It Ain't Baloney
Our Love Affair With Mortadella
Chef Trevor Perkins is working against the clock. He is making mortadella and he has to be quick. He has a bowl of pork, pork fat, salt, garlic and spices and loads of ice. He wants to keep the mix cold. “It is critical we don’t get this mixture warm as it grinds in the mixer,” says the chef from Hogget Kitchen. Outside the kitchen are the green rolling hills of Gippsland near Warragul, a rural centre 120km east of Melbourne. Perkins is a chef known for his charcuterie and smallgoods. A meal here generally starts with a terrine, often flecked with cubes of chicken parfait inside a rustic hull of minced rabbit and lard. He makes his own pastrami, capocollo and, now, mortadella.
Perkins is one of a growing number of chefs who are experimenting with the dark arts of making mortadella – a sausage with an ancient history. Modern manufacture sees contemporary mortadella that has a soft and velvety texture, with a mosaic of pure white cubed fat laid against a cartoon pink background of emulsified pork, fat and water. “It is hard to make 'the real thing',” says Perkins. “Because everyone has a different preconception of what a real mortadella should be.”
Chef Trevor Perkins from Hogget Kitchen. Image by Richard Cornish.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, a weighty, hand-pounded mortadella was a much-desired item, costly to produce and often given as a gift. One was given to Lucrezia Borgia on her marriage to Alfonso d’Este in 1502. There are mentions in Roman literature of the famous sausage of Bologna, with Pliny commenting on how Emperor Augustus was particularly impressed by this large sausage.
In the 1600s, despite Bologna’s mortadelle business thriving, sausage counterfeiters were causing the city’s official butchers much financial and reputational grief. After much lobbying by the mortadella makers papal delegate, Cardinal Farnese, passed a law in 1661 that limited production of the sausage to a specific area and a prescribed recipe. This was a forerunner to the modern Indicazione Geografica Protetta (IGP).
The official Mortadella website does not mention the use of donkey meat in mortadella, but speaking with a good number of Italian immigrants, donkey was once an essential ingredient in making some mortadelle.
Fast forward to the invention of mechanical meat grinders in the 1800s and the amount of labour necessary to make a mortadella was massively reduced and therefore the cost plummeted. Gone were the mortars and pestles. The texture of this new-wave mortadelle was slightly coarser and more sausage-like.
When Italian immigrants took the recipe to America post WWII, mortadella makers started to use factory-raised pork and massive bowl cutters. These are shallow parabolic bowls through which high-speed blades whizz at thousands of revolutions per minute turning pork, beef, ice, salt, preservatives and spices into a pink paste through which is mixed cubed pork back fat. This mix is packed into plastic tubes or natural animals casings, sealed and cooked.
Warning: We tried a lot of Australia mortadella for this story and found a lot of it substandard. Some cheap supermarket mortadella had a rancid taste and a chemical tang and should be best avoided by those with a sensitive palate.
Meanwhile in Sydney's Chippendale, chef Luke Powell of LP’s Quality Meats says he could not afford a high-speed bowl cutter when he set up his salume bar. “It was $22,000 I didn’t have,” says the quietly spoken chef. He loves making sausages and salume. In his meat cellar hangs capocollo, guanciale, salami, bresaola and prosciutto. When he was working with ethical butchers Feather and Bone in Marrickville he was known for his repertoire of sausages. When he made his first Mortadella at LP’s Quality Meats he used a benchtop food processor and spent 8 hours removing the connective tissue from the pork by hand to make a few 6kg logs.
Powell’s mortadella is different to the traditional version as it is cooked in a smoker and has a delicate hit of applewood smoke. “It was a laborious process but we hit a note in Sydney because we had other restaurants wanting to buy our mortadella,” he says. He invested in a great big powerful Robocoup. Made of stainless steel and with a powerful motor, it looks like a food processor made by a Bond villain. In it, he can make 30kg batches of mortadella. His secret is to use pork shoulder, which is naturally fatty, and pork jowl, which has loads of flavour. The trimmed pork goes into the bucket-sized bowl of the Robocoup with salt, sugar, nitrite cinnamon, cayenne pepper and loads of fresh micro-planed garlic. He adds ice cubes and blends the mix at high speed until it becomes a pink slurry and makes a slapping sound. “That is when you know the water and the fat have blended together and the protein in the meat has developed a sticky consistency,” says Powell. He pumps these into plastic sausage casings, ties them off and places cooks them in his smokers to gently cook at 10 hours at around 75ºC.
These he slices and serves as part of his Cured & Cold Cuts menu alongside guanciale, chicken liver pate and maple ham, Compte cheese and green tomato pickle. Powell’s mortadella is smooth, smoky and piqued with the high notes of sweet spice and garlic. He watches as I eat his mortadella. I smile contentedly. He seems pleased.
(Since speaking with him he is now concentrating on manufacturing smallgoods).
Taking it mortadella back for the Italians of Melbourne is Guy Grossi from Grossi Florentino. “Mortadella was something mum would send us down the street to get,” says Guy Grossi, remembering growing up in the Melbourne suburb of Oakleigh. He makes batches in his Melbourne restaurant with his head chef and brother in law Chris Rodriguez. Together they make a version with a little cardamom and other warm spices. “It was an after-school snack, something to put in a little panino,” says Grossi. “It is a very simple thing to make, but easy to get wrong,” he says. “You have to season it just so and keep it light and happy. Mortadella is not a serious dish, but if you get don’t get the spice salt balance right, you’re going to hear about it very quickly," he says with a laugh, offering a plate layered with paper-thin slices of mortadella. "Italians have long memories."