Chris LaVeque, owner of El Salchichero butcher shop. (Photo by Chip Scheuer)
This is part of an in-depth, multi-part look at Santa Cruz's artisan food movement: Intro .html| Pizza.html | Ice Cream.html | Bakeries.html | Meat.html | Jam, Snacks and More.html
When Chris LaVeque says the word “artisan,” he says it like that—with quotation marks around it, as in, “I don’t really consider what we’re doing [finger quote] ‘artisan.’”
The owner of El Salchichero butcher shop, 28-year-old LaVeque has a round, rosy-cheeked face, but a voice as deep and authoritative as a professional athlete. Upon further reflection, he reconsiders.
“I’ve never thought about what the definition of artisan meat would be,” he says. “Small-scale production with pride, I guess. We are immensely proud of what we do.”
For its handcrafted bacon, cured meat and salami, the sunny West Side shop allots entire days to breaking up a cow or pig and taking care to use each piece—bones are sold for soup stock and even the tendons and beef trim go into a house-made dog food.
LaVeque also owns the throwback nature of what El Salchichero is doing. “No one does whole animal butchery anymore,” he says. “You can call a lot of places and be like, ‘I need five cases of ribeye,’ and that’ll come from six or eight different cows. What happens to the rest of the cow? No one knows.” Of handcrafted salami, which must be aged for three months at a pH of exactly 4.6 to let the flavors intensify, he says no one closer than San Francisco is doing anything similar. “That’s a total lost art that we’ve brought back. No one knows how to do it anymore. It’s kind of cool that we’re doing it.”
Fogline Farm is also trying to bring back something that’s been lost in the age of industrial farming. Though you wouldn’t know it from the way things are done at most large-scale farms, pigs are traditionally forest-dwelling herd animals. Their natural proclivity is to travel in small groups, continually moving through the landscape in search of new food. In the Santa Cruz Mountains just above Soquel, the pigs at Fogline Farm get to do just that.
“We mimic their natural patterns in the way we raise them,” says Fogline co-owner Jonathan Wilson, who goes by Johnny. Fogline’s pigs are moved to fresh ground two, sometimes three times a week.
Fogline’s handcrafted sausages are made in small batches of 10-15 pounds at a time and flavored with herbs, spices and produce grown on the farm. Co-owner Caleb Barron says their meat is moister, more tender, and has a richer flavor than pork sold at the grocery store—so much so that it sometimes throws first-time customers off.
“Ninety percent of our customers from the farmers market say, ‘Oh, a pork chop. I’ll try it.’ And then they come back and they’re like, ‘What is this? This is the best pork chop we’ve ever had,’” says Wilson.
“And we tell them, ‘it’s pig,’” says Barron. —Georgia Perry
