Last month I read the book An Edge in the Kitchen by Chad Ward. I’ve heard a lot of good reviews about this book, so I made it one of my first steps in an effort to improve my knife sharpening skills. But how did the book stand up to its high praise?

Well, it is definitely a worthwhile read if you are into kitchen knives or want to dive into the cutlery world a bit more. The book is essentially an expansion of a 2003 eGullet Society tutorial authored by Ward covering knife maintenance and sharpening. Here is the link to that piece.

An Edge in the Kitchen is a very good resource and does a wonderful job when providing advice on knives and sharpening equipment. It is also good at explaining the different styles of knives, types of blade steel, and highlighting the differences between European and Japanese cutlery. I also like how the book debunks several knife myths. Basically, this is a great place to start if you want to learn about sharpening knives.

With that said, the book is not a perfect product. One main flaw is that it is rather poorly organized, illustrated, and laid out. For instance, the knife skills instruction is needlessly repeated in two parts of the book, and the overview of sharpening systems is at the very end but would have been better placed earlier in the book. Even the page margins are funky leaving many pages with a strange emptiness with text squeezed in at the spine.

Other than that, I also found the book a little clumsy. The knife skills section — though informative — felt awkwardly included. I know that buying, using, and maintaining knives seems like a logical combination, but in my opinion, the skills section broke up the flow of the book. I wish the author had kept the book focused on the equipment more and hadn’t tried to address the grander topic of knife skills.

Despite these minor drawbacks, I still found the book useful and I would highly recommend buying it. It is a solid reference for knife sharpening and a good buyer’s guide for knives and accessores. With this book, you will no doubt have all the requisite information to ensure that you have sharp, well-maintained knives for your kitchen.

You can purchase An Edge in the Kitchen at Amazon, and you can also visit Chad Ward’s website at chadwrites.com.

For several years now I have been using Kartio glasses from Iittala as my everyday drinkware, and I can’t recommend them enough. The design is simple but very solid, and they come in a variety of colors. I have the light blue one pictured to the right.

The glasses were initially designed by the Finnish designer Kaj Franck in 1958, but they have a timeless simplicity and were brought back into production. I think the size and geometry of the 40 cl/13 oz tumblers are perfect for a drinking glass, and it feels great in the hand.

Outside of solid, clean design the only variations in the Kartio tumbler series are with size and color. The light-hued ones are my favorite as they add just enough color while still keeping it simple. Franck believed that good color was decoration enough, and this series proves it. You can see all the colors on offer at Iittala’s site, and they also come in a 20 cl/7 oz size.

Kartio glassware can be purchased at Amazon for $20 for a set of two.

For a few years I used the Unicorn Magnum Plus Pepper Mill (left), but about five months ago I started using the Oliver Hemming Spice Mill (right). Now that I own both of these grinders, I thought I would have a pepper grinding duel to compare the two products.

I have previously written about the Oliver Hemming and the Unicorn, and both are very good pepper grinders, but there are some differences that set them apart. So after a lot of pepper grinding, here are how the two grinders compare.

Styling

The Oliver Hemming has better styling in my opinion and comes in a range of colors. The body of the Hemming is also made out of acrylic and has a smooth, solid feel to it. But what sets it apart is the unique use of a traditional mortar perched on top of the grinder. There is a reason why the Oliver Hemming spice mill won a Red Dot Design Award.

The Unicorn is less stylish and more utilitarian, and one of the most common points raised about the Unicorn is that it doesn’t look that great. I do agree that it is nothing special, but I also don’t think it is that bad. I just wish they would start making the Unicorn in different colors. I think that would greatly reduce the ‘ugly’ stigma associated with it. Also, the ABS plastic feels a lot cheaper than the Hemming material.

Loading and Storage Capacity

The Hemming’s storage capacity is good compared to other grinders and holds about 3/8 cup but nothing like the Unicorn. The best part of the Hemming, though, is how easy it is to load. The mortar on top acts like a funnel, so loading is extremely easy.

The Unicorn holds almost one cup of peppercorns when filled up to the loading hole, which is an amazing amount. The hole is also large for easy filling, but I must admit that I find the loading of peppercorns awkward on the side of the grinder.

Storage, in my opinion, is a wash between these two products. The ease of loading with the Hemming adequately compensates for its smaller storage, but the Unicorn definitely will need less filling.

Grinding

The Hemming’s grind is very good and the turning is smooth. A nice shower of pepper comes out, and there is also an adjustment knob on the bottom to regulate the grind from fine to coarse. A nice feature of the Hemming is that the grinding mechanism is made out of ceramic and not steel, so you can use it for grinding salt as well as other dry spices that are under the size of a coffee bean.

The Unicorn is a pepper-grinding monster, and it has a very satisfying grind-and-crunch feel. It grinds fast and the shower of corns is fast and plentiful. The grinding mechanism is steel, so though it can be used for pepper, salt will corrode the metal. Unicorn has different products for grinding salt if you are looking for that option. There is also a knob at the bottom for adjusting the grind just as the Hemming has.

For comparison, at a medium-coarse grind the Unicorn produced about 1 3/8 tsp of pepper after 20 turns versus just under 1 1/8 tsp with the Hemming. At finer grinds, the Hemming performed almost as well as the Unicorn, and the Hemming actually allowed for a finer grind at the most extreme setting than the Unicorn. There is no question though that at medium to coarse grinds, the Unicorn is much faster.

Other Considerations

The Unicorn was messier than the Hemming and a fair amount of pepper would leak out of the Unicorn while resting on the counter, especially at coarser grind settings. You will probably notice a lot of peppercorn droppings where you store the Unicorn if you purchase this grinder.

Also of note, the loading hole on the Unicorn can come open accidentally because it is located just under the turning mechanism and regular grinding sometimes opens it. If this happens and the grinder tips over, you may spill peppercorns. This only happened a couple of times to me, but it did happen. The new Unicorn, however, has a tighter fitting ring over the loading hole, so hopefully it will stay closed and be less of a problem. This problem was also noted in Amazon reviews.

Conclusion

All in all they are both very good pepper grinders. If you are looking for grinding speed during hectic cooking sessions, then the Unicorn is probably the best choice. If you can sacrifice a bit of speed and want something that looks better, the Oliver Hemming is an excellent choice.

If you want to purchase the Oliver Hemming Spice Mill, Dream Icons has it for sale for $45, but shipping is $20 from the UK. The Unicorn Magnum Plus Pepper Mill is available from Cooking.com for $45 with $10 shipping. I purchased my Oliver Hemming off of eBay for around $20.

The Saveur 100 came out recently and I am just now going through it. The Jan/Feb issue consists of 100 tips, ingredients, food, restaurants, cooking tools, books and other related food insight.

From this issue, I am going to cull some of my favorites from the top 100, and the first one is The Fresh Loaf bread making website. I’ve never seen this site before, but it looks amazing and certainly deserves attention if want to make your own bread or already bake your own loaves.

According to the website The Fresh Loaf describes itself as providing “news and information for amateur bakers and artisan bread enthusiasts” and the site “contains featured recipes, lessons, book reviews, a community forum and recipe exchange, and baker blogs.”

The Fresh Loaf certainly does all of that, but the description also doesn’t do the site justice. Simply browse the baker blogs to get an idea of what you can do with the help of this site. In the blogs you will be lavished with picture after picture of fabulous looking bread with very detailed instructions on how it was created. Just looking at the pictures is inspiring (see above). So while the site does offer a lot of resources for the bread baker, even more importantly it offers inspiration.

The backbone of the site, however, is instruction. There is a bread baking handbook with useful information, and specifically I found the baker’s math section of interest as it gives you the basic proportions for ingredients and the math to adjust your recipes. There is also a lessons section that offers five instructionals such as “Your First Loaf,” “Glazing” and “Time and Temperature.” And if you ever have questions about baking a particular loaf or want to know what went wrong if you have less-than-satisfying results, there are plenty of places to post questions for individualized guidance.

This is a great site all around if you love bread.

About a month ago, I purchased from a kitchen store in Minneapolis a package of E-cloth cleaning rags. The saleslady swore by them enthusiastically, and I was intrigued but also a bit suspicious at the same time.

The cloth is the product of a British designer, Korean scientists, and Swedish innovation. Originally used in Swedish hospitals to clean with only water, these eco-cloths (E-cloths) are now produced in a wide range of specialized formats for home and kitchen use.

Essentially, E-cloths are microfiber rags specialized for cleaning kitchen countertops, stainless steel, glass and other surfaces in the home. I had been using microfiber rags for over a year for my kitchen cleaning and found it a big improvement over regular cotton cloths and sponges, but I was skeptical of the E-cloth especially considering the price tag. One cloth will run you about $10, and a package of two will cost $18. This was a sharp increase over my regular Target microfiber rags, and I couldn’t imagine how they would be that much better than comparable products.

So what has been my experience with the E-cloth? Well, the first thing I noticed when cleaning my granite countertops was that the cloth (the green one above) really gripped the surface much better than other microfiber. It almost felt abrasive, but it wasn’t. It also cleaned away dried, stuck-on food much quicker and better than my regular microfiber cloths. My first impression was very good, and three weeks on I am probably more sold on them.

Less impressive was the water spray bottle sold by E-cloth for $10. It billed itself as a water atomizer, but in the end it was just a good spray bottle. You could probably save your money and use a regular plant mister to achieve the same result. It is also rather small, so it is necessary to refill it frequently. With that said, having a dedicated spray bottle did help bring the experience of cleaning with just water together better, and I found that by having it was more likely to use the E-cloth rags as they should be — with water.

So to test this cloth out I continued to use it for a few weeks a couple times a day without washing it. I just rinsed it really well in very hot water between uses. My other microfibers would normally give out after 4-8 days and leave a very cloudy film on the granite countertop. Granted, this cloth was new, but it is still going strong after thee plus weeks with just rinsing.

I normally wouldn’t recommend this (lack of a) cleaning regime, but I did want to test real-world conditions. A lot of people use rags longer than they should and don’t fully follow care instructions. For instance, you shouldn’t use fabric softeners or bleach with the E-cloth, and they should also be washed at a high temperature or boiled in a saucepan. But let’s face it, in most cases the E-cloth will just be thrown in with the regular laundry with no concern for these recommendations. I imagine dryer sheets aren’t good for them either.

With these cloths, however, I am considering following the cleaning instructions and probably putting them in the dishwasher to clean. They really do grip the surface better, and after a few weeks, they still clean much better than regular microfiber rags. Even when the general purpose cloth left a slight film on the counter, I simply used the polishing cloth (blue one above) to eliminate it. They also work really well for computer screens.

So why do the E-cloths perform better than regular microfiber? Well, according to the E-cloth website, microfiber is just a general term for fine fibers that is not regulated. This product’s fibers are much smaller in diameter than run-of-the-mill microfiber and split to maximize cleaning. You can see from the picture what the difference is.

For instance, to quote their website, “Rated in denier (the unit for measuring fineness of fabric) a strand of cotton has a rating of 200. A human hair has a denier of 20 and a strand of silk has a denier of 8. The average microfiber has a denier of 1.0.  E-cloth fiber has a denier of 0.26.”

I am still going to test these rags out after a couple of cleanings with some new Target microfiber rags, but E-cloth does have my attention and I now use them every day. So far it has performed better than any other cleaning cloth I have used, and this doesn’t even take into consideration that I am spending less on specialized cleaning products. I am sure that over the life of the cloth I will easily recapture its cost with lower expenditures on cleaning products, and of course, it is good for the environment too.

You can buy E-cloth products at Amazon.

A few nights ago, I dined at a fabulous restaurant in Chicago called Alinea. I am not going to review the restaurant as it is well known as a great place to eat, and in 2006 Gourmet magazine named it the best restaurant in the country. It is good; very very very good, and I am not going to be able to contribute to that discussion.

What I will say is that the eating experience at Alinea under Chef Grant Achatz was a singularly amazing experience. And even though Chef Achatz’s style is often termed molecular gastronomy, I didn’t feel that to be the defining style. If I were to describe it I would say it is the foodie equivalent of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. It was haute cuisine, molecular gastronomy, a gourmet theme park, and a food fantasy land — it was essentially food cabaret at its finest.

Even when you enter the restaurant, it is whimsical and amusingly confusing. The entrance is angular and narrows and the ceiling height also drops as you progress down the hallway. You are part of an illusion. In fact, it is very much like the part in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory when they approach the tiny door entrance to Wonka’s factory. But here, as you walk towards the illusory small entrance, a motion sensor opens the real door to reveal a bustling restaurant full of food, diners, and wait staff. You have entered culinary Wonkaland.

But before describing the food, I have to say something about the service. It is impossible to compare the food service at Alinea to that of a regular restaurant; it is a different breed altogether. They take care of you in micro dining rooms within the restaurant, and their every move contributes to the wonder of your meal. At one point, a waiter asked, “I see you are drinking your wine with your left hand. Would you prefer to have your glass on the other side?” And that sounds absurd and made me chuckle at first, but once you eat there it makes sense. The staff setting the table were more akin to an architect drawing up plans or an artist constructing a mosaic. The placement of every dish was important and precise, so the placing of a wine glass was no less important. In other words — it made sense.

So now for the food. As opposed to most American restaurants, you cannot order off a menu. There is only a choice between a smaller ‘tasting’ menu and a larger ‘tour’ menu, and the menu changes about four times a year. The price and courses are set, and frankly the cost is not for the faint of heart, but save up and go at least once in your life if you take food seriously; the experience won’t disappoint. You can order wine from a wine list, but they also have a wine pairing menu that is amazing. It comes at a pretty steep price though, so be prepared to budget for it.

With that said, here are some of the wonder food highlights:

• A lightly breaded pheasant ball pierced with a small oak leaf twig and the leaves were smoldering to give a burning leaf aroma. You eat it like a twig skewer.
• A passion fruit injected with ingredients to make it taste like the famous New Orleans drink: a hurricane. The waiter uses a scissors to open the passion fruit top and you scoop out the fruit as it sits on a glass tube.
• A plate comes out on a pillow that is filled with nutmeg-air that slowly deflates and spreads the aroma of nutmeg as you eat.
• A gulp of potato soup in a small waxen dish comes with an acupuncture needle piercing the wax and suspending some butter, Parmesan, a potato ball and truffle shaving above the soup. You pull out the pin to drop the garnish into the soup and gulp it down. (This dish is pictured above.)

But I think the most amazing dish came at the end. A waiter came over and said, “Can I please remove your water glasses; it will be better that way.” So they clean off the table completely, and you are left to wonder what will come next. Then they place in the center of the table a silicon tablecloth, and two staff unfurl it to leave you with a rubberized table top. Yes, a rubber table. And you just sit there waiting expectantly for the next food wonder to arrive.

Next a young attendant comes out and organizes a set of dishes with zen-like precision on the far end of the table so we can’t see inside. Again, food and wonder are key. Then a chef comes out and proceeds to construct a desert that is placed directly on the rubber table top. He takes broad utensil strokes with a sauce here and there; dribbles tiny droplets; and describes each stroke in the process. It is more like a painting than a dessert. Then they deposit some chocolate that was chilled with liquid nitrogen right in the middle along with other ingredients in piles. That is dessert, and you eat it directly off the table.

At this point we were the first in the room to have dessert, and all eyes were looking at our table. People laughed, stared, and wondered and then did it some more. We were part of the entertainment, and it was an amazing dessert.

So that is Alinea: it is food and entertainment in the best of unimaginable ways, and you are part of it. Chef Achatz will almost literally bring out the snozberries and everlasting gobstoppers and you play your part and eat with amusing surprise. And though the staff aren’t Oompa Loompas, they provide just as much whimsy and wonder as they convey the food to your table. To this day it has been the most amazing eating experience of my life.

For those interested, there are a several online resources focused on Alinea. Two sites: Alineaphile and Alinea at Home are dedicated to all things related to the restaurant’s food and reproducing the dishes at home. They are great resources if you want to experiment with this style of food.

You can also visit the the official sister sites to Alinea such as Alinea Mosaic and Alinea Oenophilia. These sites will give recipes and information about the wines and equipment that accompany the restaurant’s food. You can even subscribe to a wine club where they will send you the wine-pairing bottles for each quarterly menu.

Lastly, if you want to know more about Chef Grant Achatz and his recent battle with tongue cancer that left him temporarily without the sense of taste, there is a good NPR story on him. It is very interesting.

Recently I wrote about Italian food resources on the web and mentioned Salumeria Biellese’s cured meats. After reading about the meat maker in Saveur magazine and browsing its site, I ordered the double variety pack, and I must say the meats are excellent. They have two variety packs on offer for a limited time from their website, so order now before supplies run out. I am sure the recent coverage will increase demand.

Out of the five meat varieties, the two I liked the most were the hot napolitana pork and the wild boar cacciatorini. The napoitana has a very good spice, and it took only about two days to finish a whole log of it. All of the meats were good, but I probably liked sampler A a bit better. These would be great additions to an upcoming holiday meal or a nice gift for a meat lover.

The shipping was quick, and though the site isn’t that high-tech it gets the job done. I also tried to order some rabbit and veal sausage, but they didn’t send that. I guess it is easier to ship dry-cured meats than fresh sausage.

You can see the variety packs on their website, here.

Butter for a long time was maligned, looked down upon, and seen as unhealthy, but it is great to see that it has comeback and its cooking place has been firmly re-established. In the October Bon Appetit, they pose the question “Is butter better?” They make the point that butter has less fat than olive oil and about 20 percent fewer calories, and the article mentions that lard and duck fat also have redeeming nutritional value. You can read the article here.

Of course to be a truly healthy food, one must consider the bad saturated fats versus the healthful monounsaturated fats, and butter does have fewer of these healthy fats and more of the bad stuff than lard, duck fat, and olive oil. But there is no denying that there is some value in butter too; you just have to moderate intake a bit more.

I personally love butter. While living in France, I would become giddy just walking down the dairy isle and looking at the great selection of butter (and yogurts). And tasting them changed me for life; there was no going back. European butter had more flavor and it was creamier.

The reason European butters generally taste better is due to the culturing and fermenting of the cream before making it into butter. In Europe this culturing process is standard practice but it isn’t in the US — though you can find more and more European-style butters being sold in the US now — both domestically made and imported.

The butter shown above is a premium hand-made one from France. Gourmet wrote in 2007 about how Jean-Yves Bordier, a boutique butter maker, was selling his product to many of the best chefs and restaurants in Paris. It is called Beurre Bordier, and though the English portion of the website wasn’t working when I visited it, you can still browse the site in French and see some wonderful butter.

Bordier hand churns his butter in Brittany, and he offers plain cultured, salted, smoke-salted, and seaweed butter. Bordier uses slightly soured cream from cows that graze on organic farms in Normandy and Brittany, and utilizes a wooden device that grinds the churned butterfat particles at a very slow speed to yield an exceptionally smooth butter. Salt and seaweed are added by hand. This article in Saveur talks about his process in more detail, but if you want to buy it you will have to go to France.

That butter sounds great, and one reason it also tastes better is that European butters have more fat. Taste in many cases equals fat, and domestic butter generally has a lower amount (80% fat) and European butters have 81-86% fat. That is one to six percent more flavor on top of production differences that make the butter creamer and more flavorful.

Cook’s Illustrated did a taste test of premium unsalted butters in November 2008, and even if you don’t live in Paris, you can still find good butter here. The tasters preferred Danish Lurpak but also recommended Vermont Butter and Cheese Company Unsalted Butter, Isigny Ste. Mère Beurre de Baratte, and Beurre de Chimay. Land O’Lakes Unsalted Butter was recommended too, though it was clearly plain compared to the flavor of the other varieties.

The San Fransisco Chronicle did a butter taste challenge for European-style butters, and Lurpak also did well, coming in second place. The butter of choice though was Challenge European Style, but it is only sold in western states. Plugra came in third, and you can find this widely throughout the US, including at Target stores. When tasting on itself, this butter outperformed Lurpak, which performed better for baking. In a different challenge, Food & Wine editors tried 20 butters and they chose Organic Valley’s Cultured Unsalted Sweet Cream as their winner.

Regardless of which brand you use, just remember to take butter out the fridge to let it soften and develop its flavors before using. Also it is best to keep your butter in a storage container in the fridge or wrap it tightly as it will absorb odors. It will also develop a rancid taste over time so try use it up within a month’s time, and if you won’t immediately be using it, keep it in a zip lock bag in the freezer. Butter keeps for about 4-6 months.

For storage, I personally use the Butter Bell Crock which inverts a butter cup over a vessel of water. This prevents the butter from going bad by eliminating air and light exposure, and you always have soft butter because you can keep it on the counter.

If you want to browse 30 good butters, Saveur has pictures and descriptions here. Many of the varieties may not be available in the US, but several of the brands are sold at stores and online. There is also an interesting article at saveur.com about making your own butter and they also have a good summary of types of butter.

For online ordering check out:
iGourmet
Zingerman’s
Marky’s
Vermont Butter & Cheese Company
Gourmet Library
Gourmet Food Store

Oh yeah, and as for me personally, I use Land O’Lakes for cooking, Lurpak on its own, and I am also trying right now an Italian butter from Delitia, which is made from the same cows from which parmegiano reggiano cheese is made. If you can’t find it locally, you can order it from Gourmet Library.

Some other suggestions if you want to try something new are Amish-style roll butter and goat-milk butter. Goat-milk butter is offered by several online retailers.

A few years back Food & Wine recommended the stone-ground grits from Charleston Grill ($10 for 2 pounds), and I ordered them. Then I kept on ordering them. Good stone-ground grits can make a fabulous dish, and even as a northerner I loved those Charleston Grill grits. If you want to order them, the restaurant has a website, but you will have to call them to order at 843.937.9142 as there is no online shop.

Then fairly recently in Alabama, I started using an organic blue corn grits from McEwen & Sons ($7 for 2 pounds) out of Wilsonville, Alabama. They were also great and the blue color gave the grits some flair, though I couldn’t tell much difference in taste between yellow or white corn. They all seem pretty much the same to me, and it is hard to compare them to the Charleston Grill grits because I used them in different recipes.

Also in Alabama is an excellent restaurant called Highland’s Bar & Grill, and they serve a wonderful creamy grits. I don’t know what brand of grits the chef, cookbook author, and restaurateur, Frank Stitt, uses but his recipe is really good. I’ve had them a few times and they never fail. You can find his recipe here relayed via Martha Stewart. Or you can buy his cookbook, Frank Stitt’s Southern Table, at Amazon.

Several cooking magazines have recommended Anson Mills out of Columbia, South Carolina. They produce heirloom grits for many restaurants worldwide, and the October Gourmet also recommends their Carolina Whole Hominy Quick Grits if you don’t want to spend the extra time preparing them. The picture above is of Anson Mills’ coarse ground yellow grits.

Of course a search of the foodie Chowhound and eGullet forums usually reveals an abundance of recipes and resources for every cooking topic under the sun — grits included. Here are some of the other recommendations from those sites on where to buy grits online. I am sure there are more sellers as they didn’t mention my two sources, but these will provide more than a good start at least. Keep in mind that shipping costs can be high, so the price per pound is only part of the bill, and sometimes the shipping is more than the cost of the product itself.

Charleston Favorites ($6 for 1 pound)

Bob’s Red Mill ($2.19 for 24 oz. bag) You can find this brand in most stores with a natural foods section.

Hoppin’ John’s ($7 for 2 pounds)

Falls Mill ($16 for 10 pounds, the minimum for mail order)

Adams Mill in Dothan, Alabama. There’s no website, so you must call 800.239.4233.

Carolina Plantation ($8 for 2 pounds)

Nora Mill Granary ($10 for 5 pounds)

Adluh ($2.50 for 1 pound)

Logan Turnpike Mill ($5.50 for 2 pounds)

Lastly, there are tons of recipes and opinons out there on how to prepare grits, and I won’t even try to enter this discussion, but on Bon Appetit’s site, they give a very basic explanation of the types of grits and also some tips that most people agree upon. You may want to check that out before delving into the very personal world of grits preparation and hundreds of recipes.

I’ve run into enough Italian food resources this last week that I thought I would put them all in one post. I guess October has been Italian month with cooking magazines.

Gourmet in the October 2009 issue recommend in their ‘Obsessions’ section the La Famiglia Delgrosso Pasta sauce. Delgrosso has eight different types of jarred pasta sauce. I know it isn’t fresh, but I think most of us cheat with jarred sauce every now and then. I haven’t tried these sauces, but you can find them at delgrossosauce.com.

Rancho Gordo, the heirloom bean provider out of Napa, says one of their highly sought after Italian beans is back in stock. They have Borlotti back in, which is the preferred bean in northern Italy for pasta e fagioli. According to Rancho Gordo, “They have a thin skin and make a lovely sauce, which is also why you find them so often in minestrone soups.”

In Saveur this month, there were a couple of interesting Italian food/drink resources. The first is Salumeria Biellese, which offers a variety of sausage and cured meats. This establishment in New York City has been preparing meats since 1925, and the shop has established relationships with many top chefs in New York and even makes cured pork jowls for Mario Batali. Salumeria Biellese sells nearly 80 types of sausages and meats and browsing the website will make your mouth water — if you eat meat that is.

Here are some examples:

• Rabbit & Chanterelles Sausage (marinated rabbit and sauteed mushrooms)
• Parsley & Cheese Pork Sausage (fresh parsley, a little red wine, and parmigiano)
• Raisins & Grappa Veal Sausage
• Rosemary, Garlic & Red Wine Lamb Sausage

But the dry-cured meats are the real draw. They are not pasteurized and are dry cured just as they did in the 19th century — very slowly. I counted six different soppressata and the wild boar cacciatorini sounds fabulous. They also have samplers (for a limited time) that you can order for a tasting of several cured meat offerings. You can find their meats at salumeriabiellese.com, and if you want to read the article you can go to saveur.com. The photo above is from the article, and shows a variety of their cured meats.

The last resource also came from the October Saveur, and it goes well with sausage. Italians are known for wine, but the northern area of Italy has a craft beer revolution apparently. You can read the article here. The bottles are big, I mean wine bottle size, but you can check out B. United International Inc. if you want more information and find them locally. The importer has a selection of 50+ Italian beers and ales on offer, but you can only buy direct if you are a wholesaler or retailer. They do, however, have a store locator for consumers that might help you in finding at least some of the brands mentioned in the article.

As far as online stores for Italian specialty food, you can also shop at Di Palo Selects out of New York. This site is well organized and has a good selection of specialty items. Other stores such as as iGourmet also have extensive imported food items to include Italian products. According to Food & Wine, look for the Italian tuna at iGourmet. And for cheese, Formaggio Kitchen has a great selection of Italian cheeses.

If you want to stock your pantry with some good imported Italian staples, Food & Wine had an Italian taste test challenge a couple years back with a variety of ingredients and foods such as polenta, capers, tuna, and honey. In addition to providing some good shopping advice, this article will point you towards several specialty online food stores where you can find a range of imported items. Other than that, there is no shortage of specialty Italian food shops on the web if you just search.