltered olive oil, which is cloudy in appearance, but can be sold as it is. The freshest unfiltered extra virgin olive oil is called the ‘novello’ oil and is really sought after.

Most oils go through one last process, which involves filtering them through a fine mesh. This produces the clear extra virgin olive oil most people are familiar with. To give you an idea, we get about 10 per cent of the weight of olives as olive oil. The best season we ever had was 15 per cent, but we have never gone above that. If we were to delay for a month, we could get over 20 per cent, but the quality of the oil would be lower.

What happens next?

We store the oil in stainless steel tanks in an oxygen-free atmosphere that prevents any changes to the flavour. Then it is bottled, and that is it. We are based in Puglia, way down in the south of Italy, so it takes seven days for our olive oil to reach Borough Market.

How would you describe the taste of a good extra virgin olive oil? A good early harvest oil will always have a peppery kick. Sometimes people have asked me if that is the sign of a cheap product, but actually the opposite is true. That kick is something you want – it means that the olives were very green when harvested. If the olives have been left to ripen and darken, the oil is sweeter. With good extra virgin olive oil, you do not need much because it can overpower a dish. Just a few drops will enhance the food with some really wonderful aromas and tastes.

Read more about The Olive Oil Co.

“DIFFERENT FLOWERS YIELD DIFFERENT HONEYS; INDIVIDUAL APIARIES ARE UNIQUE, JUST AS SINGLE VINEYARDS ARE”

Words: Clare Finney / Images: Joseph Fox

“We have one nation to thank for having a language relating to honey tasting, and that’s Italy,” says Viktoria Bassani warmly, looking admiringly toward Stefano. The Piedmontese co-founder of From Field and Flower smiles back proudly. Though he did not of course invent this honey lexicon, in spearheading the sale of honey varietals at one of Europe’s biggest food markets, he has certainly contributed to his country’s sweet and golden legacy. The pale, shimmering ‘pearl’ honey that Viktoria produces is just one example of the many highly distinctive and wildly diverse honeys from around the world sold at the stall in Borough Market.

That’s why we’re here: honey – like wine, coffee or cheese – is at its best an expression of the land and the people that produce it, varying dramatically not just between landscapes or regions, but between each collection of beehives. And Viktoria is one of the most passionate proponents of varietal honey to be found this side of the Alps.

Viktoria has 80 hives, divided between many different apiaries around Malmo, Sweden – which is where we meet before travelling onto an apiary of hers near the coast. Her daughter, Isabel, joins us. Though Viktoria is the pioneer who researched, built and founded the bee business, in recent years it’s become a real family affair. Throughout long school and university holidays, Isabel has helped her mother extract, jar and label the honey from each apiary. Marcus, her teenage son, is responsible for the website, from which Viktoria sells her honey to Sweden and beyond – including, surprisingly, Qatar. “There is a real appreciation of honey over there,” she explains to our bemused faces. “They love it a lot, and it’s hard to come by.”

It’s testament to Viktoria’s ethics that she initially refused this lucrative opportunity on environmental grounds. “When I first started getting requests I said, ‘Is there no honey produced in Qatar?’ They told me it was almost impossible to produce, because it is mostly desert.” Eventually Viktoria conceded, providing it was shipped rather than flown, to reduce the carbon footprint. “It takes longer, but you know – honey can last for millennia,” she smiles. This claim was put to the test by archaeologists excavating the Egyptian pyramids, who found pots of honey that were still edible 4,000 years on, thanks to its high sugar content.

Of course, we’ve refined our craft since then, with purpose-built hives, extractors and, at the extreme end, industrial production. But the bees still do the bulk of the work. “That is what I get excited about,” says Viktoria. “The bees have perfected their methods over thousands of years. I just have to tune in and listen to what they are doing.”

Tune in she does – almost literally, when you consider that the ‘buzzing’ of bees is the sound of them evaporating the water in the nectar they’ve collected by vibrating their wings. “At 20 per cent or less, it’s honey,” says Viktoria. The process is difficult to understand without lifting the lid on a beehive and taking a detailed look at the world therein: the tessellated web of honeycomb, the worker bees bringing nectar, and the constant, mesmeric humming of thousands of working wings and bodies. “I think it’s a lovely sound,” says Viktoria, pointing to a honeycomb cell that has just recently had a filmy wax ‘cap’ layered on top of it – a signal to the beekeeper that the frame is ready to take away. “Once they have started to cap the honeycomb, that means the bees know it is honey, and stable for the next thousand years.”

We huddle closer, mindful of the new-born bees that pose the only real risk to humans opening a bee hive. “They cannot fly for 10 days after birth, so if they fall out of the hive when we open it they want to crawl back in again.” If they’re unlucky, they’ll crawl up your leg by mistake; if they’re really unlucky, you’ll move so sharply they’ll be prompted to sting you. “They do try to avoid stinging if possible –  because if they sting you, it kills them,” says Viktoria, semi-reassuringly. Fortunately, the heavy bee suits and wellington boots we’re wearing will protect us from everything except the heat – as searing in Sweden this summer as it was back home – and the wild boars.

The wild boars are a recent development. Viktoria has yet to see them, but has been informed of their presence by a farmer who hosts some of her apiaries. It could be worse – the repopulation of bears in the north of the country has created a growing problem for some of Viktoria’s peers, forced to fend off aspiring (and considerably more aggressive) Winnie the Poohs. The heatwave is also new. It’s a heady 26C and it’s been like this for two months without pause. “It’s unheard of here,” she says disbelievingly. While Viktoria is worried about the lack of rainfall, the high temperatures are a boon for both the quantity and flavour of her honey.

“We have already collected far more than we would in a normal season – and it’s mid-July,” she says, wonderingly. “A normal season lasts to the end of September.” The hives are big, unusually so, and the honey uncharacteristically flavourful. “Usually in this part of the world the early season honey hasn’t had enough time to develop rich flavours. It’s deliciously aromatic,” she continues, “but it is often quite neutral.” She likens it to growing strawberries: “The longer they are on the vine, the more flavour they will develop. They don’t taste as strong if they develop quickly. Likewise with honey: we get more intensely flavoured honey at the end of the season.”

Though produced early on, the pearl honey is delicious, interjects Sam Wallace, From Field and Flower co-founder and Stefano’s partner in life and business. “It’s the first one we encourage new visitors to the stall to taste, because it is so delicate.” Still, she’s as eager as any of us to try some of 2018’s heady ‘heatwave’ honey.

Viktoria isn’t collecting today. Ours, she says, is more of a “social visit”, allowing her to check in with her bees and offer me, Sam and Stefano a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the bee industry. The colour of the hive strikes us first: a bright lavender blue which seems both out of place and yet curiously at home, dappled with morning sunshine in the pine forest clearing. “The bees prefer blue and purple flowers, so I thought, why not adopt blue for the hive? I like blue,” she laughs. Less obvious to the eye are the hive’s environmental credentials. “These will last for 35 years, so they’re the most sustainable option, and using plastic frames inside rather than timber allows us to recycle the bees’ wax for them.” Just how this works will become clear later.

These bees are busy. This one apiary has produced more honey this season than Viktoria’s whole collection did last year – and shows no signs of stopping when we visit. Each tray is laced with honeycombs, which the house bees are busy either filling with nectar or capping with wax. “Foraging bees come back with their load in what we call the ‘honey balloon’,” says Viktoria, “and they want to get rid of it so they can fetch more. They dump it onto the house bee, who brings it to the right cell and starts reducing the water content.” Knowing what we know now, the background buzz suddenly seems less of a lazy hum, more the sound of richly purposeful energy.

“At this time of year, it will be heather honey. A lot grows on the beach nearby – the sea is only 200 metres away,” she continues. Maybe it’s her astute palate, having worked as a sensory wine analyst before swapping vineyards for apiaries, but Viktoria maintains she could recognise the apiary’s honey blind, on account of its subtly salty taste. “My colleagues call it ‘beeroir’ – like terroir for wines,” she laughs. “I’m not sure it works as a word – the English will think it’s to do with beer and be very confused. But we do need to start talking about the way honey is affected by microclimate and geography.”

Texture. Colour. Viscosity. Scent. All this before even tasting the honey, which can be as varied as wine in its flavour profile and mouthfeel. “When I first started, all I could think is, it’s sweet. I couldn’t possibly understand how I could taste anything beyond that,” Viktoria recalls. Even her extensive experience in the wine industry could not help her when it came to writing tasting notes for honeys. She looked to Italy, where researchers had developed a colour chart, connecting flavours and shades to nectar sources. In Bologna, three postgraduate students had written a paper on honey varietals. She read it avidly, together with a seminal book by Eva Crane, an English beekeeper and mathematician. “Dr Crane passed away in 2007, just when I started, but I knew by then that I wanted to focus on varietals – to bring the variety of flowers in nature into the jar.”

For many people – or at least, those who don’t yet frequent From Field and Flower – the concept of honey varietals is still an unfamiliar one. All the honey you see in the supermarket will have been blended, with the bigger companies blending honeys from hundreds of apiaries across Europe. These honeys are pasteurised: heated up to create a cohesive texture, and to eradicate any variations in taste. “The main thing is to create a consistent, low cost product,” explains Sam. “Any beneficial bacteria will be killed off by the heat – and you certainly won’t taste any variation.” That’s fine if you just want straight-up sweetness to cook with, say, but it’s of little interest to someone as steeped in the concept of terroir as Viktoria.

Different flowers yield different honeys just as different grapes yield different wines; individual apiaries are unique, just as single vineyards are. Their ‘beeroir’ cannot be replicated by an apiary 20km away, or even by the same apiary the following year. “Every season is a novelty to me,” beams Viktoria. Come harvest time, the honey is extracted, jarred and labelled to reflect its time and place. Viktoria extracts the honey from the frames with as little mechanical intervention as possible. “With experience I’ve found it affects the flavour slightly, and I don’t want to produce bland honey. We have 80 hives and that is the way I like it to be.”

Carefully, Viktoria closes up the hive. Some casualties are inevitable: “I cannot possibly stand here all day waiting for them all to move away from the edge, though I do try to shift as many as possible.” The bees themselves “don’t even think about it. They treat the hive as one organism, one body,” she continues – making it all the more remarkable that they know Viktoria by scent and, according to research just published in Germany, by sight. “The average bee lives for four to six weeks. It is like an inherited knowledge,” she marvels, as she calmly replaces the final frame and puts the lid on it. We make our way back to the trucks, peeling off the white, linen layers as we walk, and set off toward the processing unit next to Viktoria’s house in the countryside.

“It’s quite old fashioned,” she grins as, in food hygiene gear complete with clogs, we step into her shed-come-honey plant. On one side, honey frames are stacked ready for extraction. Next to that, stripped honeycombs lie seemingly abandoned in a sticky, craggy mound. The extractor sits in front of us. “She’s called Francesca because she’s from Italy, and she does things the way she wants to do them. Not the way we want,” Viktoria laughs, turning the machine onto its lowest setting. Francesca’s stainless-steel tummy rumbles as the centrifuge spins slowly, with the honey-filled frames attached to the central structure. “It’s very simple. They spin around, the honey hurtles out of the wax onto the walls, slides down to where this tap is and comes out.”

Viktoria stops Francesca, opens up a tap near the extractor’s feet, and smiles as we exclaim at the heavy stream of gold pouring smoothly out of it. “Again, again!” we cry, when the honey eventually slows to a trickle. Viktoria happily obliges, sending Francesca into another gentle spin. “There is lime tree honey in here. Can you smell it?” she says – and sure enough, when she opens the tap a distinct citrus scent hangs in the air. This variety is not for blending. Come tomorrow, it will be put into jars – unfiltered, because “removing those trace bits of pollen removes so much flavour” – and labelled with today’s date and the location of the apiary from whence it came.

The now-empty honeycombs, meanwhile, will be melted down for their wax. “I prefer the look and feel of timber frames, but the plastic offers a closed circuit,” Viktoria tells us. “We don’t have to send our wax away. We just melt it down overnight, roll it onto plastic frames to go back in the hive, and the bees can reuse it.” They can of course produce more wax from their glands, “but it’s hard work for the them. To make one kilo of wax they need to consume nine kilos of honey.”

She’s waiting for a cool night. We all are at this point in the summer, but it particularly matters for Viktoria in order for the wax to set on the frames, and for the creation of the pearl honey sold by From Field and Flower – an opaque, thick-set honey, the creaminess of which results from painstakingly stirring, for around 10 hours over the course of six or seven days. “For stirring, we need the honey to be at the perfect temperature. If it’s above 25C we have to halt the operation,” she says, “and that has been a challenge this year!”

They even contemplated stirring at night, “but no one wanted to do that,” smiles Viktoria. Later on, she shows us a basin of half-creamed honey, its contents ivory-white and steeped in scent. They stir by hand: too vigorous a stir would release the delicate aroma compounds. Unlike her other honeys, the pearl honey does have to be filtered for stray bits of pollen whose presence would prevent its transformation from liquid gold to dense, sweet cream. The creaming of honey to prevent it from crystallising is an old Scandinavian tradition, but Viktoria has over the past 12 years elevated the technique to new heights, resulting in the gloriously smooth product that she calls ‘pärlehonung’.

We taste it in the garden, alongside various other honeys from her apiaries in the centre of Malmo (“bees thrive in the city – they get such variety in the parks”), on organic farms, and of course from the one we visited. Last year’s pearl honey is velvety and delicate; the lime honey we saw coming out of Francesca is almost leaping with flavour; the urban honeys are as multi-faceted and complex as the environment that yielded them; and the dark, jammy heather honey is brooding and almost bitter-sweet. Their differences go beyond language – or at least, they go beyond my language. I am no more qualified to talk in detail about these honeys than I am to intrude upon a conversation between Swedes or Italians. I can taste them though – and I can, now I have seen it up close, appreciate the hard work both bees and beekeeper put into preserving these snapshots of nature’s inimitable, infinite variety.

“THERE ARE DISSERTATIONS TO BE WRITTEN ON THE SUBJECT OF THE IBERIAN BLACK PIG AND THE JAMÓN MADE FROM IT”

The cured meats of Spain can be broken down into two broad categories: muscle meats and sausages, with a sub or arguably third category of ‘soft and spreadable’. Most of the products are pork-based, though there’s a tendency towards certain cuts of beef and ox, too. All of which, I hear you screaming, is more or less the same as the traditional meats of Italy, France, Germany, Scandinavia and beyond – and indeed what we’ve already discussed so far in this series.

What makes charcutería quintessentially Spanish, then? Again, as with the other countries we’ve discussed, region and terroir are important to specific styles and specialities. We’ll touch on this a little bit below, and you should get chatting to the people carving the hams at the Brindisa counter for more detail.

For me, there are two things in particular that make many (not all, but many) of Spain’s cured meats stand out: paprika and the Iberian black pig.

Paprika

So much of Spain’s cured meat is dusted or rippled with paprika – the ground red spice made from dried and sometimes smoked sweet peppers.

Paprika is the defining ingredient of chorizo – one of those rare food products that bears its original, native-tongue label wherever in the world it is reproduced or consumed (and on the rare occasion a paprika-seasoned sausage is not called chorizo, then it’s still labelled a ‘Spanish sausage’).

Paprika is also, as we’ll see, used in and on a number of other Spanish cured meats. In fact, if you take jamón out of the equation, cured meats not seasoned with paprika are very much in the minority.

The Iberian black pig

There are dissertations to be written on the subject of the Iberian black pig (and indeed jamón made from it). At this level, perhaps we can simply say that this pig – and cross breeds of it – make superior cured meats because both the levels and particular qualities of the intramuscular fat appear nearly perfect for making rich, smooth-textured and creamy meats.

The pig’s fame is largely down to jamón produced in the central and southwestern regions and centres of Huelva, Córdoba, Extremadura, Salamanca and Seville. However, as jamón is merely the ham, or rear leg of a pig, there’s much more pork to go around. You can also find chorizo, plainer sausages, loin and more made from the rest of the carcass, and they also carry the same rich, smooth, creamy qualities as the ham.

When you see ‘Iberico’ on a menu or a label, that means the pig the product is made from is (or is a cross of) an Iberian black pig.

Jamón

As mentioned, jamón is made from the back leg of a pig. In that respect, it’s essentially the same product as Italian prosciutto – salted, larded and air-dried for between nine and 48 months. A key difference to the end-product is that whereas Italians slice their hams into wafer-thin handkerchiefs using a mechanical slicer, most Spanish hams are hand-carved. It has been suggested that this is largely because the Italian industry embraced machinery faster than the Spaniards. But there must also be something in the character of Spanish hams that they taste particularly good carved into thin squares.

The most iconic Spanish ham (and perhaps the single most iconic Spanish thing?!) is jamón ibérico.

As with the Iberian black pig used for this, there is much to be written – and not so much room for it here. In brief, then, the creme de la creme of Spanish jamónes are those that fall under the four classified grades of jamón ibérico. Diet, breed and living conditions determine which grade of jamón their meat will become, though the common theme of the highest quality (jamón ibérico de bellota) is that those pigs were fed on acorns.

Jamón ibérico differs in taste and texture depending not just on its breeding and feeding grade, but also the area the leg is reared and cured in, and the length of time it has been dried.

Clear as mud? Frankly, the best thing to do to clear this all up is to head to Brindisa to taste the three or four different hams they have been carving at any one time, decide which you like best (is it sweet, nutty, rich?), and take a pack of freshly carved meat home.

It should also be noted that other Spanish hams are available. Serrano ham, ‘mountain ham’ cured from anything other than an Iberian black pig, is less expensive, but often still of a good quality.

Other muscle meats

— Lomo: The loin of a pig. Whereas Italian cured loin tends to include a thick piece of back fat over the top (it looks much like back bacon or a bacon chop), Spanish lomo looks more like a lean cylinder of meat; the eye of the chop. Very often the lomo will be dusted with chorizo. Though the lack of a layer of fat might in theory lead to a particularly lean meat, the loins of Iberian black pigs are rippled with intramuscular fat, and so are still a joy to eat once cured and dried. In some regions – like Extremadura – two loins are placed together and encased like a sausage. This is known as ‘lomo doblado’.

— Belly, coppa: Cured belly (pancetta and bacon) and collar (coppa-style) meats do exist in Spain, though they’re not as quintessentially Spanish as other varieties mentioned here.

Sausages

— Chorizo: Not so much a type of sausage, more a genre: chorizo can be semi-cured (so need to be cooked), fully cured and dried, smoked, hot, spicy, sweet, super fatty or fairly lean, thinly sliced or thickly chunked, made from Iberian black pigs, or any other pig, and made all over Spain (and beyond). The thing that links them all is paprika. As with jamón, head to Brindisa and engross yourself in their rusty-coloured meat counter and fridges.

— Chistorra: A thin ‘snacking’ style of chorizo made in the Basque Country and Navarre region – perhaps areas traditionally suited to sausages that cure and dry quickly.

— Fuet: A hard, usually relatively thin and long sausage from Catalonia. Typically, the casing will be covered in a white mould. The meat is finely ground, dried to quite a firm texture, and characteristically porky, with just black pepper and a little garlic as the seasoning.

— Salchichón: Also relatively finely ground pork, and generally flavoured only with black pepper and garlic. But a slightly wider sausage than fuet. Sometimes smoked.

— Morcon: Difficult to know whether this should be labelled a sausage or a muscle meat, such is the size of meat pieces pressed within the sausage-shaped casing. It’s an Extremaduran speciality, so made with the pork of Iberian black pig, and laced with a little paprika too.

— Morcilla: Spanish blood sausage, often (but not always) bulked up with short grain rice and usually more heavily spiced than a classic British black pudding. Huge variety across regions. Generally an ingredient to be cooked, though pre-cooked sausages and pastes exist too.

Spreadable

— Sobrasada: A fully cured, spreadable style of cured meat, similar to Italian nduja, except that the redness of sobrasada comes from typically mild paprika rather than fresh and fiery Calabrian chillies. Spread on toast or crackers, or use to flavour tomato or cream sauces.

Non-pork-based meats

 – Cecina: Some Spanish cured meats are non-pork based. Perhaps the best-known is cecina, which is cured, air-dried and sometimes smoked beef butchered from the muscles in the hind leg of a cow. It’s usually quite dry and intensely flavoured and needs to be sliced very finely. Northwest Spain is a particular producer of cecina – an area, as it happens, where Iberian pigs are not farmed. This area also produces chorizo using both beef (de vaca) and ox (de buey).

The ultimate board of Spanish charcutería

If you plan on compiling a Spanish meat board, it’d be worth trying to balance the amount of paprika and also the particular richness of Spanish charcutería, so as not to blast away your taste buds. I’d personally limit the board to just three different meats: perhaps a lomo, a chorizo and some Cecina – plus a separate plateful of jamón ibérico de bellota, served at body temperature.

Where to shop for Spanish charcutería at Borough Market

At Brindisa, of course! An emporium of Spanish produce and the importers of the finest charcutería.

Read Ed’s recipe for hot smoked chorizo croquetas.

“A PIG’S SENSE OF SMELL IS SEVEN TIMES MORE DEVELOPED THAN A DOG’S, BUT YOU CAN’T TRAIN IT NOT TO EAT THE TRUFFLES!”

Interview: Clare Finney

Are the truffles you source farmed or wild?

Both. At Tartufaia, our Australian truffles are farmed – truffle farms in Australia are a relatively recent thing but have done remarkably well – as are most of the ones we get from Spain. That said, the very concept of truffle farms is a grey area, because they are so unreliable. The truffle, which grows underground around the roots of a tree, is a very weak fungus, so other fungi are prone to take over. You can’t use fungicides or pesticides to stop other fungi establishing themselves, as that would kill the truffles as well. This is good in that it keeps producers in check, but it does make it all very unpredictable: 60 per cent of truffle farms fail, and you can’t farm white truffles at all, so we are also reliant on the natural woodlands. Eighty per cent of the truffles we get from Italy are wild.

Which do you prefer?

When the wild truffles are good, they are better – but it is hard to have consistency, which is what chefs are after. Personally, I like the wild ones. The farms are sustainable in the sense that you are keeping a patch of woodland and irrigating it, but it is still a monoculture and that is not the best way to go about faming. If they are planting oak, they are planting all oak. If they are planting poplar, it is all poplar. Moreover, they will have cleared natural woodland in order to do this. With wild truffles, you are making natural woodland work for you, just as it is. It’s fenced to prevent wild boars, but no trees or plants are removed.

Are pigs still used to hunt wild truffles?

There are a few people in France and Turkey who still work with pigs. Their sense of smell is seven times more developed than a dog, but you can’t train a pig not to eat the truffles. You have to keep them on a leash, and physically pull them back. Dogs can be trained not to eat the truffles they find. Of course, this makes trained dogs very expensive – up to 10 or 12 grand for a six-month-old puppy. There’s an old joke in truffle areas that suppliers look after their dogs better than their wives.

How do you sniff out the best truffle suppliers?

In most food businesses, suppliers find you. When I first got into the truffle business it was the other way around – it was all about the connections. It wasn’t a matter of money; you had to know the families and the people involved on a personal level. My first close supplier, with whom I started in 2006, was in his sixties. He’d supplied the same families for 40 years, and each one was entitled to a quota. The only reason we were able to get in there was because one of his customers died and his sons weren’t interested in the truffle business, so their quota was up for grabs. My dad was a friend of this guy, so he was able to slip in there. In some areas this is still the case, particularly in France, but it’s been changing as more money has come into the industry and black truffle farms in Spain and Australia have proved so successful.

Are truffles easier to source than they once were, then?

At a certain point money does start to talk. It is much easier, especially for us, as we’re established now and people know us. From now until the white truffle season starts in September, suppliers will be approaching us every week, but you have to be careful who you work with because 80 per cent of new suppliers go bust within a couple of months. People see it as an opportunity to make money quickly, then find they can’t manage supply and demand: they buy too much, and waste money, or they fail to meet the demands of their buyers. The hardest part of our job is keeping a supply chain at a certain standard, because our customers are used to a certain quality. Having a good relationship with your suppliers is still so important: with perishable products, at those prices, there is a certain level of trust involved.

How do you judge the quality of truffles?

Sometimes there are worms in truffles. That’s a normal thing for a fungus, but in the hours between being boxed and being delivered that worm can travel from truffle to truffle – so you go from one damaged truffle to 10. In Australia, suppliers scan each truffle through a machine: it’s a 48-hour trip, so they need to be sure. Once they’re here, I look at the shape and the size – mainly the shape. The rounder the better – and the more expensive – as being round, a truffle takes longer to lose weight from evaporation than if it is bobbly and has a greater surface area. It’s hard to find round wild truffles because of the roots and stones around the trees. 

How do you get truffles from Italy to Borough Market? The suppliers go out at sunrise with their dogs. They get back by 10 or 11am, then go through the process of checking them and brushing most of the soil off, without getting them wet. We have someone in Italy who goes through, selecting the truffles before they are sent. They are shipped at 4pm and I get them here by 11am the next day. They can’t sit in a warehouse because they’d lose weight, so the logistics are tricky. The black truffles are a bit more robust, but the white loses 10 per cent of its weight every 24 hours. It is highly stressful, especially for those guys who deal with large quantities of truffles – you can see it in their faces by the end of the season. They are people on the edge.

“THERE IS AN OLD SAYING ABOUT NATIVE OYSTERS: THE FIRST THING THEY THINK ABOUT IS DYING”

Interview: Viel Richardson

Richard Haward of Richard Haward’s Oysters is the seventh generation of his family to cultivate oysters in the River Blackwater, on Mersea Island, Essex. He sells the Colchester native oysters that have been harvested from the area’s creeks for thousands of years, as well as hardier Pacific oysters – also known as rock oysters – which were introduced there in the late sixties. Richard doesn’t consider himself an oyster ‘farmer’: “There are some oyster farms that use specially constructed pens and oyster bags, but our oysters live on the river bed, so it would be more accurate to say that we cultivate oysters,” he explains.

What does oyster cultivation involve?

The deep waters where the oysters spawn are often not ideal for their further development – the shell grows but they don’t fatten up, so you don’t get much meat. The flesh can be very thin and watery. So, after they’ve reached a certain size we move them to oyster beds situated in creeks that run into the main river. This seems to be the environment that produces the best quality oysters. A lot of what we do is about making sure the oysters are in the right part of the river to thrive. For that, you have to know the river intimately.

Do you treat both species of oyster the same way?

The two are very different. There is an old saying about native oysters: “The first thing they think about is dying.” They don’t like too much heat, cold or silt. The water here is brackish – a mixture of seawater and fresh water – so the salt levels can change. Native oysters struggle if the salt levels fall too much, so we have to monitor the salinity.

We also have to ensure they remain under water all the time. The river is tidal, and if they are left exposed on the foreshore at low tide, a cold snap can kill them. Rock oysters are much hardier and can cope with most changes, but – like all oysters – too much silt is bad for them. Oysters feed by filtering nutrients out of the water that flows over them, and high silt levels can make this difficult.

How do you harvest them?

We bring them up by dredging. We return the ones that are too small to the beds. We separate any that have stuck together, because oysters that have fused together will not develop properly. This is also when we move oysters between locations if we need to, and check for pests. We go out four or five days a week, so we develop a feel for the condition of the beds and we can spot any issues that are developing.

What pests do you have?

The biggest predator is the starfish. We kill any that are brought up, which sounds harsh, but it is the only effective and responsible way to control their numbers. We also remove any oysters that show signs of ‘oyster drill’ – a snail that bores into the oyster and kills them.

Isn’t dredging bad for the beds?

It is important to understand that there are different levels of dredging. We use very light dredgers. These skim across the surface of the seabed and don’t gouge into it in the way that heavier dredgers do. In fact, the way we dredge actually helps to maintain the riverbed. Recent studies have found that areas that are being worked for oyster cultivation have greater biodiversity than areas that are not. Regular light dredging helps to maintain low silt levels – it stirs the silt up, allowing it to be carried away by the tide – and this helps create a good habitat for other marine life, as well as for oysters.

Do you have to do anything else to maintain the beds?

Not really. The main thing is to stop silt from building up. If we stopped dredging, the silt would build up surprisingly quickly. Other than that, we just leave the river to its own devices.

What happens to the oysters after they’ve been harvested?

They are placed in baskets and covered with wet sacks to keep them cool and damp. When we get ashore we wash and grade them, then the oysters go into depuration tanks to flush out any toxins they might have picked up while feeding. The river water flowing through these tanks has been placed under intense ultraviolet light, which purifies the water while leaving it rich in nutrients. The oysters are cleaned as they feed.

Another old oysterman saying is: “Treat your oysters like eggs.” They are living creatures, so if you throw them about they will get stressed. Careful handling is so important. Stressed oysters don’t feed properly, making the purification process less effective.

Is there an oyster season?

Not for rock oysters, but we can only sell native oysters from 4th August to 14th May. Natives are still in very short supply. There are regeneration projects aimed at building stocks up, but that will take several years.

Are your oyster beds in good condition at the moment? Yes, they are. If we are responsible, they should remain so for the eighth generation of Hawards, who are already continuing the tradition of working the oyster beds.

“WITH MOST SPICES, AS SOON AS YOU OPEN A SAMPLE PACK, YOUR NOSE WILL TELL YOU HOW GOOD IT IS”

Interview: Clare Finney

How do you go about selecting the raw spices you use in your blends?

Getting the right spices is key to what we do. Take cumin seeds, for example: at Spice Mountain we only buy them from a particular supplier who specialises in cumin seeds; he doesn’t deal in any other spices. He offers us several gradings of cumin seeds – because not all cumin is the same. Its quality depends on its essential oil content, its size and its shape. The oilier the seeds, the fresher the taste will be. The highest grade we sell either as whole or ground cumin, but the second grade is good for mixing into spice blends. It’s like making juice out of misshapen apples – while the taste is extremely important, those buying blended spice mixes are less concerned about the size and shape of the original seeds.

How can you tell if a spice is of sufficiently high quality?

With most spices, as soon as you open a sample pack, your nose will tell you how good it is. Some spices you may need to bite on as well: a little bite of cumin, coriander or fennel seeds will tell you if they’re fresh or old. With those spices that aren’t so easy to smell, like mustard seeds, it’s a matter of looking at the spec sheet, which comes with each sample and shows the oil content of the seed and various other results from lab testing.

There are visual clues, too: at the moment we have Sri Lankan cinnamon sticks on the stall; they’re really small and thin, which means the quality is far greater than the bigger ones that customers often assume are better. Cinnamon bark is shaved off the tree and left to dry and curl naturally. The producers then layer the sheets by hand and roll them like cigars. The tighter the rolls, the better and more intense the flavour will be. If it’s a big, thick roll, it’s too loose.

Who do you buy spices from?

Most spices I buy from suppliers. It is not realistic to buy direct from the farmers. It is not like sourcing vegetables in the UK: I can’t just buy cumin from one farm – or if I did, I’d have to buy it by the tonne. I do, though, insist that the spices I buy have been sourced from the particular countries or regions that do them best. Our turmeric, for example, comes the Gujarat region of India and our lemongrass comes from Indonesia. We have built very close relationships with the importers. We’re going to be hit a lot harder by Brexit than people imagine, because the main European hubs for spice suppliers are still in Holland and Germany.

How do you get ideas for new spice blends?

Through travelling, reading and listening to our customers. Our customers are hugely varied in background, and also eat out a lot! We get lots of feedback and suggestions as to blends and variations we could make. It’s a constant conversation.

How do you devise the recipes for your blends?

A big part of what we do is trial and error, but there’s a lot of knowledge too. I don’t want to be vain, but I’ve learnt a great deal through sampling and selling spices for so many years, and I’ve developed a real feel for the proportions you need, particularly of certain strong spices. Cumin and coriander, for example, are sort of brother and sister spices, in a way. Cumin is a strong, domineering spice and coriander has a distinct flavour that some people really don’t like. The two tend to work beautifully together, but only if you get the balance right.

How important is the roasting process?

The balancing of certain spices – including cumin and coriander – often happens when you roast them. It’s then that the flavours really amalgamate. Before roasting you can taste them separately, but somehow afterwards it’s like the two spices have joined forces to create a new one. You can really taste the effects of roasting on Ethiopian blends: the spices are roasted for a long time, which means they develop a gorgeous, smoky flavour. But I don’t always roast spices, and sometimes I mix roasted and non-roasted. We rarely roast fennels seeds, for example – fennel is so lovely, it really doesn’t need anything doing to it. We’re making a Goan curry blend at the moment, and the challenge is making something gentle, mellow and woody, but with a nice sweetness. Powdered fennel seeds provide sweetness, cinnamon is sweet but woody, so those two seem to work well together.

How do you test your blends?

When we’re creating a new blend, we will use it to make a particular dish a number of times to check that it works consistently. Even after a blend has been perfected, though, it is really important not to neglect the testing, because the profile of the spices can change. The heat of the chilli can vary, for example – we might get a batch that is not so spicy – and we see turmeric changing all the time. Sometimes it’s the most beautiful shade of bright yellow, other times it’s darker. Each time that happens, we have to retest the blend, as the taste of the turmeric tends to vary with the colour. It helps that I use the blends in my own cooking – especially the Mauritian curry, Ethiopian and shichimi togarashi blends – and that my partner tries everything I make!

Are there any spice blends you can’t make?

We have had a lot of people asking about the merkén spice blend recently – it’s a smoky, peppy blend from Chile – but the main ingredient in that is aji cacho de cabra, a hot smoked chilli, and you can’t reliably get this chilli yet in the UK. Sometimes with spice blends you can cheat a little by substituting one specific ingredient with another if the profile is similar enough, but you can’t in the case of merkén. The chilli makes its flavour. Without it, it’s not merkén.

“MUSIC IS FRANCESCO’S PASSION, BUT HE ALSO LOVES FOOD. IF HE HAS SOME NDUJA AND PASTA WITH A GUITAR NEARBY, HE IS HAPPY”

Interviews: Viel Richardson / Image: Christopher L Proctor

Giuseppe (right) on Francesco (left)

I first met Francesco back home in Calabria, in southern Italy. I had jointly inherited an abandoned cinema and was working to bring it back to life as an artistic hub. Francesco’s band heard that there might be some rehearsal space there, so he approached me in the street and asked if they could use it. At the time they only played covers, but I was building a creative space, so I told them they could only be part of it if they came back with some original material. Three months later, to their credit, they did. We became friends. At the time, he and his band were the only ones in the town who really connected with what I was trying to do, and that gave me respect for them. We have all become a bit of a family.

Francesco was hanging around the town playing music, with no real plan for the future – most of the work for the locals was as crew on passenger or merchant ships – so when I arrived at a position where I could hire a second person at the Borough Market De Calabria stall, freeing me up to make more trips back to Calabria, I suggested that he join me.

Francesco loves London, and he loves the social interactions at the Market. He is a very friendly, sociable person. That is one reason I think we work so well together: we complement each other. I am always nice to the customers, of course, but I am not the most outgoing person – Francesco is, and that’s good for me and great for the stall.

Music is Francesco’s real passion, but he also loves food. If he has some nduja and pasta with a guitar nearby, he is happy. One thing I know he really loves is the raclette sold by Kappacasein – he could happily have that every day.

Francesco on Giuseppe

Giuseppe is knowledgeable about so many things. When I first heard of him, it was because of the abandoned cinema. He was doing all the work by himself, which is amazing – it was an enormous task. My band spent a lot of time there, so we got to know each other very well. When he suggested I come to London to work for him, I thought, why not: I had learned a lot from him in my time at the cinema, so the thought of being here in London really appealed.

When we are not at work, he sometimes hangs out with me and my new band, the Gulps. Giuseppe spends a lot of time at cultural events, so we often go with him to small pubs and venues to see music. He is always looking for something new. When he finds someone he likes, he might invite them for a residency at the space back in Calabria, especially if they want to do something experimental. Some really interesting people have spent time there.

We also like hanging around at home with the band, just talking, laughing and playing music. Giuseppe has been a huge influence on our music. He is always pushing us to be more inventive – not to settle for the easy answer. We are releasing an EP later this year produced by Youth, who was the bassist in the band Killing Joke. We would never have got this far had it not been for Giuseppe pushing us to express ourselves.

Giuseppe is a very good cook. We will buy things from the Market and he will come around to my house to cook for the band. He is a firm believer in natural and organic foods, and that is all he sells here at De Calabria. He is passionate about supporting people who make their produce in ways that are good for the land. Everything you see here on the stall, Giuseppe has gone out and found the producer. He will make trips alone, deep into the mountains where many people don’t often travel, to find new products. Either he will have heard of someone making something special or he will just go into a region and see what he can find. He sees how everything is produced and only brings it to the stall if he is happy about the way it is made. It is in his blood: he is from a farming family and that was how they farmed. For him, producing really good food and caring for the environment are one and the same.

“THE WHOLE PROCESS TAKES SIX OR SEVEN HOURS AND, PROVIDED EVERYTHING HAS GONE TO PLAN, THAT’S IT”

Interview & illustration: Ed Smith

I’ve been the head distiller at East London Liquor Company since we were founded five years ago. We have a range of three different gins: our signature, everyday house gin, and then two premium ones. We also produce vodka and, since 2015, whisky, which is rare in London – ours was the first whisky to be made in London in over a century.

Spirits are made through the distillation of alcohol and water, for which you need a still. We have four stills: one we use for gins and vodka; two are for the whisky process; and the fourth is a smaller one that we use in an R&D lab set-up. To keep things clear, I’ll focus here on the process of making gin.

Distillation is the separation of two different liquids with differing boiling points. Water boils at 100C. Pure ethanol, on the other hand, boils at about 78C. The basic premise goes that if you heat a mixture of alcohol and water to above 78C but below 100C, the alcohol will boil off and condense elsewhere, while the water stays behind. Because the flavour compounds in botanicals are soluble in alcohol but not water, they are carried in the alcohol vapour and, once condensed, they flavour the spirit.

For gin we start with a strong, near-pure alcohol, add water and botanicals, and then begin distilling. What we end up with is a concentrated gin – the distillate – which is about 82-83% ABV. We then add ‘reverse osmosis’ filtered water to bring the spirit to bottling strength (45-47%). The whole process takes six or seven hours and, provided everything has gone to plan, that’s it. After a short period of resting, the gin can be sold. We use the still twice a day, producing about 600 bottles of gin at a time.

Our gin still is made by Holstein, a German company. If we’re getting technical, it’s a ‘hybrid pot-column still’. The ‘pot’ element is essentially a 450-litre kettle, which is heated by a steam jacket. The ‘column’ allows us to control how concentrated the spirit is when we collect it as it condenses. The still is made from copper. Aside from looking great and being a good conductor of heat, the main benefit is that unwanted bi-products of fermentation such as sulphites and sulphates, which have a negative effect on flavour, react with the copper to leave a greenish-bluish-black compound on the inside of the still. This shows that the impurities have been left behind and we get a cleaner, better-tasting gin as a result.