It all started with bresaola. I had arrived in the old Swiss village of Gruyères to stage with my friend Frédéric Médigue. He was in his new position as chef⁄manager of the Hostellerie Saint-Georges. I think the year was 2003, but it may have been a year later. The set-up here was much different than his previous position where he was the chef⁄owner of a small hotel and Michelin one-star restaurant in the village of Amondans in Eastern France. There, meal service at lunch and dinner was directed toward the crowd that made the 26-km drive down from Besançon or even the 100-km trek up from Switzerland. This was fine dining. In Gruyères, tourists stumbled into the restaurant seeking fondue and raclette, neither of which was on the menu. Each morning, as part of the breakfast provided for overnight guests, there would be a charcuterie plate. One of the items on the plate was paper-thin slices of bresaola.

I had never seen or tasted it before, but I really liked it. Whenever I got a chance to grab a scrap, I did. One night when the restaurant was closed, and I was having dinner with the chef and his family in their apartment, he started the meal with a charcuterie plate filled with various hams and a copious amount of bresaola. It was all I could do to share the bresaola with the others at the table. From then on, whenever I saw bresaola in a store window or on a menu, I had to have some.

About the same time, I saw a recipe on the website for Bay Café, a now long off-the-air television program, for a duck “prosciutto.” In the recipe, a duck breast was cured for 48 hours in salt and herbs and then dried for three to four weeks in the refrigerator. I tried the recipe, and it turned out okay, but a bit too complicated. For some reason (old age maybe?) I didn’t make the connection between dried duck and dried beef. I did eventually repeat a simpler version of the recipe to use as an amuse-bouche, and I then made the connection.

In 2007, when I started working at The Healthy Butcher in Toronto, I was pleased to find that they were fabricating their own bresaola. Maybe now I could learn how to make it myself. I asked the head butcher, Ryan Donovan, if he’d share the recipe with me, and he agreed. It turned out that the technique they used in the shop was really a function of their facility and not easily transferable to other sites. They had this complicated formula where they would move all their cured meats back-and-forth between the walk-in refrigerator with low temperature and high humidity and the ceiling of the work room which was warmer but with a lower humidity. This was not something I was going to duplicate at home.

The next piece of the bresaola puzzle fell into place in Oxford, England, in the summer of 2010. I was attending the annual Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. The subject was Cured, Fermented and Smoked Foods. On the last day, Len Fisher, a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Bristol and sometime radio personality, gave a fascinating and entertaining talk on water activity. The gist of his presentation was that if the water activity level was low enough, no microbe could grow in food. Water activity is related to moisture content in a non-linear fashion, but get the moisture content low enough and the water activity will also be lower. One of the theories as to why wooden cutting boards tend to be bacteria free is that their water activity level is too low to support bacterial growth. Although bresaola is not as dry as wood-like katsuobushi, it still feels quite hard and dry. (Maybe Len was on to something I could use?)

The last piece of the puzzle was solved in two stages. In the summer of 2011, I was traveling through Spain and looking at a lot of jamón serrano and jamón ibérico hanging out in the open. No one seemed too concerned with keeping these hams cold, or even cool. The difference between the two type of hams and their subgroups was the variety of pigs and the feed. Other than that, the processing was essentially the same: a one-week cure in salt followed by many months of air drying.

From Spain, I headed to another Oxford Symposium where one of the papers dealt with a small ham producer in Kentucky that prepared her hams in a similar manner. She’d start in early winter when the weather was cold so that by the time the meat was exposed to summer heat, the moisture level was quite low. The hams were never placed in a refrigerator throughout the entire process, just left to hang in open-air sheds.

Sometime that summer, I decided to start by drying a pork loin instead of a beef inside round. The loin could hang in my refrigerator without occupying too much space whereas a full inside round would occupy more than two-thirds of its capacity and be too heavy to hang from inside the top. So when my local meat purveyor put pork loins on sale, I purchased a nicely shaped one. I trimmed off the small strip of side meat and removed the silverskin. I now had 25-cm (10-in) length of a single muscle. I packed this in some coarse salt in a plastic container, and placed it in my refrigerator for 48 hours. At 12 hours, there was already a fair amount of water sitting in the bottom of the container, and next time I’ll probably reduce the cure time by half. At the end of the curing time, I rinsed the salt off the surface of the meat and dried the surface with absorbent paper.

To keep dirt and dust off the surface of the meat—not that my refrigerator is dirty or dusty inside—I sewed a single layer of unbleached muslin around the whole loin. This cloth bag also provided a convenient surface to attach a string to use to hang the meat from the ceiling of my refrigerator. And hang it I did. After a couple of weeks, I started to give the meat a little squeeze each day. I could feel the meat was shrinking inside its shroud, and each day it was a little stiffer than the previous one. When it no longer felt different from the previous day and the stiffness reminded me of wood, I declared it finished. The total drying time was about four weeks.

By drying the meat in a refrigerator set at 3 °C (37 °F), the level of bacterial growth is very low. This would be much too low for curing and drying salami-type products because some microbial growth is needed for flavor development. In those products there is a balance between temperature and humidity required to develop their characteristic flavor without spoilage. In my case, the refrigerator is not only at a low temperature, but there’s a device to remove the moisture from the air so frost doesn’t form. This low humidity also helps the meat dry faster than if it was just set in a cold room.

Once I unwrapped the dried loin, I had to decide what to do with it. How would I serve it? I used an electric meat slicer to cut the meat into paper thin slices. Because the slices were so thin, it was hard to perceive much flavor. I knew I had to multiple what flavor there was. I did this by rolling the slices into cylinders. I also decided that two simple pieces of romaine lettuce leaf harvested from far inside the head would add a second texture and counteract some of the dryness of the meat. A small dab of okonomi sauce was added to provide some sweetness to play against the saltiness of the meat. Everything was tied together with a chive, and a new amuse-bouche was born.