• Why should I buy La Quercia prosciutto instead of Italian or Spanish?
  
  
  • First and foremost because it’s delicious! Star chefs like Mario Batali, Emeril Lagasse, Wolfgang Puck, and Martha Stewart choose it for their restaurants and homes. Top food and restaurant critics say it’s better than any Italian prosciutto you can get in the USA. And Cook’s Illustrated did a taste test that rated the “newcomer from Iowa” as the “hands down winner vs the Italians Prosciutto di Parma and Prosciutto di San Daniele.”
    
  • All La Quercia cured meats are made with humanely raised pork that is not treated with non-therapeutic doses of antibiotics. Except for the most costly exceptions, Italian and Spanish producers cannot make traceable animal production claims.
    
  • La Quercia cured meats are made with US pork in the USA, close to where the animals are raised. This minimizes the carbon footprint.

 

 

 

 

• What’s different about La Quercia artisan cured meats?
  
  
  • La Quercia salts, dries and ages meat so that the heritage breed pork we use expresses its special qualities and “terroir."
    
  • La Quercia was the first company to offer salumi (dry cured meats) made with organic pork and purebred Berkshire pork. It offered the first organic prosciutto (La Quercia Prosciutto Green Label) and breed specific prosciutto (La Quercia Rossa Berkshire Prosciutto) available in the USA. Our Tamworth Smoked Pancetta is the only ready to eat, uncooked bacon in the USA, made with no nitrates or nitrite or vegetable substitutes.
    
  • La Quercia uses traditional dry curing—drying the meat to make it safe to age, so it doesn’t need nitrates, nitrites, vegetable substitutes, or any preservatives.  Ingredients are either pork and sea salt or pork, sea salt and spices—nothing else. 

 

 

 

 

• What do you mean by “Cured Meat Varietals”?
  
  
  • From our experience working with different breeds of pork and different farming systems, we’ve learned that dry cured meat is like wine. Just as grape varietals like Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot are different from one another, and each will age to develop its own distinctive flavor and aroma, so Berkshire pork and Tamworth pork when they are dry cured develop their own distinctive flavor, texture and aroma profiles and are different from one another. Likewise, different growing areas and animal husbandry systems have a similar type of influence—Cabernet Sauvignon from California varies from that grown in the Bordeaux region of France.
    
  • La Quercia is the first producer of dry cured meats in the USA to working with identified special breeds and growing areas to develop and highlight these differences.  We select the breeds and growing areas we prefer to offer the best eating experience.

 

 

 

 

• Why does your prosciutto look different from any other?
  
  
  • When we started La Quercia, we wanted to learn from customers what they liked and didn’t like about the prosciutto they were buying.  We learned that they liked their prosciutto drier; they liked it less salty, and more richly flavored.  And they didn’t like all the trimming and waste.  Because of how we cut the meat before salting, we can deliver improvements for all four of these.
    
  • We remove the shank so that our customer receives 90% sliceable product, not 70% like a whole piece prosciutto from Italy or other North American producers.  This means that they have less freight and waste.

 

 

 

 

• If I have a piece of La Quercia Artisan cured meat, how should I take care of it?
  
  
  • We recommend that you keep it refrigerated to maintain quality—this is not necessary for safety, but the fat will stay in better condition.
    
  • The meat will not go “bad,” even if it gets mold on it. But it will oxidize, so we recommend sealing it as best you can from air—tight plastic wrap or, if you have a vacuum sealing machine, a vacuum package.
    
  • If the meat does get mold on it, you can just clean the mold off and eat the rest.

 

 

 

 

• What is La Quercia’s “style” of Artisan Cured Meats?
  
  
  • We work very hard to buy the best quality pork—all of the meat we buy comes from humanely raised (no confinement systems, no non-therapeutic antibiotics, deep bedding, room to socially congregate, access to the out of doors) pork—this is under 1% of the pork supply. So we want to highlight the flavor of this very high quality meat.
    
  • When we add spices to or smoke any of our dry cured meats, we try to do so with a “light hand” to complement the natural aged flavor, not overwhelm it.  Our spices are generally organic, and if we smoke something it is with real applewood smoke, never a smoke flavoring.
    
  • We use salt to help us dry the meat, but we try to minimize it, so that it’s not too salty and the natural umami and sweetness of the aged meat can be prominent.