Charcuterie

This is posted a week after the fact, but then, just like the products of charcuterie, a little time makes a good thing better.

Last Tuesday, the local Slow Food chapter organized a tour of the Oyama Sausage production plant down in the industrial area under the Oak Street Bridge. There, we were allowed to sample very generous servings of a wide selection of their wonderful products and given a tour.

John van der Lieck has been in the charcuterie business for a very long time, and has been here in Vancouver for over 20 years, making and selling his fantastic products.

What is charcuterie I hear you ask? Well, a simple answer would be "it's about sausages and hams" - but there's a lot more to it than that. These days, many companies make sausages and hams (and not always very good ones), but classic charcuterie was all about preserving meat for later consumption. As John put it so succinctly, "if you want to understand charcuterie, think of a European winter."

And it's actually as simple as that. In the days before refrigeration, people wanted to have food available in the winter and into spring so they would have something to eat before the bountiful fruits of summer and crops of the fall. Meat was a particularly valuable commodity, and the Europeans developed all manner of techniques to preserve meat - every combination one can think of to salt, smoke, and spice meat so it would keep.

There are many books available on the subject, so I will not comment further on preservation methods - suffice to say that if you're interested, I'm sure you can use Google and the library as well as anyone else.

Every meat product they sell at the Oyama store is made at their plant, and everything they make at the plant is sold exclusively through the store. They use special breeds of pig and boar for their sausages, hams, and salamis, and the choice comes through in the rich flavour of the meat. One particular delight at the sample table was a ham which was over a year old that had been brined in ale and treacle and smoked for three months.

I have always liked their products, but I am thoroughly impressed by John's passion for his craft, a craft which is slowly dying out as large corporations make bland generic hams for the mass market.

If you haven't tried Oyama sausages, terrines, hams, and salamis, you need to go to Granville Island soon and try their products out.

Vancouver truly is a foodie's paradise.