Yes, yes, we all know how great bacon is. Bacon makes everything better and you can make bacon ice cream, chocolate covered bacon, etc. But bacon made from the belly of the pork is one thing. How about roman bacon, guanciale; it's made from the jowls of the pig. That's bacon on another level entirely.
If bacon has about 60% fat to 40% meat, guanciale as about 85% fat to 15% meat. But the pork flavor from guanciale puts bacon to shame. It's very intense and it makes the distinct bucatini all'amatriciana a luxuriously rich, unique dish.
I've found that Mario has published a recipe for guanciale in two of his books, Babbo and Molto Itliano. The recipes are identical.
It starts with high-quality pork jowls. These are not easy to come by, unless you want a whole pig's head, but then your left to butcher the jowls yourself. After a bit of reasearch and a story in the New York Times, I came acorss Heritage Foods. They sell pre-butched pork jowls.
The jowls are cured with salt, sugar, fresh thyme, and black pepper. That's it.
Into plastic bags for 10 days or so.
Here they are, cured. Their color is darker, texture firmer.
Then they hang to dry in my drying cellar (okay, my basement) for two weeks. This intensifies the flavor. And here's the finished guanciale, cut into half-pound portions for the freezer.
Roman bacon. Up next, bucatini all'amatriciana.
Nice! We've got some guanciale laying about and have been planning on making amatriciana as well. We haven't been able to find bucatini locally, though, so I've been looking into buying it online.
This looks really good. I have Molto Mario in the car right now as it's the book I grabbed to look through on the way back to the city from the country tonight. I will check this recipe out on the way back up next weekend.
Tell Mike that www.buonitalia.com (located in the Chelsea Market) will ship bucatini made by Pasta Setaro (just fabulous - my favorite brand of dried pasta; I drag it uptown from the Chelsea Market all the time).
Thanks very much for sharing this interesting post. I am just starting up my own blog and this has given me inspiration to what I can achieve.