<< Back to Ingredients LA QUERCIA ARTISAN SALUMI
Only a few types of Italian salumi are exported, so either travel frequently to Italy to get your fix or rely on memories. Now there are great alternatives and they are made in Iowa. Kathy and Herb Eckhouse lived in Parma, Italy, for 3 1/2 years learning the process for making prosciutto, culatello, guanciale, speck, pancetta and other salumi. There is no better locale in Italy than Parma for learning this culinary art. They devote full-time to making premium quality American salumi. Working with special breeders who raise the pigs according to their high standards, the Eckhouse's work from the inside out. It is the pig and his environment, healthful feed, crunchy acorns which pigs adore, and a good quality life, that ultimately provides great salumi. Kathy and Herb control the entire process of trimming, salting,
dry-curing and aging to make exceptional products. Capture that Italian essence in your cooking with
La Quercia's salumi.

Heirloom Breed Culaccia - For anyone who has tasted ruby slices of culatello from Emilia-Romagna, and longed for more, La Quercia provides a superb variation called Culaccia. Made from the rear muscle of Berkshire or Kurobuta pigs, they use a special dry-cure and omit the flavoring with spices and wine used in making traditional culatello. The resulting Culaccia transports you back to Italy. The aroma is nutty and makes you hungry, the beautiful deep, garnet color will remind you of the salumerias, and that full, round, sweet flavor...you might even sing an aria!

Guanciale - The cheek. This cut adds distinctive flavor and texture to a dish, especially when making a tomato-based sauce such as all'Amatriciana or alla Matriciana, or Spaghetti alla Carbonara. In many recipes and restaurants, bacon is substituted often, but the flavor and texture of the sauce is never the same. With guanciale, it is the layering of meat between fat and collagen that gives a silkiness to sauces that mere bacon can never deliver.

Organic Pancetta Americana, Green Label - Unlike most other pancetta made in America, La Quercia Pancetta Americana - Green Label, is ready to eat and requires no cooking. Nitrites, nitrates or their vegetable-based substitutes are never used, no injections or chemicals either. Only organic pork, sea salt and organic spices in a dry cure are used, with no fermentation. Often commercial pancetta requires cooking, is quite thin and consequently rolled up to look like a jelly-roll; La Quercia produces flat pancetta, called pancetta tesa, making it more practical and easier to cut, wrap foods, slice. Aged with the skin on for better flavor, simply remove the skin then use. Pure, white, creamy, clean-tasting fat with a bit of meat, yes fat. And it's luscious.