“So I got this pig,” says Steven A. Bookbinder, by way of a welcome to the Meats Laboratory on the Pennsylvania State University campus here. He’s wearing a Nittany Lions baseball cap and a
white work coat over jeans, and he’s eager to get started. He pulls open the door to a walk-in cooler and moments later reappears, grinning, with one arm around half a pig carcass hanging from a trolley on an overhead rail.
Mr. Bookbinder, 23, is a Penn State junior with a pork obsession. Not only does he envision opening a company to produce fine prosciutto, coppa, salami, terrines, and other high-end products, but he dreams of creating a new American charcuterie—a native style of preserving meat that would go far beyond hot dogs, scrapple, and Slim Jims to rival the famous cold cuts, sausages, and terrines of Europe. And while he says he’s just “a humble undergraduate” majoring in food science, he has a scholarship from the National Pork Board, an associate degree from the Culinary Institute of America, and chef de cuisine certification from the American Culinary Federation.
He sets to work with a sharp knife and a hacksaw. “I’m gonna take off the belly first"—that will become several pounds of bacon. He sets aside the tenderloin. Then he removes the fatback in one long strip, working as though the knife were a sixth finger. The fatback will be rendered into lard or used in sausage.
The only thing Mr. Bookbinder likes as much as preparing and eating good pork is talking about good pork, which he does as he works. “What I want to do is all about adding value to the meat,” he says. The half-carcass in front of him would cost $100 to $150. His job is to make the meat worth a lot more by the time it gets to your local Whole Foods or Harris Teeter.
The tenderloin he doesn’t need to touch—it would bring $6 a pound without his doing anything more than setting a few sprigs of parsley beside it in a display case. On the other hand, the meaty, 28-pound ham will become—after it’s been salted and then hung to dry for a year—about 16 pounds of prosciutto, worth somewhere between $20 and $40 a pound, or $320 to $640 in all. “Prosciutto is just salt and meat and time,” Mr. Bookbinder says, waxing poetic as he describes European shops in which butchers throw open their windows in good weather to let fresh local breezes caress drying hams. But it’s also profit.
This isn’t Italy, in any case, as a glance around the tile-walled meat lab confirms. Across the room, student employees are blaring music as they finish stuffing a big batch of what look like Slim Jims but will be sold as “snack sticks.” Mr. Bookbinder nods at the carcass before him. “This is your all-American, Marlboro Red pig,” raised on the campus and slaughtered two days ago, he says. But like most American pigs nowadays, it is on the lean side for the products he likes best.
To get the kind of fat that makes really good charcuterie, he says, you want to work with a small farmer who raises heritage-breed animals, like Mangalitsa, a breed that “has a ton of really beautiful fatback.”
And some small producers now raise pigs on special diets meant to impart particular flavors. “It’s not the meat that gets the flavor of whatever a pig eats—it’s the fat,” Mr. Bookbinder says. “A pig that eats all corn, say, will have a completely different flavor from one that eats nuts.”
From the shoulder he extracts a cut of meat that will become coppa, also called capicola—it’s like prosciutto but a smaller cut, so it dries in a couple of months rather than a year. He mixes a white sodium-nitrite powder—the curing agent that prevents botulism and preserves color—with salt, sugar, black pepper, garlic powder, juniper berry, and mace, and rubs the mix thoroughly over the meat. It will cure for 18 days in the refrigerator, after which he’ll tie it into a fairly uniform shape and hang it to dry until it’s lost 30 to 35 percent of its weight. Next he prepares salami—meat and fat ground together with spices and a sugar and then stuffed into casings, where it will ferment for a few hours before hanging to dry for several weeks.
The techniques Mr. Bookbinder champions were developed to preserve pork in the centuries before mechanical refrigeration. “Traditionally you were taking a pig you slaughtered in October and making it good to eat all year,” he says. Fresh meat would last a month or so, and soon after that the first Salamis and the coppa would be ready, leading a parade of other treats that culminated in the prosciutto. The word “sausage,” he notes, comes from the Latin salsas, for “salted.”
An Unexpected Enthusiast
Mr. Bookbinder’s fascination with charcuterie is, to say the least, unlikely. Raised near Miami in a Jewish family, he got interested in cooking around the time of his bar mitzvah. “My mother—you can put this in—is not a great cook,” he says. Inspired by foodie shows on TV, he started experimenting in the kitchen and got the first of a series of restaurant jobs at 14, as a busboy at a chicken-wing place. Next he worked in a Cuban restaurant, and then an Italian place let him work as a line cook—but only as long as there were no health-department inspectors around, since he wasn’t yet 16.
After working for a caterer for two years, he enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park, N.Y. An introductory course in meat made a big impression the first time he “put knife to the bone,” he says, and when he finished the two-year program, he applied to become a teaching assistant in the institute’s meat lab. While attending a veal conference, he met Christopher Raines, an enthusiastic young assistant professor and extension specialist at Penn State who would eventually lure him to State College.
First, though, Mr. Bookbinder went to Germany for a year, courtesy of an exchange program run by Congress and the Bundestag. He got to work with a German master butcher, Jürgen Müller, who “totally humbled me,” Mr. Bookbinder says, by sharing the accumulated knowledge of generations of butchers.
When he arrived here the following year, he teamed up with Mr. Raines on charcuterie projects that would broaden the former’s knowledge and help the latter advise the state’s small meat processors.
“We were such a good team,” Mr. Bookbinder says, recalling a faculty meeting at the College of Agricultural Sciences last year for which they were asked to provide snacks. Invoking the name of the chef-owner of Napa Valley’s famous French Laundry, Mr. Raines told Mr. Bookbinder to “go all freakin’ Thomas Keller.” Mr. Bookbinder obliged with head cheese (a “meat Jell-O” that he calls “soft, rich, unctuous, and buttery”), a pork terrine with interior garnishes of pistachios and ground smoked pork tongue, and a venison terrine with a duck breast in the middle and truffle pieces strewn throughout. It made, he says, a big splash.
Last December, Mr. Raines died in an auto accident. Mr. Bookbinder was devastated. “I came back in January and I was like, Where do I go from here? After a few months I doubled down.” He began exploring Italian and Spanish recipes with other faculty members. “You could spend a lifetime just learning Eastern German charcuterie, but there’s so much more out there.”
He’s also busy with chemistry and biology classes, and with a leadership course taught by Penn State’s new president, Rodney A. Erickson. “We’re talking about how to make decisions in very gray areas,” Mr. Bookbinder says. “It’s a very interesting class this year.”
Then there’s the Penn State Cooking and Baking Club, which he co-founded. Now that he’s calmed the fears of the university’s risk managers, which was far more of a challenge than embedding duck breast in a terrine, club members gather weekly to learn about some facet of cooking and then feast on whatever they’ve made. Not surprisingly, he describes the club’s recent German night as “pretty epic.”
If you’re not a club member, though, the fruits of Mr. Bookbinder’s labor are hard to come by—he can’t sell what he makes without going through a lot of food-safety paperwork. He can, however, give away whatever he likes to friends and acquaintances. (His girlfriend, like his family, doesn’t eat pork.)
If you’re extremely fortunate, he takes you down to the meat lab’s basement and starts pulling things out of a refrigerator and putting them on a slicer. He dangles a translucent slice of coppa off one finger—"Just let it melt on your tongue"—and follows it with guanciale (made from the jowl), salami with orange and bourbon, salami with Chianti and peppercorns, even lardo, a cured-and-herbed-fatback delicacy.
Holy smokes—the flavors are close-your-eyes-and-savor extraordinary, the textures utterly sensual. “Stuff like this needs to be shared,” Mr. Bookbinder says, grinning again as he assembles a bag of samples. “The reason I do this is not so I can sit in a room by myself and enjoy it.”
