Home Grown: A celebration of local culinary enterprise

Armandino Batali, Conquering the Pig

Pity the pig, reviled as a filthy glutton in our language and our literature. Cooks know better. They praise the pig, revere it as the embodiment of everything delicious.

But fresh pork spoils quickly. It needs to be cooked and eaten before it decomposes, breaks down under the assault of micro-enzymes, or else preserved by some means. Refrigeration slows decay, freezing kills unwanted bacteria. Man has long preserved his food in other ways as well: smoking, air drying, sweetening and, since ancient times, salting.

Simply put, the harmful bacteria cannot live in a salty environment. But the process of salting has many variables and success takes both a scientist and an artisan.

Armandino Batali is both. After an engineering career at Boeing, he spent the first years of his retirement learning both the craft and science of curing meat. "If at first you succeed, hide your astonishment," he says.

Restaurants always want something new, says Armandino. The worst offender, he says, is his own son, the larger-than-life restaurateur Mario (Iron Chef, Babbo, Eataly, etc.), who relentlessly seeks innovation. Armandino, on the other hand, doesn't want to be trendy. Rigorous process control (the engineering background!) in the service of tradition. And tradition in the service of family. Today, his daughter Gina and son-in-law Brian d'Amato do the heavy lifting for the storefront deli, Salumi, and its online marketplace, SalumiCuredMeats.com. Armandino himself only shows up on Thursdays.

One hundred pounds of meat can make 50 salamis, for example, but a 20-pound pork leg only yields four or five pieces of coppa. And coppa is (relatively) easy. Chorizo is complex. Finocchioni is complex (when you can even get the fennel pollen that provides the essential seasoning). There's a lot of chemistry (checking pH levels and humidity, to determine stability and edibility). Green and blue molds are no-nos; white mold is okay.

Salumi's pigs are local, many of them raised at Skagit River Ranch in Sedro Woolley, where the livestock are pasture-fed on nuts, grass and grain. But Salumi's mail-order business requires a steady supply of pigs, as many as 100 a week, so the company now taps into a network of farmers who subscribe to the ideals of the Slow Food movement, in particular, Newman Farm in Missouri. Salumi prizes animals with more heavily marbled fat, juicier and richer tasting than most pork. The Berkshire pigs that he buys fit the bill for Salumi's dry curing processes and produce a better texture, flavor and consistency. Praise the pigs, indeed!

It's worth noting that Armandino did his apprenticeship in Tuscany, with an opera-singing, Dante-quoting butcher named Dario Cecchini. I went to his shop one day a couple of years ago and said I was from Seattle. "Armandino!!" he exclaimed, hugging me. Any messages for Seattle? "Si," Cecchini shouted enthusiastically. "Eat! More! Meat!"

Martin Barrett, Spreading Good with Every Glass

Wine, nectar of the gods, is what the elites drink, an expensive indulgence for snobs. Martin Barrett has heard it all. He's a wine guy, former owner of Cana's Feast in Oregon, now living in Seattle and running inner-city social welfare programs.

Over a glass of wine one evening with his longtime friend Monte Regier--a human resources manager who'd just returned from a stint on a hospital ship in Liberia--the talk turned to the contrast between Africa's grinding poverty and America's pockets of poverty in a land of abundance. Barrett realized that for a dollar a day he could feed a hungry kid. Not in some distant land but here at home, where he knew well that there are too many hungry kids. "This glass of wine," he said, "could feed a kid."

And so was born the concept of Sozo (a Greek word that suggests rescue), a unique project that shares the revenue from wine sales with local food banks.

Barrett understood that Sozo had to start with excellent wines, "but the last thing the industry needs at this point is another new winery." Yet, there's a lot of good juice out there, languishing, begging for a good home. Tasting tank samples around Woodinville that seemed to have some potential, Barrett and Regier discovered the talents of Cheryl Barber Jones, the former winemaker for Chateau Ste. Michelle, now a freelance consultant. She began working her "magic," blending stray lots so that the sum was greater than its parts.

In its first year, Sozo released six or seven wines, whites like riesling and pinot gris; reds like pinot noir, tempranillo, a Rhone blend, a Bordeaux blend, in addition to special bottlings for the Rotary Club. So far, so good. In fact, the Rhone blend was named best of class at the Los Angeles International Wine & Spirits Competition and the Bordeaux blend won a gold medal; priced at $120, it sold out.

"Cheryl's crafted some amazing wines," Barrett says. So the "cause" is a bonus. There's a number in the lower right hand corner of the wine label, the number of food bank meals that the sale of the bottle will generate. Not a guilt-inducing "instead of" admonition that you could have made a donation instead of buying the bottle, but a satisfying "in addition to." Five meals for the riesling, 25 for the Bordeaux.

The biggest supporters have been local restaurants, over 70 at last count, from swanky spots like Canlis to neighborhood eateries like Magnolia's Mondello. There's no mention on the list that there's anything special about the wines, but each restaurant names its own charity (Canlis picked the None Will Perish foundation; Mondello named the Ballard Food Bank). Sozo writes the check, and the restaurant mails it to the beneficiary.

So far, the Sozo project has generated close to 100,000 meals for hungry kids. "People who work in the private sector think we're crazy to be giving away our profits. Yet the idealists in the non-profit world probably didn't have the discipline and analytical skills to make this happen." Barrett told me. "With Sozo, we seem to have created the best of both worlds."

Ronald Holden is a Seattle-based journalist who specializes in food, wine and travel. He has worked for KING TV, Seattle Weekly, and Chateau Ste. Michelle. His blog is www.Cornichon.org and he has recently published a new book "Home Grown Seattle: 101 True Tales of Local Food & Drink"

March 2015