Culatello di Zibello

Culatello is made from the inner muscle of the pig's hind leg, the part that sits protected inside the bone and rind of a prosciutto. The butcher bones the leg out by hand, strips away skin and outer fat and is left with a pear-shaped piece of three to five kilos. The rest of the leg becomes a separate, cheaper cut called fiocco.

That piece is salted, massaged with pepper, garlic and white wine, stuffed into a pig's bladder and tied by hand into a tight string cage. Then it hangs in an unheated, unconditioned cellar for a minimum of ten months under the protected designation, though the pieces worth the money have had eighteen to thirty-six.

The protected name is Culatello di Zibello DOP, granted in 1996 and restricted to eight small towns on the Po. Anything labelled just 'culatello' comes from outside that zone or outside those rules. It can be good; it should not cost the same.

Sweeter and softer than any prosciutto you have had. The salt is present but restrained, and what dominates is a delicate, almost floral sweetness: producers describe it as violets, and once you have been told that, it is hard to taste anything else.

The texture is the real surprise. Because it ages inside a bladder in a humid cellar rather than in dry air, it stays moist and yielding, closer to a very fine ham that has never been allowed to dry out. A slice folds and clings rather than snapping.

Under it all is a note of cellar and damp stone, the same character you find in a wine that has been kept underground. That is not romance: the humidity of the Po fog is a functional part of how it is made.

Do not cook it. Culatello is sliced and eaten, and the only preparation that matters is temperature: take it out of the fridge half an hour before serving, because cold flattens the aroma completely.

Slice it thin but not transparent. Paper-thin slices dry out within a minute and lose the moist texture that is the whole point. In the Po valley it is still cut by hand with a knife, which gives slightly thicker, irregular slices; a slicer is fine, but slice to order rather than in advance.

Serve it with plain bread and good unsalted butter. That combination is the local orthodoxy, and it works: the butter softens the salt and stretches out the sweetness. Fried dough (torta fritta or gnocco fritto) is the other classic partner. Melon and figs, which suit prosciutto, overwhelm culatello.

If it must go into a dish, add it raw at the very end: draped over a finished risotto or a plate of tortelli.

A whole piece hangs in a cool, humid room between 12 and 16 °C. A domestic fridge is dry and pulls water out of the meat, so without a cellar the sensible purchase is half a piece or a portion sliced to order. Once you cut into it, cover the cut face with a cotton cloth soaked in dry white wine and renew the cloth every two or three days, or brush the surface with a thin film of butter or lard. Treated that way an open piece holds a couple of months, drying slowly and tasting more concentrated.

Vacuum packs keep to the date printed on them and are convenient, but they need opening at least an hour before serving: straight out of the bag the meat smells shut in and flat, and after thirty minutes in the air it comes back. Slices cut at a counter are for the same day, because at that thickness the edges darken and dry within hours. Freezing is not advised: the thawed slice comes out watery and loses its softness.

On a whole piece the bladder should be tight to the meat, the tying visibly done by hand with irregular knots rather than an industrial net, and the Consorzio brand burned in with the words Culatello di Zibello. The film of mould on the outside belongs there and says the piece was aged in a damp cellar. Cut, the slice is ruby red with veins of white fat, never yellow, and it should be soft, almost slack, and faintly moist; a dry or tight culatello was aged somewhere too dry. The smell is sweet and cellar like, with a floral note the producers call violet.

Two close relatives are often sold as the same thing. Culaccia is a culatello left with its rind and aged without the bladder; fiocco is the complementary cut from the same leg. Both are good and both cost far less. Outside Italy the word also appears on pieces made nowhere near Zibello, so the consortium mark is what to look for. Price is the blunt test: real DOP runs roughly $80 to $130 a pound or £15 to £22 for 100 g.

Culatello di Zibello DOP is not widely exported, and in the United States the genuine DOP article has historically been hard to import, so most 'culatello' on US shelves is a domestic or non-DOP interpretation. Italian specialists such as Eataly and dedicated salumi importers are the realistic route; expect $90–160 per pound for anything credible.

In the UK, Italian delicatessens and online grocers including Sous Chef and Valvona & Crolla in Edinburgh carry it, usually pre-sliced in 80–100 g packs at £12–20, or vacuum-packed half pieces. Buying it in Italy remains far cheaper: €60–90 per kilo whole.

Check for the Consorzio brand mark reading Culatello di Zibello and for hand-tied string with irregular knots. If a whole piece is cheap, it is fiocco, culaccia or out-of-zone culatello: all legitimate products, none of them the DOP.

The eight DOP towns sit on the left bank of the Po west of Parma: Busseto, Polesine Zibello, Soragna, Roccabianca, San Secondo Parmense, Sissa and Colorno. Antica Corte Pallavicina at Polesine Zibello, run by the Spigaroli brothers, opens its riverbank cellars to visitors: rows of hanging culatelli tagged with the names of people who reserved them years earlier.

Go in November, when four consecutive weekends of pork festivals run across the plain under the collective name November Porc, rotating between Sissa Trecasali, Polesine Zibello, Roccabianca and Fontanellato. Fog is likely, which is exactly the point.

The same short drive takes in Verdi's birthplace at Le Roncole, the Rocca at Soragna and the ducal palace at Colorno.