Slow Food and Fast Cars…Parma (the Ham)
Not all the fast cars we saw on this road trip were in the Ferrari Museum. With Mattias our tour guide at the wheel, our 7 passenger touring van might have given even the fanciest sports car a good “run for the money”! Like so many other Italian drivers, Mattias seemed incapable of patiently following the car ahead at a reasonable distance. Rather, he dodged around lagging motorists, threaded through improbable spaces, raced over hills and around curves, yet somehow managed to keep within the speed limit between radar hot spots.
And so we took a “fast car” to the Langhirano municipality of Parma to learn about Prosciutto di Parma- the famed “Parma ham.” As a DPO (Designation of Origin) product every aspect of its production must be conducted in strict accordace to established rules.
Before the tour we donned white coats and once again hid our hair beneath very attractive blue hairnets (from the cheese tour) so we all looked like we were auditioning for an episde of LaVerne and Shirley (a 70’s-80’s sitcom based on friends who worked at a brewery, for those of you too young to have seen it).
A bunch of hams...
And more hams
Inside the factory, we saw more pigs’ legs than I could handle. The process that turns a hind leg of just the right weight into the delicate cured meat prized around the world is simple yet very precise. It takes salting, washing, curing and aging. The first step- the salting is the responsibility of a “salt master” who assures that just the right amount of salt is applied. Precise timing for each step is carried out within specific temperature ranges. For some of the time, the hams are in a room where the windows allow the sweet yet salty sea breeze that flows from the Adriatic down over the Appenines to permeate the ham, giving this prosciutto its distinctive flavor.
To earn the DPO, the pigs must be of the right weight, from the specified region, with legs of about 33 lbs. with 1 to 1 1/2 inches of fat under the skin. Special inspectors check each leg multiple times during the curing process of up to 36 months. To inspect the ham the inspector inserts a horse’s tibia bone between the skin and the meat and quickly withdraws it. The inspector evaluates the scent on the bone to rule out any spoilage or disqualifying defects. The unique qualities of this horse bone are that it quickly absorbs odors then just as quickly releases them so the inspector can use the same bone to make quick successive probes wthout a prior scent lingering to obscure the next test.
Each leg carries marks to tell of its origin and history. Only approved DPO prosciutto from Parma is the real thing!
