HAM AMBITION
Italian vet eyes pastrami crown
Deep in the Tuscan countryside, between a hill and a bleating sheep, Gianluca Tonelli tended to 17 pounds 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 aromatises the pastrami with cloves and Tuscan red wine, before selling it from a bright red food truck.
For Tonelli and pastrami, it has been love at first bite since that fateful day decades 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, or his ambition to become the pastrami king of Tuscany.
As Carnegie, Stage and many other traditional Jewish delis close in New York City, Tonelli, a 46-year-old equine veterinarian, is helping Italians acquire the taste for the Ashkenazi arteryclogging fare.
And as European populists rev up their base with nationalist appeals, Tonelli is the personification of globalisation.
He found his truck in France and has a baker in the small town of Gallicano imitating bread he brought back from Ireland. He has pictures of Satu Mare, Romania, and New York City adorning his attic.
Unlike homogenised hipster foodies who flock from trend to trend, Tonelli is that rarest of things, a true free spirit with the work ethic to perfect his passion.
And his passion is pastrami.
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; pointed out the hang gliders floating above (“I do that,” he said); and drove, at breakneck pace, to Torre del Lago. The town, best known as the home of the composer Giacomo Puccini, was 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 whet his appetite with stories about Katz’s. He made his pilgrimage to the deli in 2000.
Since then, he has become a student of pastrami, studying its history and even its etymology. Yet 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 mention pastrami, local residents just do not understand.
“Pastrami?” Valentino Donati, 84, the restaurant’s owner, asked with a bewildered look. After some explanation, he said Tonelli had to “make people understand”.
“When I opened up, no one knew what Valentino’s was,” he added, “and now it is famous all over the world.”
With those words of encouragement, Tonelli drove the winding roads home to his pastrami lab.
He said hello to his two sons and his dog and his pig and his in-laws, 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”, Tonelli said.
It was getting late, and the couple had to make it to Campi Bisenzio, a suburb of Florence, where the pastrami truck was parked for a street food fair.
Once there, Tonelli put on some klezmer music and arranged foam boxes filled with frozen bread. The boxes read, “Dr Tonelli Gianluca”. “They used to hold horse vaccines,” he said. He opened for business. Competition was stiff. One vendor sold “medieval sausages”. Another specialised in lampredotto, the classic Florentine sandwich made from the fourth stomach of a cow. The traditional Tuscan foods did well.
Domenico Guidotti, 60, who had driven five hours to sell his meat-stuffed olives from Ascoli Piceno, in Le Marche, came over to commiserate. “In Tuscany, they only know lampredotto,” he said. “They won’t try our olives.”
Tonelli lamented that he had to mix mustard with mayonnaise, a pastrami sacrilege, as a sop to Italian taste buds. “One asked me for ketchup,” he said. “I said no.”
He said he had once hoped to buy a second pastrami truck and then a third and canvas the nation. But now he felt down about Italy, its economic prospects and culinary closed-mindedness.
His dream, he said, is to put the truck on a boat to Ireland. “Nobody knows pastrami there,” he said, adding that it was a nation full of openminded people, fiscal benefits and less cuisine elitism. “In Ireland the food is great until they cook it.”
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. “It could find a niche here.”
A few minutes later, he came back for a second sandwich to go. One sandwich was plenty for Ilaria Bettazzi, 50, who said she found it delicious and very filling. “This is enough,” she said. “There’s not even room for an espresso.”
At 8.30pm, Tonelli took more sides of pastrami out to the cutting board and kept carefully sawing with his yellow knife. One potential customer seemed in doubt. Tonelli assured him.
“I first had it 20 years ago,” he said. “You can’t eat it every day, but it’s spectacular.”