At Fatted Calf, Taylor Boetticher, Toponia Miller and their teams stock polished glass cases with fresh meat, poultry, sausages, charcuterie, pates and sandwiches in twin Napa and Hayes Valley locations.
Boetticher and Miller figure prominently in the crusade to run modern butchery and charcuterie operations “the right way”: sourcing meat from animals that are more sustainably and humanely raised and slaughtered than the industry norm. Fatted Calf’s rigorous procurement standards revolve around more than just ethics. Poor living conditions and careless slaughter methods trigger cascades of biochemical backlash in the muscles of livestock, and that excessive trauma can leave tangible flavor scars on the taste, texture, aroma and appearance of animal-derived food.
Fatted Calf sets the stage for deliciousness by meticulously vetting ranchers, but thoughtful animal husbandry alone does not guarantee a great meal. Unlike fruits and vegetables, which brim with a potpourri of taste and aroma compounds that plants use for communication, animal muscles house relatively simple engines for movement. If mismanaged, the coils and cogs of microscopic protein embedded in each muscle cell can seize, leaving us with a bland, chewy mass.
Boetticher and Miller are masters at piloting these molecular mechanisms to unlock primal pleasure in meat. Here is how they shepherd prime raw materials toward greatness in three of their signature dishes.
Beef Jerky
Trim beef bottom round to remove excess connective tissue, slice thin. Lay slices in shallow container, cover with marinade of salt, bourbon, molasses and black pepper. Marinate two days in refrigeration. Cold smoke for 45 minutes. Transfer to dehydrator, dry 3 to 4 hours.
Raw meat spoils quickly because animal muscles are full of water. In response to meaty bounties from large animals that couldn’t be eaten in one sitting, early human hunters figured out two ways of protecting meat from microbial siege: removing water, or occupying it with dissolved substances like sugars and salts.
Jerky, whether made from beef, pork, poultry or kangaroo, is the creation of an edible desert. Removing moisture evenly from a piece of meat requires slow, steady heating. Since the tepid air of a dehydrator fails to deliver the flavor pyrotechnics of a scorching grill, Boetticher and Miller adorn each slice of jerky with an elaborate wardrobe of smoky accessories.
Bourbon is barbecue in slow motion. Oak barrels harbor a girded scaffold of lignin, cellulose and hemicellulose, three fibrous building blocks that decompose with heat and time to yield the enchanting aromas of wood smoke. During several months to years of barrel aging, alcohol in the whiskey carves jagged, microscopic pieces of broken carbs from each stave of charred oak. By marinating bottom round in bourbon, the Fatted Calf team invites these decomposed bits of barrel to season the meat with many of the same aromas of nuts, butter and warm spices found in the bark of long-smoked meat.
After marination, each tray of beef gets a second taste of smoke from a cocktail of cherry, apple, hickory and alder woods before dehydration. Each type of wood contains a different blend of lignin, cellulose and hemicellulose which decompose to a unique aromatic fingerprint when burned. Fatted Calf protects its jerky from the irregular heat of burning wood by funneling smoke onto the meat in a climate-controlled chamber. This allows each slice to bask in perfumed reverie before its final journey through the more consistent heat of the dehydrator.
Even after several days of drying, all jerky contains some residual moisture. Sugars and salts act like chemical tethers to prevent any leftover water from wandering out of the meat or into close contact with dangerous microbes. By including a small amount of dark molasses rather than heaps of simple cane sugar in their marinade, the Fatted Calf team recruits a syrupy array of sugars especially suited to this chemical watchdoggery, preserving a measure of juiciness in the finished jerky without need for a glut of sweetness.
Compared to sugary, acrid gas station fare, Fatted Calf jerky tastes like a portable steak house experience.
Merguez Sausage
Remove bones from lamb shoulder and neck, marinate overnight in garlic, cumin, coriander, paprika, cayenne, black pepper and salt. Separately, steep freshly grated lemon zest in olive oil. Grind meat using medium die. Mix ground lamb with infused olive oil. Soak lamb casings in water, check for damage. Fill meat into lamb casings, check length against template, twist and separate. Refrigerate finished sausages.
At their best, sausages are a culinary mixtape of meat’s best attributes. Whole-muscle cuts like steak or brisket derive their texture from bundles of muscle fibers bound in a network of protein and fat. Most traditional meat cookery requires choosing between the delicate texture and bland flavor of a filet or the coarse structure and gamey complexity of a shank. With a grinder to level the playing field, sausages allow a butcher to select his or her texture of choice within the context of any flavor profile.
Grinding destroys the organized structure of muscle tissues and provides materials for building new textures from scratch. Salt and physical agitation marshal free proteins to the task of binding a sausage together, but too much attrition will draw a delicate protein web into tight, rubbery clumps. Cold meat minces more efficiently and is less likely to linger beneath the abusive turmoil of a grinder blade. To keep proteins from overworking, the Fatted Calf crew refrigerates everything from the meat itself to the grinder’s steel housing and blades until the moment grinding begins.
After grinding each batch, a Fatted Calf employee mixes a blend of freshly grated lemon zest and olive oil into the meat by hand, feeling for the precise moment when the mixture attains enough cling to be picked up as a cohesive mass, ready for stuffing.
Natural sausage casings come from animal intestines that have been scrubbed clean, with all but a thin layer of collagen removed. This process makes natural casings fragile; Fatted Calf sausage makers carefully inspect every inch of casing for flaws before stuffing and use a hand-operated crank to minimize grinding damage.
However, using natural casings allows sausages to become crispy quicker than any other animal product. Water evaporating from the skin of a roasting duck breast or a piece of sizzling bacon will eventually leave behind a glassy crust of desiccated proteins, but it can take up to an hour or more for that water to fight its way out through several centimeters of gnarled protein and rubbery, rendering fat. When a sausage hits a hot cooking surface, however, superheated water can blast off of the lean collagen casing almost instantly. Simultaneously, the interior of the sausage expands, stretching the now-brittle exterior to its limit to yield the characteristic slingshot snap that only well-made sausages can achieve.
Sausage-making tends to lurk in a fog of sinister mystery in popular culture. Fatted Calf sausages are not black holes where unmentionable things hide; they are carefully curated balancing acts of edible physics worthy of being flaunted.
White Rock Salami
Remove bones from pork leg and shoulder, rub with ground bay leaves, thyme, black pepper, salt and curing salt. Cure overnight. Grind half of each batch on a large die, half on a small die. Mix with White Rock Cabernet Franc. Fill into beef casings, twist and separate each link. Hang individually in fermentation cabinet and keep humidified for four days. Once microbes have bloomed, hang in curing room for eight to 10 weeks. Validate moisture content and flavor. Keep refrigerated.
Fermented sausages advance the complexity of fresh sausages an extra few steps toward immortality by offering helpful microbes a seat at the table. Curing salt facilitates the first step in that journey. Curing salts for quick-cured products like hotdogs or bacon contain a dose of sodium nitrite mixed with standard table salt. Sodium nitrite is an antioxidant that sacrifices itself to protect the fat in cured meats from becoming rancid over the course of long aging. It also staves off some of the most lethal foodborne pathogens. Curing salts designed for long-fermented products include a second form of this antioxidant: sodium nitrate. Sodium nitrate acts as a slow-release backup battery to take over once the initial dose of nitrite has been used up.
Celery — along with fava beans, beets and several other plants — naturally stockpiles nitrate. Many grocery store-cured meat brands claim that their products are “uncured” because they use dehydrated celery juice powder rather than the conventional nitrate-infused salts. The chemistry of nitrates in celery juice is identical to that of nitrates in curing salt, so Boetticher and Miller stick to the conventional stuff.
For their aged salami, the Fatted Calf crew repeats the same cold-grinding regime as with fresh sausages, with an added flourish: They grind half of the pork on a larger die to leave square cobblestones of textural contrast when the fully cured sausage is sliced thin. Boetticher and Miller teach their butchers not to overwork the mix during or after grinding, which would turn their beautiful stained-glass mosaic into a smeary impressionist canvas of grease.
The White Rock salami receives its name from a glug of Cabernet Franc that is mixed directly into the meat immediately after grinding. White Rock Vineyards lost its winery during the Napa and Sonoma fires in 2017, but its aging caves survived and it continues to supply Boetticher and Miller with wine for every batch. In addition to the flavor of the wine itself, the alcohol in the wine helps to guide the aromas of hand-picked dried thyme, black pepper and freshly ground bay leaves from Boetticher and Miller’s garden into every corner of the meat.
Once stuffed, the sausages go into a humidified, temperature-controlled cabinet to catalyze the aging process. Over the course of four days in this muggy environment, a microbial spring emerges. Blooms of helpful bacteria, yeasts and molds sprout across the surface of the casing, creating complex aromas and tangy lactic acid that both shape the flavor profile of the salami and add an additional layer of security against dangerous microbes.
Many sausage makers, especially those who operate at massive scale, spray a purified starter culture onto their sausages during this blooming stage. The Fatted Calf aging facilities are so meticulously cared for that Boetticher and Miller’s preferred microbial populations have colonized the air itself. This spontaneous manifestation of meaty terroir mirrors other artisanal Bay Area cultures like wild-fermented wine, beer and sourdough bread.
Once hung to dry, each salami requires several weeks of prodding, weighing and monitoring to reach maturity, and shortcuts aren’t possible. Attempts to fast-track the process with accelerated evaporation can create a hardened callus on the surface of the sausage that seals in moisture, causing it to rot from the inside out. The care and precision with which Boetticher and Miller dry their jerky seems coarse compared to the slow-burn maturation of their charcuterie.
The blissful ignorance of our most carefree era of omnivorism has vanished, and life as a meat-eater in 2019 is fraught with specters of looming disaster. In this climate, it’s difficult to rationalize mindless, autopilot consumption of meat that is anything but mind-blowing. Luckily, everything at Fatted Calf deserves your undivided attention.
Ali Bouzari is is a culinary scientist, author and co-founder of Pilot R&D and Render. Email: food@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @alibouzari