Red Table Meat Co.'s Custom Salumi Program

Red Table Meat Co. rebuilt its business to work one-on-one with customers to create custom salumi during these uncertain times. And it’s selling out.

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Days into the March coronavirus shut-down, Red Table Meat Co. owner Mike Phillips saw two-thirds of his orders vanish and knew he had to lay off his whole staff. His nationally recognized, award-winning hams, salamis, and other Italian-style cured pork products mainly shipped to restaurants and retail, and everything was suddenly shut down. Phillips walked through his Northeast Minneapolis room-sized coolers, the ones hanging with salamis as fat and numerous as ears of corn in an autumn cornfield, and thought: All this perishable inventory, all the money I spent buying pigs to create everything I see—what now? 

It was a blow he couldn’t entirely get his head around. After founding the farm-to-charcuterie concept in 2014, Phillips had overcome one enormous logistical hurdle after another. Like climbing every mountain of money and paperwork to become an official USDA meat processor. Like fighting the war against American food safety customs of super-salt, super-acid, or super-preservative soaking that have made American salumi such a lesser category than Italian salumi. (Phillips uses the term salumi, as it seems to capture the category of various cured meats, including different larger whole-muscle cuts like speck.) Lately, things had been on the right track with national awards and strong distribution in New York City and California. But then when the pandemic hit, he had to scratch his spring sales trip throughout America’s southeast off his calendar and lay off his crew of some of America’s best salumi makers, leaving him rattling around his packed larder. 

“It was weird,” Phillips tells me. “For two and a half months it was just me here, alone. And this probably sounds crazy, but it was helpful. It gave me time to think about what matters, what’s really worth thinking about. I see so many other people just trying to do what they’ve always done, and I wish I could tell them: ‘Let’s have the world stop exchanging money right now. Let’s take a minute to think about what’s going on.’” 

For instance, Phillips thought, briefly: Pigs are being euthanized because the system of America’s worst-fed and worst-raised pigs, processed by America’s lowest-paid workers, is failing. I have a USDA plant—could I volunteer somehow? “But then I thought, No,” he says. “This is a system that’s been set up to fail, and now that the curtain is being pulled back and it’s failing, I don’t need to bail out a failing system. I need to focus on the farmers and people in the good system.” 

He considered his earliest days of charcuterie making. He remembered describing his original vision for American salumi production to his biking buddy Scott Robertson, who works for HealthPartners. Phillips recalled Robertson saying, “Great. Then you’ll be able to get a bunch of knuckleheads like me together and explain what heritage pork means, what heritage suppliers are like, and we’ll all make salami.” Now, 20 years later, Robertson volunteered to test drive the custom salumi idea. When I talked to him on the phone recently, Robertson was just leaving Red Table after picking up probably the rarest food in America: bespoke heritage single-farm pepperoni. 

It’s kind of a shocker, having an extremely rare consumer-involved, farm-to-your-individual-table, USDA-inspected salumi program now in Minneapolis. After deciding that the way forward was to find guidance in his original principles, connecting farm and customer through the middleman of skill, Phillips signed up Robertson and another friend, Matt Cimino, as the first customers. 

Here’s how this new rare thing works. Step One: Red Table connects you with a good farmer with a good pig. Robertson and Cimino were connected with a heritage Red Wattle pig from southeastern Minnesota’s Pork and Plants farm. The farm invoiced them directly, and arrangements were made for the hog to be slaughtered and delivered to Red Table’s manufacturing floor in the Food Building. (As of this writing, a pig was going for around $3 a pound, and an average pig in the Red Table program came in around 200–300 pounds.) 

Step Two: In preliminary phone conversations, Phillips walks you through the basic tradeoffs of charcuterie: You need a certain amount of lean meat and a certain amount of hard fat to make salami. If you remove lean meat from your equation, by say, wanting pork chops, you need to get it from somewhere else, like a ham. Time factors in, too—a prosciutto takes two years, a smaller ham maybe a year. After understanding what parts you have and what meat products you can get, you  custom-stack your board with the things you like to eat.

Red Table charges an additional $3 per pound for production and storage costs, though payments will be divided up according to when you receive your meats. So if you’re really going to wait a year for a ham, you can pay for it when you pick it up. Because of bones, water-weight loss, and so forth, Red Table guesses most final salumi ends up costing a customer around $10 to $12 per pound after farm costs, losses like water weight, and charcuterie costs are factored in. Retail prices for Red Table salumi hover in the range of $20 to $30 per pound. 

Step Three: Have your pig turned into single-farm, personally directed salumi. 

Step Four: Circle back to Red Table to pick up what Phillips made. Small-caliber salami takes about a month. Coppa, lonza, and larger salami take around three months. Big whole-muscle cuts like culatello, a sort of wine-cured ham, or speck take about a year. Red Table gives the head to neighboring Kieran’s Kitchen to make into ragu, which you can take home whenever convenient. 

Robertson is a convert. “I sent Pork and Plants a thank-you note for everything they did to make such a well-raised animal. And even though I cook a lot and have known Mike for years, I learned so much. The anatomy, what is used for what, it was incredible.” Robertson and Cimino walked out the door that first night with fresh pork ribs and soon received their first cured option, loads of pancetta. 

“The first thing I made was pasta carbonara,” Cimino told me. “It’s my seven-year-old’s favorite dish. I’ve made it a million times. But I was just focused on the underlying pork in a way I don’t think I’ve ever been. I mean, Red Table is fantastic; I really thought it tasted better than other pancettas, but things taste better when you have that connection, when you have a love of where it came from.” Cimino gave packages of his pancetta to all his cook friends on his block. One, on a COVID baking kick, returned to him a loaf of pancetta bread. “This is way better than the usual: everyone on the block giving each other zucchini,” laughs Cimino.

It’s not just neighbors on the block who are electrified by Red Table’s new custom program. Tim McKee, James Beard Award–winning chef, told me, “The idea of a single-source salumi, having the purchaser have some say in the direction of the salumi, blows my mind. It’s a chef’s dream to guide that process.” McKee is going to do a pig as soon as Red Table can come up with a working scalder, a device you need in order to leave the skin on a ham so that you can turn it into prosciutto. 

“As a chef, the reason this is exciting is because when I purchase salumi, I just buy it off a shelf; I have no involvement. Working with Mike, I can say, I want guanciale, so we’re going to have to cure the jowls. I was in Emilia-Romagna, and this woman was making culatello. Well, they make culatello in one place and one place only. I’ve never seen it anywhere else. But I can make it with Mike. And he’s better than he’s ever been. His salumi can stand shoulder to shoulder with any salumi I’ve ever tried. But what’s crazy is this is something that’s never been available to me as a chef, never mind available to someone at the consumer level. There just aren’t many things that have never happened in the world, and this is one.” 

McKee is not alone in his excitement. As of this writing, Red Table has sold all the slots for custom salumi until more hogs are available for the holidays. It will also have more pigs in the spring, as well as a collection of customers who know things about salumi you can only know after understanding the fullness of the process. 

And that, to Phillips, is maybe the program’s greatest value. In a way, throughout his career, all he ever really wanted was for Americans to appreciate good ham and salami. He wanted us to know the difference between a young fresh salami in perfect condition the first couple weeks of its release—when it’s fruity, easy to slice, fragrant, and energetic—and an old salami that gets salty, hard, and winey. “In this country people are used to eating over-dry, kind of on the dead side salami,” he says. The supply chain makes it that way, with distributors buying large quantities to save on shipping costs, then accidentally aging them till they sell everything they’ve got. After years of evangelizing good salami and never knowing if his words were sinking in, he’s getting to do the thing he always wanted: convincing customers to see what he sees and value what he values. 

“This year ended up being a really great point for me to reset,” says Phillips of the unforgettable COVID season when he went down to no business and then started building  up again. “I got to decide what’s important and what’s not.”

1401 NE Marshall St., Mpls., 612-314-6057, redtablemeatco.com