For three days in late January, Francois Vecchio taught hunters, homesteaders, notable island chefs and Oahu’s award-winning chef, Doug Kocol, how to butcher and preserve local pork. Despite being practiced for thousands of years, butchering by hand and crafting charcuterie
For three days in late January, Francois Vecchio taught hunters, homesteaders, notable island chefs and Oahu’s award-winning chef, Doug Kocol, how to butcher and preserve local pork. Despite being practiced for thousands of years, butchering by hand and crafting charcuterie are endangered techniques.
Charcuterie is the ancient art of transforming animal flesh into succulent meat products. Typically made with pork, it includes bacon, ham, sausage, salumi, terrines, galantines, pâtés, and confit. It’s the Spanish jamón, the Italian prosciutto and the Chinese lap cheong.
Eager students meet at Hukilau Lanai to learn the dying art from a master charcutier. Vecchio’s book, “Charcutier. Salumiere. Wurstmeister.” is clutched in their hands. A wild boar, which was caught and raised on a North Shore farm, lay splayed on a table next to Kauai’s Kaneshiro Farms hogs. Vecchio, a retired man dressed in a Kauai T-shirt and blue apron, speaks with a French accent as he gracefully guides a well-honed blade between meat and bone.
“During the last 50 years, the meat industry, abandoning centuries of ancient craftsmanship, has changed direction,” he says. “It has moved into the direction opposite from the old wisdom. The change has been imposed by a cultural shift from quality to quantity by the economy of the bottom line.”
“It’s refreshing to hear his old world philosophy,” says John Scott, bartender and butcher at Hukilau Lanai. “Not just about how to cut the pig, but life in general.”
In 1958, Vecchio apprenticed at Boucher-Charcutier in French speaking Geneva and went on to develop one of the largest Swiss meat and farming businesses. In 1980, he married Christine, a plantation girl from Oahu, who assists Francois during his classes.
A lot of things have changed since 1958. Including today’s factory farm culture, where animals are mass-produced and butchered on a swift conveyer belt. The environment is destroyed, animals suffer and people who work at slaughterhouses are easily injured. Vecchio believes it’s the small, family owned shops offering handcrafted meats that will preserve the art of butchery and charcuterie.
“Francois is the Babe Ruth of charcuterie,” says Kocol. “With his training and experience, I believe he is at the pinnacle of his discipline.”
As the 2012 Rising Star Chef Artisan winner, chef Kocol left Salt Honolulu to work at Shinsato Farm on Ohau.
The 74-year-old pig farm raises and processes pork at their onsite, USDA approved facility. In three to five years, Kocol plans to make the farm the only company in the state that reproduces, raises, slaughters, butchers, processes and sells their own animals.
Tom Pickett, owner of Pau Hana Bakery in Kilauea, has been to Vecchio’s eight-day workshop called The Pig Gig, which was held in Alaska.
At the bakery, Pickett uses fresh pork to make sausage, bacon and cured ham, which is served in soups and on pizza and sandwiches.
“It’s just a pleasure to work with Francois,” says Pickett. “He’s a living treasure and habitual sharer.”
At the workshop’s conclusion, 20 students and their spouses sit at a long table in Hukilau Lanai’s private dining room. Over sips of wine and beer and bites of what was made, Francois says he plans to come back. I swipe a thick smear of pâté on a slice of crusty bread as he begins to speak.
“America is constructed on the notion that you free people to pursue happiness,” he says. “But what is happiness? Money? We took a wrong turn when we became connected to money instead of being connected to the substance of life.”
• Marta Lane is a Kauai-based food writer. For more information, visit TastingKauai.com.
Lane to write on food for TGI
When Marta Lane came to Poipu for her 10-year wedding anniversary she felt like she had come home. Six months later, she and her husband left Colorado to move to Kapaa.
“I’ve never really free fallen with my career and life like I did with this move” said Lane. “We gave up everything to start over.”
After 25 years in the entertainment industry as an editor, camera and audio person, she explored what Kauai had to offer.
“We decided to look through doors and go through them,” Lane said. And she has found many doors to go through, including three years writing for Midweek and now as a food writer for The Garden Island.
“My mom is from Barcelona and loved to cook,” Lane said. “We’d be in the kitchen having friendly banter for hours while we made meals together.”
Now she has taken that passion for food, writing about Kauai people and food made from scratch using local ingredients whenever possible. The food writer loves it when people can cook with locally grown food.
Look for her Tastes of Kauai column in Wednesday’s TGI, and On the Farm column in Sunday’s TGI.
