“Heavy Metal Sausage Co…is a combination of more than just what the typical person would think of coming into a deli and overall just helping build a community around locally sourced products.” Bon Appétit spends a day on the line with Pat Alfiero, chef and co-owner of Heavy Metal Sausage Co. in Philadelphia. This exciting new deli is serving up forgotten meats from around the world and even turns into a restaurant, Trattoria, at the weekends–most importantly, they pride themselves on using predominantly locally sourced products.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 [MUSIC]
00:02 Heavy Metal Sausage Company is a deli and
00:05 then it is a restaurant on Thursday and Friday nights.
00:09 [MUSIC]
00:10 The mix of meat products available are definitely spanning multiple cultures.
00:17 We push into the realm of unseen products like Zungen Blutwurst, Laborwurst.
00:23 The shop is a combination of more than just what the typical person would think
00:28 of coming into a deli and overall just helping
00:32 build a community around locally sourced products.
00:35 [MUSIC]
00:44 >> Hey, my name's Pat Alfiero.
00:47 I'm the chef and co-owner at Heavy Metal Sausage Company.
00:49 So why don't you guys come on in?
00:50 [MUSIC]
00:53 So this is the shop.
00:54 All 250 square feet of it.
00:56 Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from 10 AM to 4 PM, we are a deli.
01:00 Thursday and Friday nights,
01:01 we transform into a restaurant that we call Trattoria.
01:06 The deli case changes depending on the day.
01:08 So this is all of our production space.
01:11 We have a very simple layout, butcher block, a little low boy over there,
01:14 a pot scooper for dinners at night, a few induction burners and an oven.
01:17 Man, why did I do this?
01:20 It's 9 AM, our dishwasher broke, and we're gonna fix that first.
01:25 The grounding prong broke off in the outlet.
01:29 So until we can call our dishwasher company who we rent this from,
01:33 I'm gonna put a new plug on it so we can use it for today and
01:37 probably tomorrow, probably for the next week.
01:40 Calling a repairman does not give me an item to then make money off of.
01:44 In a business that's our size, those outside expenses can be what could
01:49 damage us or hurt us if there's too many of them.
01:53 All right, let's see if this works.
01:56 I'm not an electrician, don't do what I do, call someone if you need to.
01:59 Yay.
02:01 Okay, now we can prep.
02:05 So it's 9.32 and we're really far behind now.
02:09 The first task is we have to pull the beef out of the oven that braised overnight.
02:13 The beef is for Trattoria service Thursday and Friday night for entree.
02:17 So these are beef shanks that we got from Happy Valley Meat Co-op.
02:22 We took them off the bone, we braised them in red wine and
02:25 some veal stock and a whole lot of onions.
02:28 Today we're gonna reduce the braise and
02:31 turn it into somewhat of a coating stew-ish sauce.
02:36 So the Trattoria dinners, we wanna put out grandma vibes.
02:39 So trying to do some like classical things but
02:42 stew them in like a fun way that's maybe a little different.
02:45 So this is loosely based off of a Sicilian dish where the wine is Marsala
02:50 instead of red, but there is still like lots of onions and
02:55 you reduce the braise and caramelizes the onions.
02:58 Tomorrow we'll caramelize everything and then mix everything back together.
03:02 [MUSIC]
03:04 Ow, we're coming down.
03:05 [MUSIC]
03:08 So this will go in the walk-in, tomorrow we'll portion them out for
03:10 dinner service.
03:11 This is Alessandra, this is our lonely full-time employee.
03:15 >> [LAUGH] >> She's just down here kind of
03:17 chipping away at some things.
03:18 So I'm just finishing up mustard, got the chickens butchered and
03:22 now I'm gonna move on to Zugen Wladwurst.
03:24 >> Alessandra, her main role here is to take care of heavy metal as the deli.
03:30 And then I'm, especially on Wednesdays, are focusing on Trattoria and
03:34 getting big projects done for that.
03:37 So next up, we're gonna strain some stock, roast some bones,
03:40 get another stock running, so let's get to it.
03:42 [MUSIC]
03:44 So it's about 10, 15, this will be a duck and goose body stock.
03:47 So we're gonna roast bones, get them in the pot.
03:49 This is a goose body, this is a duck body.
03:51 Geese are definitely a little bit bigger.
03:53 The geese, we save the bodies for stock for us.
03:56 Then we take the whole breast plate off, dry age that for our December menus.
04:00 We braise the legs, dry age and roast the breasts.
04:03 It's a nice dish, it's fun.
04:04 We did it last year and I wanna do it again this year.
04:06 The difference in flavor between geese and duck,
04:09 I find that geese are a little bit more hearty.
04:12 They have a little bit more oil, they're a little bigger, so
04:15 they have maybe a little more texture.
04:17 And they definitely hold up to dry aging pretty well.
04:20 So for the ducks, we remove the breasts, remove the legs,
04:23 save the bones for stock.
04:24 Or now that it's soup season, we will put the bones in the case and
04:28 sell them for people who wanna make soup at home.
04:30 So we're just gonna load these in the oven.
04:32 [BLANK_AUDIO]
04:35 These will roast at 400 for, I don't know, 45 minutes,
04:38 half an hour until the color is right.
04:40 Then we'll throw them in the pot.
04:42 We have a delivery coming, it's 1020.
04:45 We're gonna go grab that.
04:46 It's mostly wheat berries and flour.
04:48 We are going to be milling some of those wheat berries to make our own flour.
04:52 [MUSIC]
04:57 We mill about 50% of our flour here in-house.
05:01 At least for our breads, we mill all of our pasta flour in-house.
05:04 There are some flavor benefits to milling.
05:06 When you use white flour, it all kind of tastes the same.
05:09 But when you use whole wheat, fresh milled flour,
05:12 you're really getting a lot of different flavors.
05:15 To the point where we'll actually, depending on the pasta sauce,
05:18 change what flour we use to best match that sauce.
05:23 When we're milling, I've found that I have an almost allergic reaction to
05:27 the flour dust, the rise, the worst of all of them.
05:31 I typically wear a mask while I'm milling.
05:33 This is actually a common thing for bakers as well.
05:35 You get, I think it's called baker's lung, but it's just from inhaling flour.
05:39 We're milling about five kilos of rye.
05:44 And then after the rye's done, and I'm gonna weigh that out now,
05:47 we're gonna mill about two and a half kilos of hard wheat.
05:51 That will then get sifted.
05:52 It's important to sift it, I think for two reasons.
05:55 The first is, we don't really, as a people, enjoy whole wheat pasta all that much.
06:01 I think that it definitely has this connotation of being like a health food,
06:05 and like you have to suffer to eat it kind of feeling.
06:08 The other thing is that structurally,
06:10 it's easier to build gluten when there's no bran in the way.
06:14 So the bran essentially acts like little razor blades when you're trying to
06:18 make a dough.
06:19 And if you don't wanna deal with those little razor blades,
06:21 then you just sift it out.
06:23 Super simple, we have a sifter.
06:25 It's got sieves, put the flour in it, turn it on, it vibrates, sifts the flour.
06:30 We used to do this by hand, it sucked.
06:31 Now we don't do it by hand, it doesn't suck.
06:34 [MUSIC]
06:38 So it's 11 o'clock, it's time to get the second smoke on these ring bologna
06:42 that we make in house.
06:43 We use our oven, which isn't a smoker, but we've made it into a smoker.
06:47 So we pretty much take a pan of wood chips like this.
06:50 These are coming from one of our farmers who had a bunch of fruit trees that they
06:53 took down, chipped them up, and now sell them as firewood, which is really useful.
06:57 We light it, close the door, and
06:59 then we control the smoke level by controlling the fan speed.
07:03 So the higher fan we do, the harder it'll smolder, the more smoke it creates.
07:07 The second smoke brings it to the internal temperature it needs to be to make it food
07:12 safe and ready to eat, so 155 degrees for these.
07:16 And then the second smoke also kind of solidifies the beautiful amber color
07:20 of the smoked meats.
07:21 I grew up with ring bologna, and it's something that's near and
07:24 dear to my heart, and I wanted to give it to Philly.
07:27 And I'm just really proud of the fact that we've been able to do this,
07:30 not having the necessarily proper pieces of equipment to do so.
07:34 So before the day gets away from me, I want to introduce my partner, Melissa.
07:39 She does almost all the front of house and
07:42 all the back end stuff that keeps the business running and humming away.
07:46 >> Just getting the menus all set to send out to the dinner guests this week.
07:51 We are a BYOB, but I do like to come up with pairings every week for our guests.
07:56 I am a certified sommelier, so I like to kind of lend people a hand in choosing
08:01 what they bring in for dinner each week.
08:03 I mean, it's a small space, so we can max do 14 people.
08:08 So it does have a communal setting.
08:10 Up until very recently, we lived upstairs, so
08:12 it is very much like coming into our home.
08:15 [MUSIC]
08:18 >> It is 11.30 right now.
08:20 Alessandra is going to be doing the Zunigin Blue Horse.
08:23 It's been here since the shop opened.
08:25 So it's an all pork sausage that is mixed with blood and
08:29 cured pork tongue stuffed into a large diameter casing.
08:32 And then we use these as like a cold cut deli meat.
08:35 We double grind to finely ground sausage.
08:38 It'll allow the sausage to become more homogenous, similar to bologna.
08:43 You wanna grind on the larger die first, so we don't build up too much friction,
08:48 cuz heat's the enemy here, and we don't want the fat in the meat to get too warm.
08:53 If it does, it will not be able to bind itself together with the blood and
08:58 everything else that's in it, and
08:59 it will break out of its homogenous mix while it's cooking.
09:03 >> I was not someone who grew up eating blood products, so
09:06 this was definitely something that I was admittedly apprehensive to.
09:10 I think it's a dynamic sausage to have.
09:12 I love having it on the menu.
09:14 It definitely takes a moment for people to digest and
09:17 understand what we're doing with it.
09:19 But I think that it's a great example to showcase at least one organ.
09:24 So you have these pockets of the tongue that are really beautiful and
09:27 are contrasted with the blood.
09:30 I think it's awesome.
09:31 It's a really sturdy, hearty sandwich overall,
09:34 served on rye with some pepper relish, lettuce, and garlic mayo.
09:39 >> And then from this point, we will mix in the blood and pork skin puree.
09:44 I wanted to do a blood-based deli meat mostly for me, but
09:48 also to get people to start looking at things a little differently.
09:52 And I think that maybe even just in our little bubble, we've been able to do so.
09:56 >> So ring bologna's done on its second smoke.
09:58 These will air dry for about an hour.
10:01 That'll help the color deepen and get around the whole thing.
10:05 Oxidization will occur, and that helps with color development in smoked sausages and
10:10 smoked products.
10:11 And then we'll get them in the walk-in when they're ready to go in.
10:13 [MUSIC]
10:17 So it's about 12 o'clock.
10:18 We're gonna get our dough made.
10:19 The dough is for pasta for this weekend's trattoria dinners.
10:23 It will be a ravioli that's gonna have a sheet filling of some form,
10:27 most likely some chilies, some dried oregano, maybe a little cheese.
10:32 We're still workshopping it, the old brain hole.
10:34 We get our eggs from Horseshoe Ranch.
10:37 This is their words, best damn eggs, and I agree with that.
10:40 We'll set this to one.
10:41 We'll get it rocking.
10:42 We'll just add our eggs.
10:44 And this will mix for about ten minutes or so.
10:47 We'll let it do its thing.
10:49 While that's mixing, we're gonna start mixing some bread.
10:52 First of five breads that we're gonna be making today is the focaccia.
10:58 Because we don't really sell bread,
11:00 I don't like to consider us in the same realm as a bakery.
11:03 I'm especially being friends with a good amount of bakers in the city.
11:07 They are so much more talented than I am.
11:09 I've just kind of figured out how it works best for us.
11:13 The next bread we're gonna do is the panner.
11:15 This is a northern Italian rye bread.
11:18 We use this for our sandwich bread.
11:21 And then we also use it in the dinners as a part of our bread service.
11:26 This does not get mixed in the mixer.
11:28 This is all hand.
11:29 If, like, three years ago, you would have told me that I was gonna make
11:32 the same bread recipes every day for a year,
11:35 I probably would have told you that you're f***ing nuts.
11:37 'Cause, like, I just move so fast.
11:39 Like, I wanna change and I wanna...
11:41 But, like, the bread is, like, you can make the same dough every day
11:44 and it's different every day and it's frustrating and interesting and...
11:48 So now we're gonna pull the pasta that's ready.
11:50 I'll give it a quick knead, make sure it's good.
11:52 And then we'll wrap in the plastic wrap.
11:56 It'll soften out a little bit in about an hour or two, hydrate fully.
12:01 And then we'll be able to roll some pasta.
12:03 It's now 2 o'clock.
12:07 Alessandra's gonna start stuffing zingan blutwurst
12:10 that you saw her mix earlier.
12:12 We're gonna start with capicola.
12:13 And the capicola's gonna be stuffed by hand.
12:15 So, yesterday, what I did was I cured some pork,
12:21 let it sit overnight.
12:23 And so now we're ready to go.
12:25 They get compressed to kind of eliminate any air pockets.
12:28 And then once it's as tight as possible, then we cook it off.
12:32 It has a really lovely, subtle warmth to it.
12:37 We add Calabrian chilies in.
12:39 And I love that it's more of a disjointed deli meat.
12:44 It's not a homogenized one,
12:46 so you really get to see the result of this cubed pork.
12:50 It's a circular tying motion,
12:52 so we're really trying to compress it as much as possible
12:55 and eliminate as much air as possible.
12:58 So by using, like, centrifugal force,
13:00 it makes it a little bit easier than sitting here
13:03 and tying it on, like, on a surface.
13:05 Once we're done, I double knot it.
13:09 We cut the edges off so it can actually fit in the oven.
13:12 We always perforate the casings after we're done stuffing
13:15 to allow for some air.
13:17 And then we're gonna move to Zucchin bloodwurst.
13:19 So now we're actually gonna use the stuffer.
13:21 So what we're gonna do is we're gonna take
13:23 our Zucchin bloodwurst farce.
13:25 We're gonna put it into this capsule.
13:27 And it's important that when you're putting it in
13:30 that we're not incorporating too much air.
13:33 Alrighty, we are in.
13:39 Can't wait to find out later
13:40 if I got sausage in my armpit or not.
13:42 - I bet not.
13:43 [laughs]
13:44 - It's important to really have, like, a continuous flow
13:48 and be steady with how you're cranking.
13:51 All right, so we're at the end.
13:53 And there she is in all her glory.
13:55 Pat, you wanna come feel?
14:01 - Yeah.
14:02 Pop these first.
14:03 - Yeah.
14:04 So we're gonna hang these, and then once we're ready,
14:07 we're gonna put them into the oven.
14:08 They're gonna cook in perforated pans
14:10 for about three hours.
14:12 And then they'll go downstairs to be hung again.
14:14 And then we'll be ready to go for tomorrow
14:16 for service, for retail, for sandwiches.
14:19 - While under pressure, it's being cooked,
14:21 and it's expanding.
14:22 It's pushing out liquid, it's pushing out gelatin.
14:24 And then as it cools down, it all contracts back together
14:27 into a solid, sliceable thing.
14:30 All right, it's three o'clock.
14:32 Now that those are in the oven,
14:33 we're gonna start making a filling for our raviolis.
14:37 [upbeat music]
14:39 We kinda make these things up as we go.
14:41 We had rendered a bunch of sheep fat two weeks ago,
14:44 and we saved all the particle bits
14:46 that were left over from that rendering.
14:49 We're gonna take that, and we're gonna turn it
14:50 into a pasta filling with ricotta.
14:52 We have some beef filling here that was from another batch
14:56 that we'll fold in.
14:58 We'll probably give it some spices,
14:59 maybe some Calabrian chili, some coriander,
15:02 a little bit of garlic.
15:03 We'll see what happens.
15:04 I don't know yet.
15:05 We're gonna be using the dough from earlier
15:07 that we used to also mill
15:09 and make with all those beautiful eggs.
15:12 It's really just like looking at
15:14 what we have available to us,
15:16 looking at what we need to get rid of,
15:18 looking what maybe I spent too much money on,
15:22 and now I need to make some money back.
15:24 [laughing]
15:27 The nice thing with it is that it's already cooked
15:30 and everything.
15:32 I have an idea of what the sauce is gonna be like.
15:34 White wine, some chilies, very straightforward,
15:37 maybe some dried oregano.
15:39 So I really don't wanna overly spice the filling
15:43 if I'm gonna have those things as the sauce.
15:46 I also really love making people feel
15:51 like they just ate way too much
15:53 and have to go lay on a couch.
15:57 It's such a good feeling.
15:58 Until Melissa tells me that I have to go do something
16:00 and then I get up, reluctantly.
16:03 Living and working with your life partner,
16:06 I think, is pretty tough
16:07 and we go through highs and lows.
16:11 Melissa's over there waiting for me.
16:13 What's this mother [beep] gonna say?
16:15 [laughing]
16:16 - Being able to have somebody that understands
16:18 everything that you're going through
16:20 and is right there with you is really nice
16:23 and not everybody gets to experience that.
16:25 If we can survive this, we can survive anything.
16:28 - We just finished filling, it's good to go.
16:29 So now we're gonna just sheet out some pasta.
16:31 We use this little handy dandy ravioli mold.
16:34 So we'll do this fold
16:36 and then we'll do a couple double folds
16:37 until it gets the right width
16:39 and then we'll do our final roll through.
16:41 So we just put in little balls of filling
16:46 and put this sheet over top.
16:48 Very nice little sheet ravioli.
16:53 Cool, that's it.
16:58 Raviolis are made.
17:00 All right guys, it's five o'clock.
17:02 We got some pumpkins to roast, some vegetables to steam,
17:06 some ricotta to whip, it never really ends.
17:08 So you guys gotta get out of here.
17:10 Thanks for coming in
17:11 and please swing in and eat some of our food.
17:15 Okay, bye, go birds.
17:16 (upbeat music)
17:18 (dramatic music)