The Cheek with Pepper is a cured meat prepared with pork’s cheek, a piece of the meat where the lean veins run. This cured meat, for its texture and taste, is placed in the middle between the bacon and the lard, but its gustatory mark is characteristic and unique. This product does not need a long seasoning time and its section without the ring is completely peppered.

To make the Cheek with Pepper, we select the average size pork’s cheeks, with a proper balance between the fat and thin. We leave the rind and then salt the meat, adding to it a mix of spices, there are mostly marked the flavours of the garlic, black pepper, and rosemary.

The salted cheeks are placed in the special salting tanks and then left in refrigerating rooms at last a month, during which time the meat absorbs the salt and the flavours of the spices. After the salting phase, the cheeks are removed from the brine and the parts without the pork rind are peppered with finely minced black pepper. The seasoning time of the Cheek with Pepper is quite short, roughly two weeks because this product has to remain rather soft.

With the Cheek with Pepper, you can prepare a myriad of dishes. Served in thin slices, it is perfect as an appetizer-placed on the warm, toasted bread (also with black truffle), but it definitely plays the main role in the formulation of sauces and it also accompanies too many main courses. The Cheek with Pepper is a basic ingredient for diverse traditional dishes, as the “Carbonara” and the “Amatriciana”, in some regions of Italy, it is a substitute of well-known Pancetta (bacon).

 

 

Ingredients

Pork cheek, salt, pepper, garlic, herbs and spices, sugar: dextrose, antioxidant: E301, preservative: E252.

Produced in a factory where dairy products and gluten-containing ingredients are not used.

It may contain traces of walnuts and pistachios.

Salumificio Artigianale Gombitelli di Triglia M. & T. s.n.c. Via dei norcini, 4719/4725 Gombitelli – 55041 Camaiore (LU)

Store in cool place.

100% ITALIAN