Driving a love of pastrami
Deep in the Tuscan countryside, between a hill and a bleating sheep, Gianluca Tonelli tended to eight kilograms of pastrami soaking in a plastic container filled with brine.
With his trademark porkpie hat and grey goatee, Tonelli, a worshipper of what he called “pastrami culture” — “We started a klezmer band!” — sidestepped Dante, his family’s pet pig, and loaded freshly chopped cherry wood chips into a smoker.
In the house, he showed off heavy-duty cooking devices, including a pressure cooker in which he aromatizes the pastrami with cloves and Tuscan red wine, before selling it from a bright red food truck.
For Tonelli and pastrami, it has been a love story since the day years ago when he first visited Katz’s Delicatessen in Manhattan. “Pastrami has always stayed in his heart,” said his wife, Beatrice Baroni, 35.
For Trebbio and its environs around Lucca, it has been something a little less than love. But that has not dimmed Tonelli’s ardour. Tonelli, a 46-year-old equine veterinarian, is helping Italians acquire the taste for the Ashkenazi artery-clogging fare.
He found his truck in France and has a baker in the small town of Gallicano imitating bread he brought back from Ireland.
On a recent morning, Tonelli took a break from cured meats to work his day job. He picked up David Bandieri, 38, his friend and the saxophone player in one of his bands and drove, at breakneck pace, to Torre del Lago, where Tonelli had to attend to the teeth of some horses.
Tonelli first heard about pastrami 20 years ago, when a Scottish woman who gave him English lessons in the medieval town of Lucca first whetted his appetite with stories about Katz’s. He made his pilgrimage to the deli — “the top,” he called it — in 2000.
Since then, he has become a student of pastrami, studying its history, even its etymology. It has been a lonely pursuit. Despite some brief blips of interest in the past few years, as Italy has been swept by a street food fad, the sandwich has not caught on.
At lunch at Valentino, a venerable restaurant in the village of Pescaglia, waitresses brought out sausage, prosciutto, bowls of fresh tortellini. Bandieri says that when he mentions pastrami, local residents just do not understand.
Tonelli drove the winding roads home to his pastrami lab and checked on the sous vide machine, the Coldline blast chiller, the brine, the smoker. The smoker is connected to a tractor that he received “in exchange for artificially inseminating two horses.”
It was getting late, and Tonelli and his wife had to make it to a Florence suburb where the pastrami truck was parked for a street food fair.
Competition was stiff. One vendor sold “medieval sausages.” Another specialized in lampredotto, the Florentine sandwich made from the fourth stomach of a cow. The traditional Tuscan foods did well.
But then, as night fell, more and more people came to try the pastrami. Tonelli became busy explaining the spices and long cooking process.
Roberto Gondolini, 46, ordered his first pastrami sandwich, inspired to try one by television shows about street food. “I like it a lot,” he said.
A few minutes later, he came back for a second sandwich to go.