- 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
Click here right here if you want to see more of this.
Great job!
Thanks!
Yep!
And mark!
