- Hey, guys!
We're here at Ends Meat where our friend John
is making what we think is the best salami in New York.
- He's also making whole-animal charcuterie
which is both awesome and stupid,
but we still love him for it.
What the (bleep) are you doing?
- Let's go!
- Action.
- Here we are!
- At Ends Meat.
And we're here with John. - Hi, guys!
- [Brent] Hey!
- Business plan revolves around
whole muscles and whole animals.
You can make more salami, you can get more pork trim,
but you create these specific products
that can only get so much of.
The one that is that is the hardest
100% of the time is the coppa.
We get two of these per animal.
- So what do you do?
- We tell people they can't have 'em!
There's no question.
It's not even a thought process
as to whether or not we attempt to make
more of any one product outside of the whole animal.
We get pigs that are pretty large.
They're 350, 400 pounds.
And we get 12 pounds of coppa.
Every day it's like, "I want coppa.
"I want coppa.
"I want coppa."
And it's like, cool, I get it.
It has nothing to do with the treatment.
It's the type of muscle.
It's just like this (bleep) amazing balance
of fat and extremely active protein.
It's weird to be a retailer when you can't curate
specifically to what people are ordering.
It's like, oh, that's a no-brainer.
Why would we sell anything else but these three things?
- Totally, you know, customers come in,
and everybody wants skirt steak.
- Yeah.
- So like, all right, we like raise the price
of skirt steak a little bit, but we don't wanna
sell skirt steak for $30 a pound.
So it just sells out every single day
that we get it delivered.
- Everybody can't have skirt.
That's not whole animal.
It's an 850-pound animal, and it's gonna give you
a pound and a quarter a hanger.
- We make a lot of sausage.
We don't make salami.
What's the difference in process?
- Higher salt, higher sugar, more intense muscle separation.
And then we do a pretty in-depth seaming process
with our protein to remove unnecessary sinew.
- All that silver skin, and you want all of that gone.
- Yeah, all of that fascia and all that like
really gnarly stuff that will get caught in your teeth.
So what we're really looking for here
is an even mix, an even distribution.
And we're relying on the denaturing
of our proteins in fermentation.
So we're basically pickling this meat
and then, you know, the four to eight months
it takes to actually--
- And then there's that part.
- Sell it so somebody.
(laughing)
We're gonna make salami piccante.
- [Brent] Great.
- Or our take, our version on salami piccante.
- The spicy salami.
- The spice is nice!
Sorry, that was-- (laughing)
- That was not it. - Does it get old?
I don't think it can get old. (laughing)
- The inspiration for this was wanting to utilize
chiles from the home state I'm from,
from New Mexico.
We're utilizing a lot of lean
from the hams and the shoulders.
- Gotcha.
- This is gonna be like a lot of work for a two-second shot.
Oh, yeah.
- You all look so tiny from up here.
(group exclaims)
- So we're doing a large grind on our lean right now,
and then we tumble it with all of our spices,
then we grind through our desired-sized plate.
So salt, fennel, New Mexico chilis,
bird's eye chili, sugar, turbinado.
- [Ben] Yeah.
- And we're using culture that is a mixture
of lactobacillus and staphylococcus.
So we're just doin' a little mix.
What we're lookin' for is that clean separation right there.
- Yep.
- We're noticing the little brighter orange areas
where it does look like the fat is smearing.
But that's not as much smearing as it is
the little bit of myosin that's being extracted
kind of coming together.
- [Ben] This is exactly, this is how you get a salami
where you see like the fat bits separated from the meat bits
as you get like this clean-- - Exactly.
This is our culture.
The powder itself isn't just bacteria.
It's also specific minerals and nutrients
that kickstart the bacteria in the hydration.
- [Ben] So we're waking it up.
- They're waking it up.
- [Ben] That's the alarm, those minerals are the alarm
that's like waking it up as soon as the water hits.
All right.
- And if we were to just add it in here,
it would be a crapshoot as to whether or not
it would activate.
Slowly add water.
I'm gonna slowly add our culture over here.
- Hey, Ben!
- Yo, what's up?
- [John] Beef bums.
- Shimmy it.
Gonna shimmy it?
Shimmy, shimmy, shimmy, shimmy.
- There you go.
Shong shape, dong shape.
We're taking a very loose farce,
putting it in a very large slippery animal intestine.
And we want it to hang like this.
So what we need to do is not only make this little package
as tight as possible, but we also need to make sure
that it is secure so that the loop doesn't come off
the rod that it's hanging from.
In order to do that, we need to have structure
from top to bottom, because if we just tied
a loop around here, this is like 2 1/2 pounds,
it's gonna slip right off.
And we're also--
- That sounds gross and hilarious.
- No, it's not.
It's neither of those things.
It's extremely infuriating.
Any possible air gaps that were in there,
we wanna get rid of them.
- If you wanna know what the inside of a cow smells like,
this is a good way to find out.
- So once the products are cased,
we go into our fermentation chamber.
This mounts on there.
- So what temperature is it in here?
- Right now, it's at 40.
If the temperature goes too high,
the fermentation can happen too fast.
And then you don't get as much developed in its flavor.
You just get acid.
We're not going for a sour product.
- Right.
- We're going for a high-acid, developed, flavorful,
taste the protein, taste spices.
Not acid.
It'll be coming out whenever 72 hours is from now.
- And then it goes into--
- Into the big bad boy.
- This bad boy.
- We have a much larger room here.
This is what you guys just made, right here.
- [Brent] Oh, wow!
- So this is our salami piccante.
These are beautiful.
At any given time, we have eight to ten thousand
pounds of product rotating through this room.
And then, we have a prosciutto scenario that we're starting.
We're gonna hang a bunch of stuff from the ceilings.
Three years into the game, I'm like barely okay
with putting a piece of product in here for two years.
That's such a (bleep) massive investment.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- And I get, like everybody, everybody, first question is,
"Do you have prosciutto?"
I'm just like, do have any (bleep) idea what that means
for like a small business that has
zero financial investment from anyone, like?
- Right, and do you wanna pay $300 a pound--
- Yeah, 'cause that's what it's--
- For the shit that I made? - Yeah.
- Probably not. - No!
No, there's tons of people doing great prosciutto out there.
And I mean, for that matter, there's tons of people
doing way better product than I am.
Like, this is just kind of this little low-key
Brooklyn spot that's trying to figure it out, so.
- We think it's amazing.
- Thank you.
You guys wanna go taste this shit, or what?
- Yeah, I'm pretty hungry now.
(whistling)
- All right!
We have great fat definition in there.
- [Brent] Uh-huh.
- Really nice separation.
There might have been a little air gaps in there,
but I'm really happy with that.
You see every separate particle.
There's not a huge ring around the outside.
That demonstrates that the outside is
much drier than the inside.
It's pretty even all the way through,
which leads me to believe it was a really clean drying,
the fermentation was very active,
and it denatured properly and dropped in pH.
So without further ado.
- Man, I've never had something like this before,
like so newly out of the walk-in
where you can taste what that walk-in smells like.
- The chili, so even.
- It's like it hits you up front,
and then it kinda chills out.
Fennel seed action in there.
And the actual heat is coming from
flakes of the bird's eye chili.
- Yeah. - Right.
- 'Cause in New Mexico, red chili is like powder, it's dust.
So it's really what's giving it the color
and the fruitiness.
You can really see the importance of the truss here.
No separation, no potential for mold
to get in there on either side.
You see how much weight gets put on this lower side.
It's necessary to have that vertical truss.
- Can we try that? - Can't wait.
- Let's try this big bad Jackson right here.
Yes, sir.
- [Brent] Wow.
- You can hold that up to the light,
and you can see right through it.
- Let's try the coppa.
The aroma of this, it's like fuckin' nutty.
This is like an aged sheep's milk cheese.
Super in-depth. - That's completely,
that's completely different.
- Texture-oli!
Intermuscular fat, off the chain.
- Yeah, I'll eat more of that.
- [Brent] And really shames most prosciuttos.
- I would never say that.
- I can. (laughs)
- It's just been getting the people to pay attention,
to notice, to fall in love with the products.
'Cause they need this experience for this product.
They're like, "Wow, this is more expensive,
"and it's less available.
"Why would I not just go to Whole Foods?"
- Can't you go to Whole Foods, yeah, exactly.
- You know?
- Like, what's special about this?
- And what's missing-- - So it's made in Brooklyn.
What's that mean?
- Is that interaction-- - Yeah, who cares.
- That discussion, and that's what, you know,
we're trying to continue to give to people
while operating a business.
- No one gets into animal agriculture,
definitely whole animal, to make money.
You do it because you care about something.
You wanna support a particular kind
of agriculture, and you wanna do something
that's truly different and unique.
And you trust that people will
be along for the ride with you.
- It was an honor to have you here.
I'll go ahead and redo all this stuff you guys did,
but don't worry about it.
- You're the best, you're the best, yeah.
(laughing)
- We'll be fine.
- Thank you so much for watching. - Yep!
This episode of Prime Time
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Great job!
Thanks!
Yep!
And mark!