Across the United States, artisanal pizza joints are opening faster than Natalie Portman movies. But inside those imported ovens, pepperoni — by far America’s most popular pizza topping — is as rare as a black swan.
In these rarefied, wood-fired precincts, pizzas are draped with hot soppressata and salami piccante, and spicy pizza alla diavola is popular. At Boot and Shoe Service in Oakland, there is local-leek and potato pizza. At Paulie Gee’s in Brooklyn, dried cherry and orange blossom honey pizza. At Motorino in New York’s East Village, Brussels sprouts and pancetta. But pepperoni pizza? Geddoutahere!
What, exactly, is pepperoni? It is an air-dried spicy sausage with a few distinctive characteristics: It is fine-grained, lightly smoky, bright red and relatively soft. But one thing it is not — Italian.
“Purely an Italian-American creation, like chicken Parmesan,” said John Mariani, a food writer and historian who has just published a book with the modest title, “How Italian Food Conquered the World” (Palgrave, 264 pp., $25)
“Peperoni” is the Italian word for large peppers, as in bell peppers, and there is no Italian salami called by that name, though some salamis from Calabria and Abruzzo in the south are similarly spicy and flushed red with dried chilies. The first reference to pepperoni in print is from 1919, Mariani said, the period when pizzerias and Italian butcher shops began to flourish here.
World conquerer
Pepperoni certainly has conquered the United States. Hormel is the biggest-selling brand, and in the run-up to the Super Bowl, the company had sold enough pepperoni — 40 million feet — to tunnel all the way through the planet Earth, said Holly Drennan, a product manager.
Michael Ruhlman, an expert in meat curing who is writing a book on Italian salumi, doesn’t flinch from calling pepperoni pizza a “bastard” dish, a distorted reflection of wholesome tradition.
“Bread, cheese and salami is a good idea,” he said. “But America has a way of taking a good idea, mass-producing it to the point of profound mediocrity, then losing our sense of where the idea comes from.”
He prefers lardo or a fine-grained salami, very thinly sliced, then laid over pizza as it comes out of the oven rather than cooked in the oven.
But some of the most respected meatheads in the country are beginning to take pepperoni seriously.
“I can’t make salami fast enough as it is, and now the pizza chefs are begging me for pepperoni,” said Paul Bertolli, founder and self-proclaimed “curemaster” of Fra’ Mani, the salumi specialist in Oakland. Bertolli is in a research-and-development phase on a pepperoni because of demand from expert pizzaiolos like Craig Stoll of Delfina in San Francisco.
“There’s nothing quite like that spicy, smoky taste with pizza,” he said.
Bertolli believes that pepperoni’s smokiness, beef content and fine grind are more characteristic of German sausages like Thuringer.
“I’ve never seen a smoked sausage anywhere in Italy,” he said.
Normally, Bertolli confines himself to products and processes that are almost painfully traditional and a nose-to-tail ethos that he applies to the pasture-raised, antibiotic-free pigs he buys. For Bertolli’s pepperoni, he will avoid the nitrites used by commercial producers in favor of celery juice, an effective and natural preservative.
No one is claiming that pepperoni is difficult to find. Large producers like Volpi, Patrick Cudahy, Columbus and Ezzo are considered top-of-the-line among pizzeria owners. Opinion is divided on whether a slice of the stuff should curl when cooked, or lie flat. Some say that the little cups of cooked pepperoni perform an important job: confining the spicy, molten fat from pouring out over the surface of the pizza.
But a pepperoni that lives up to the handmade, high quality standards of the artisanal-food movement and also replicates the soft, chewy, smoky-hot-sweetness of the commercial product? That’s the grail.
Otto, the Greenwich Village pizzeria opened by Mario Batali in 2003, cures its own pepperoni in a small subterranean chamber overseen by Dan Drohan, the restaurant’s chef.
In 2007, following a crackdown by the New York City Health Department on illicit cured meats, Otto became the first restaurant in the city to receive formal permission to air-cure its own meats, a process that must take place within a specific range of humidity and temperature in order to be safe and effective.
Kind of a rarity
Pepperoni is the most popular topping at Otto, said Drohan, and the restaurant goes though more than 100 pounds a week of red-wine-colored pepperoni, made from Berkshire pork shoulder and flavored with fennel pollen (rather than the usual fennel seed), paprika and cayenne.
Outside the pizza universe, it’s rare to see pepperoni in a restaurant kitchen. Chorizo is everywhere; soppressata, with its pearly grains of fat, is all the rage. But only at New York’s Torrisi Italian Specialties, the small Mulberry Street restaurant dedicated to upgrading Italian-American flavors, is there evidence of true pepperoni creativity. It serves pepperoni vinaigrette, pepperoni snow, and minced pepperoni mixed into warm crushed potatoes with oregano and vinegar to make the potato salad of dreams.
“We buy three different kinds for different culinary purposes,” said Mario Carbone, a co-owner and chef. Alps brand is good for cooking, he said, “Pepperoni just wants to give out that wonderful orange grease.”
Salumeria Biellese is best for slices, he added, and a super-salty-smoky version from Vermont Smoke and Cure makes an intensely flavorful garnish for raw seafood. For the snow, Carbone briefly freezes the whole sausage, then grates it on a Microplane into feathery shreds that melt when they come to rest atop a hot soup, like potato or bean.
