Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But for some time I’ve been meaning to give a shout out to a lesser known and lamentably rare La Quercia pork product. A few weeks ago a friend returned from the Norwalk, Iowa, prosciuttificio with several pounds of luscious, fatty guanciale, the dry cured jowl of the hog (thanks Joel). It’s indispensable for a true spaghetti alla carbonara, or anything that calls for pancetta. If bacon makes everything better, guanciale makes it best.
“For one thing all the pork that we buy has to be from pigs [raised in] non confinement, antibiotic-free, vegetarian diet, humanely raised, so already that really narrows the pool that we can choose from,” says Kathy. But it appears that the real problem is that, at the slaughterhouse, USDA inspectors routinely slash the jowls as the carcass comes down the line, searching for disease. That isn’t the only way to inspect a pig, but that’s the way its done unless they have a written cease and desist from the slaughterhouse. But even then the instructions are often ignored. “Part of it is that the message doesn’t get all the way through to the line about what needs to be done,” she says. “That’s been a recurring issue when we’ve received jowls that are just really difficult for us to use, and we have to basically discard almost all of what we get.”
