mike phillips
I dice the fat for salumi in the walk-in cooler because I don’t have any refrigeration out
c r a f t s m a n r e s t a u r a n t, m n
here and if I take too much time it will smear
Mike doesn’t own Craftsman, which makes his work all the more extraordinary. As the chef he has helped establish Tour de Farm dinners with Scott Pampuch aided in developing the city’s local food initiatives and created a farm-direct buying program to rival any I have seen. It doesn’t seem to be about bravado or profit, at all. Upstairs at Craftsman is the kitchen, but downstairs is Mike’s haven, his cured meat workshop where he experiments and teaches others. His Midwestern humility threatened to belie his talents, but the truth is in the salumi. When he started slicing, I thought, “So he does know how to brag.”
ping I have to run back and forth from the
and then I've got trouble. So when I’m prepwalk-in. I’ve only had one or two bad batches in all my years of doing this. Nitrates have a horrible rap. One study out there was conclusive and it was about eating burnt bacon every day. Celery powder? Come on! You find more traces in a stick of celery than you do in a cured product. It’s such a farce, especially from the natural foods world. There’s no difference in flavor. I started curing hams ten years ago when I saw a picture of Paul Bertolli sur-
rounded with all of his meat. Then I started reading and the pigs were from Iowa and Minnesota. I thought, Wait a minute, those are my pigs! Why don’t we keep them here? One of the places I get pigs from is Hidden Streams Farm, which has formed a little cooperative of five or six other farms that have different kinds of produce like milk cheese, vegetables. It gives people more choices and it saves costs. On the menu right now we have venison, lamb, pork, duck, rabbit, and trout—all raised within a hundred and fifty miles. We bought eleven lambs and we knocked them all down in one day. Everything gets butchered and then if we need to freeze it, we can. That works best for the farmer and it’s efficient for us. The meat industry in the US just sells water. It’s interesting to visit bigger plants because you really see how the business works. If you buy a tumbler to marinate, for instance, it speeds up the process, and then you can sell that ham before the bill on the meat is due. Not like in my kitchen, where everything is done by hand. I have so many people asking me to buy salami but I can’t resell from the restaurant. I want some regional identity for this area and I think cured meats would help. Minneapolis hasn’t had the best food reputation. I have a notebook with every recipe I’ve ever done. You can check it out. There’s just so much mistrust in the food world. Everybody’s so secretive; I couldn’t get anyone to teach me how to cure meats. People spend so much money figuring out how to make stuff, they get greedy about their market. It would be nice if we could all learn from each other.
“I started curing hams ten years ago when I saw a picture of Paul Bertolli surrounded with all of his meat.”
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