The charcuterie shop has always been a friendly place where life stories and chats are exchanged between a PDO ham and a mature cheese. Once upon a time, every neighbourhood in Rome had its own trusted charcuterie shop, but today these are disappearing, being replaced by large-scale distribution, which unfortunately is often unable to do justice to the absolute quality of the products that our land can offer. Hence the idea of opening a dedicated charcuterie counter, where the love of good food is expressed among sumptuous knife-cut hams, tasty sausages and inviting cheeses: many rare little gems to be discovered, tasted and loved forever.
The charcuterie of yesteryear, with a genuine spirit and rich in refined products
The charcuterie counter: a triumph of flavours
At the charcuterie counter you will find a selection of five hand-cut hams, four Italian and one Spanish, the famous Jamón Joselito, regarded as the best ham in the world. With its long, slender shape and fragrant, delicate meat, the king of hams’ aromatic fat is so succulent that it melts in your mouth!
Tuscany brings instead Cinta Senese hams from Casamonti, where pigs are raised in the wild and fed on natural GMO-free grasses when the woods are low on food. The meat is dark, super tasty and well marbled.
Then you have the Prosciutto Bazzone by Antica Norcineria, which is at its best when hand-cut, as we do here at Aventina. This ham has an intense fragrance and a strong, aromatic flavour. It is made from pigs fed on spelt flours, apples and pears that have fallen to the ground, chestnuts, acorns and on the so-called scotta, a by-product of local cheese factories.
Enter the Mangalitza ham, produced by Fabrizio Nocci at Villa Caviciana. It is made from a rare Hungarian breed whose meat is rich in unsaturated fats, antioxidants and omega 3, with a very low cholesterol content.
Another excellent artisanal product, this time from Apulia, is the Capocollo Santoro made in Martina Franca by Salumificio Santoro, which breeds the finest Murgia pigs following the ancient local pork-butchering tradition. Finally enter the San Daniele prosciutto from the Camarin ham factory, one of the best PDOs produced in the Friuli region: a cured ham salted only with Trapani sea salt and matured at length, until it becomes incomparably sweet and soft!
A selection of the best traditional cheeses
For our cheeses we have chosen Sicily, or rather La Paisanella, a historical reality born in the heart of the Nebrodi Park, the largest protected area in Sicily. Here, cheeses are made exclusively from the milk of native breeds that are free to graze at altitudes of up to 1,200 metres.
Among its outstanding cheeses, we have chosen the canestrato, a traditional Sicilian cheese matured for 12 months and made from a blend of sheep and cow, the delicious ricotta salata, excellent as a table cheese but equally perfect grated over pasta dishes and in meat and vegetable sauces, and the very special ricotta infornata, a new take on the classic Sicilian recipe: it is a ricotta made from sheep milk that is pressed and dried in the Sicilian sun for about a month and then baked in a wood-fired oven until it becomes brown in colour. A delicacy!
