Ingredient of the Year: Charcuterie

By Joie Alvaro Kent

NOT SO LONG AGO, most people shrugged at the word charcuterie; cured meats meant nothing more than Oscar Meyer bologna for lunchbox sandwiches or pepperoni topping on takeout pizza. Today, charcuterie—born from the need to preserve meat in the absence of refrigeration—has far surpassed its rustic origins to become, over the past year, almost de rigeur in our city’s finest restaurants. And in the kitchens of these fine restaurants, chefs are experimenting with house-made charcuterie, which, if you’re lucky, may end up on your plate.

Jean-Yves Benoit of Mistral makes his own rillettes and pâté en crépine for a duck platter. At Hamilton Street Grill, Neil Wyles uses a venison sausage flavoured with rosemary and juniper berries in the mixed grill. At Victoria’s Paprika Bistro, George Szasz varies his charcuterie offerings weekly; standouts include foie gras torchon and merguez sausage. Aurora Bistro’s Jeff Van Geest offers an Ocean Wise take on charcuterie with his gravlax-style white spring salmon pastrami, flavoured with fennel and coriander and cold smoked with apple wood. And then there’s Parkside’s ethereal foie gras parfait with white truffle butter, a dish with cult status among local foodies.

“One thing that intrigues me about charcuterie is the alchemy and science behind the whole thing,” says Parkside owner/chef Andrey Durbach, “where you take a couple of products like your meat, your salt and air and time, where the thing actually becomes more than the sum of its parts.” He speaks about the painstaking method of making coppa; sliced ever so thinly and served with charantais melon, Durbach laments that the end product of four-and-a-half months’ labour disappears over the short span of two services. But this is the jewel-box nature of artisanal charcuterie: a slow, meticulous process requiring much time and great craftsmanship, executed with pride and care, resulting in a taste experience meant to be savoured as mindfully as the process itself.

For John van der Lieck, “food is how it connects, how it’s grown, how things are paired, how foods are generated,” and he’s fascinated with the “symbiotic arrangements that make foods such as fermented meats.” As a fifth-generation master sausage maker, his passion is manifested in the 300-plus varieties of charcuterie produced by his Oyama Sausage Company. Vancouverites flock to his Granville Island shop and queue three deep on weekends to purchase (and sample) morsels of porcine delight, like the decadent Strasbourg terrine with pistachios, black truffles and a heart of foie gras, or the smoked Suffolk bacon cured with treacle and beer. Van der Lieck’s prosciutto is cured with nothing but sea salt and made from pasture-raised English black pigs, a heritage variety that van der Lieck has been working with local farms to breed.

The runaway success of Salt Tasting Room (Best New Informal) has been a barometer for gauging charcuterie’s popularity. Owner Sean Heather sagely predicted that Vancouverites would embrace a European-style wine bar serving only artisanal cheeses and cured meats. But instead of creating charcuterie in house, he opened Salt as a chef-less restaurant, featuring products from top-quality suppliers. It’s standing room only on most nights as people nosh on J N & Z Deli’s smoked beef tenderloin, coppa from Moccia’s Italian Market, Mike Vito’s corned beef, wild boar head cheese from Oyama and Parkside’s foie gras parfait.

Heather knows a good thing when he sees it, and the positive buzz is fueling his future plans: expanding into the Salt Cellar by September; announcing a second location of Salt this summer; opening a 150-square-foot refrigerated retail store dubbed Snout (carrying everything on Salt’s menu board); and launching a seafood version of the tasting room (Sea Salt) sometime within the next year. It’s dizzying to say the least, but it’s a reflection of the foothold that artisanal charcuterie has in our collective dining consciousness. So long, Oscar Meyer.

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