Ontalia Puts Italian Roots in Local Soil - This Little Piggy...

Written by Tod Stewart | 01 July 2009

this little piggy…

Bean uses only shoulder meat for his sausages, something that sets his products apart from those typically seen in supermarkets. “Sausage is typically a by-product of the butchering process,” he explains. “In order to stretch the yield and mask impurities of inferior meat a number of additives are often used. When only shoulder meat with the optimum marbling of fat is used you get the real taste.” In fact, one judge at the Sausage King of Ontario competition noted that Bean’s entries tasted like pork and not “a spiced concoction the sausage maker came up with.” Not surprisingly, Bean was crowned King of the competition. Bean sources his meat from family-owned, sustainable Ontario pig farmers such as Paul Unruh in Durham and Fred and Ingrid de Martines in Stratford. The animals are typically allowed to roam free and are fed a natural diet. Bean notes that they “behave just like pets.” Yum.

It goes without saying that the wine used in the process has to be every bit as good as the meat used since it plays such a pivotal role. But getting enough wine into the meat to allow its flavour to show through poses a challenge as pork meat, according to Bean, is not particularly absorbent. The work-around is both simple and novel; if you can’t get more wine into the meat, concentrate the flavour of the wine.

“In order to intensify the wine’s flavour I reduce the wine to less than half of its original volume by cryoextraction.” This process, simply put, is a way to make pseudo-Icewine. You freeze the stuff and separate the flavour compounds from the water. The result is a concentrated wine essence of which a little goes a long way. “A bottle of wine usually gives me a couple glasses of concentrate that is easily absorbed by about five kilos of sausage meat.”

life’s bean good

The only problem for those of us wanting to chow down on some of Bean’s piggy pleasures is their scarcity, a problem inherent in any artisan product. While certain high-end food shops in Toronto carry them from time to time (try All The Best Fine Food Ltd), they are more readily seen in fine dining establishments. “They are the chef’s sausages,” Bean confesses. “They are my regular customers.”

Should you manage to get your mitts on some, Bean suggests cooking them over a very hot grill for 15 minutes. The myth that pork needs to be cooked to the same degree of doneness as poultry is just that: a myth.

With Ontalia, Bean has taken the best practices of the Slow Food Condotte — plus the legacy of his mother — and combined them with sustainable, local ingredients to create an evolving line of exceptional Italian-inspired Ontario delicacies that offer a true taste of the land. “We have forgotten what natural unprocessed food tastes like and have become too used to cheap, processed, unsustainable fair,” Bean laments. A taste of his drunken sausages is all it takes to remind you that eating is indeed a pleasure and not simply a requirement.