Palazzolo Acreide Sausage

Palazzolo Acreide, a pearl of the Sicilian baroque, is a small town with Greek roots close to Syracuse. Known mostly for its architecture, it also has a long tradition of pork curing.
The tradition dates back to the arrival of the Romans, who usually travelled with pigs and sheep so as to always have meat and milk available. Many small pig farms were started in Sicily after the Romans came to the island, and in Palazzolo, as in other areas, the tradition of curing the pork continued through the centuries.
In Palazzolo, each family would raise one or two black pigs, which would produce enough meat to last them a whole year. Among the different preparations, the most prized were the sausages, because they could be eaten both fresh (used to flavor dishes or grilled over charcoal) and dried. Nine cuts go into Palazzolo Acreide sausage: neck and jowl, lard, collar, loin, shoulder, trotter, underbelly, leg and fat (no more than 25%). The only other ingredients added are Sicilian sea salt, chili pepper, wild fennel from the Iblei Mountains and red wine from the Noto Valley. The meat is cut with a knife to a medium coarseness, mixed by hand and packed into animal casings. Usually Palazzolo sausages are smoked over olive wood in aging rooms.
When cured, Palazzolo sausage has intense scents of wine and wild fennel.