Attention Oaklanders: How to eat a pig!

January 27, 2004

Anyone interested in REAL sausage ...

An intelligent and articulate man with a shyness rare among today's star chefs,

he showed me a model of a pig's skeleton, citing the Latin name of each bone,

and learnedly discussed the action of enzymes and the changes in pH that take

place during curing and aging. It was way over my head, but he mastered the

chemistry in courses he took in meat sciences at Iowa State.

For the moment, Mr. Bertolli makes sausage once a week, Tuesdays and Wednesdays,

in batches of 70 to 75 pounds, but he has been laying plans for a

10,000-square-foot factory in the Bay Area to manufacture pork products on a

larger scale. When it opens late this summer, it will turn out a dozen kinds of

fresh and dry-cured sausages, for sale to the public and to wholesalers in the

area.

Everything, he vows, will still be tied by hand, using linen twine, just the way

it is done now, and only pure natural casings will be used.

AS soon as he had dealt with the hindquarter of the pig on the day of my visit,

Mr. Bertolli set to making coppa. He cut into the pig, six ribs or so back from

the head, lifted out a loin, trimmed away much of the fat and shaped the meat

into a compact, beautifully marbled cylinder. Each pig yields only two of these

very choice pieces.

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