Salo, an Everday Cured Delicacy from Ukraine
Salo, an Everyday Cured Delicacy from Ukraine
And How to Make It Yourself
As a child, I spent my summer vacations in Ukraine. The city of Irpin, now in ruins, was generous and hospitable, filled with the aromas of the South. The simple but varied and delicious dishes for the guests were all homemade; the alternative did not cross the minds of the hosts. Sausages, liqueurs, and pickled vegetables of all kinds poured out of the cellars; tsibulniki (fried onion pancakes) gave out a strong smell of unrefined sunflower oil. Set on the table first, announcing the feast, was a plate filled with salo, salted pork fat, fragrant and meltingly tender.By Maria Korneitchik
Photographs by Maria Korneitchik
The slices, so thin as to be translucent, were bright white with a little rose and sometimes a pink vein of lean. Next to the salo was always another plate with “black” rye bread, as well as an iced bottle of horilka, homemade alcohol. It was firmly believed that, if you ate the fat, it was not possible to get drunk but just to cheer up. Maybe it was true — in the evenings from neighboring gardens you could hear singing in melodious Ukrainian.
In the market, there was a lot of salo, of all kinds — boiled, smoked, confit, brined, and the classic: dry-salted. The last was variously flavored: with pepper, dill seed, garlic. The sellers offered generous tastes. And there was fresh salo, too, waiting for you to take it home and prepare it. It was displayed among the rows of meat in large snow-white squares called shmats. The layer of fat wraps a pig’s body from the back to the belly. At some sellers, the shmat was already cut in two, the back fat separated from the belly. The back fat is always thicker; the fat lower down is thinner, with veins of lean. Each has its admirers.
Later, I often visited Ukraine in my work as a journalist, and it was impossible to leave without making a detour to the market in Kyiv, Odessa, or Kharkiv, in particular to buy salo, for myself and as gifts. In market conversations, I learned the details of salting without ever doing it myself. Why would I? There was so much variety of salo everywhere! Who could imagine that one day we would no longer be able to visit Ukraine?
Each seller praised the quality of his pigs and the way he fed them. In the Ukrainian countryside, from Donbass to the Polish border, there was no house that did not have, at the bottom of the garden, a shed with pigs. Everyone was in basic agreement that pigs should be fed potatoes (homegrown, of course) and sugar beets, products in which Ukraine is rich. These were accompanied by a grain-milk porridge with vegetable peelings.
Now, when visits to a peaceful Ukraine are postponed indefinitely, I’ve realized that if I want good salo, I have to make it myself. I pulled out my old notebooks and armed myself with advice from my Ukrainian friends scattered by the war throughout Europe. Among them — teachers, peasants, artists — not a single one hadn’t prepared salo.
My old friend Alina Slisarenko is an inexhaustible source of practical knowledge about Ukrainian village life. She now lives in Paris, a refugee from her small town of Derajnia, in central Ukraine between Vinnitsa and Khmelnitsky, a region justly famous for its pork fat. I first met Alina, who is now approaching 50, at least 20 years ago at a bus station, waiting for a bus that was late. Our conversation flowed naturally. This short, slight, dark-haired woman had big bags of food that she was taking to her parents in another village, her mother being sick. Curious, I asked what she was bringing them. A culinary world opened to me, a true surprise — of elaborate, varied, and carefully made foods, despite the humble life that Alina apparently led. She had just returned from a wedding where she had cooked (“the whole village helps when a girl from our country gets married”), and I was struck by a dessert she had made: a lake of fruit jelly with swans in meringue! And that was only one dessert among many. I discovered that you can live without buying food in shops but preparing everything yourself, and nothing is missing. “Except lemons,” Alina said. “You have to go and get them from the Moscow train; the conductors sell them.”
Alina’s stories, which I have always written down, show a traditional life in rhythm with the seasons and with agricultural work, almost without impact from the contemporary industrialized world. The people lived wholly on products grown and cooked with their own hands. In Soviet times, there simply were no other products; the impact of agribusiness was delayed. For rural people, homemade was a necessity. In the more favorable times that followed, Alina remained convinced that these were the only products worthy of consumption. She even sent me, in France, potatoes and onions from her farm in Ukraine, putting the boxes in the buses that still crisscross Europe. She didn’t accept that French potatoes suited me perfectly well: “Even so,” she said, “ours are tastier. You don’t have anything like them!” And then here we were, preparing salo together!
From the Donbass to Lviv
We bought our fresh fat at a Basque shop in Paris. It was from free-range Noir de Bigorre pigs. Alina inspected the shmat very carefully and admitted that it was quite suitable for Ukrainian salo. To those who have never tasted salted fat, the idea of eating pure fat may seem unpleasant. And yet salting changes the consistency, and it becomes a different product with a different taste. A translucent piece melts on the tongue like butter.
Ukraine isn’t the only country that appreciates salted pork fat, of course. It’s popular throughout Eastern Europe and the Baltic countries. In most Slavic languages, the word for it — despite the resemblance to “salt” in various languages — comes from the root meaning “to sit.” Salo is the flat layer that “sits” on the lean. You see that when you cut a carcass. Cured fat is also a delicacy in Italy, where Tuscan lardo di Colonnata and Valle d’Aosta lard d’Arnad are renowned. But only in Ukraine is salted fat a national gastronomic symbol and a part of everyday cooking.
Salo has a long history. “In central Ukraine and on the left bank of the Dnipro, pig farming is linked to the development of alcohol production, which had a significant impact on the economy during the 17th and 18th centuries,” according to Ukraine: Culture and History, published in 2022 in several languages by the Ukrainian Institute. “In the east of the country, pigs were then confined indoors and fed on waste from alcohol production, which contributed to their rapid weight gain. But in more rugged regions, such as Polesia, the pigs were free range.” There the taste and texture were more like those of Basque pigs. The different conditions have given rise to a number of varieties of salo; no one has yet made a list.
The main suppliers of salo to markets and even supermarkets are small private farms. The fat layer of industrial pigs is thin, because the industry prefers breeds with a maximum of lean meat. Industrial pigs don’t have much flavor, and Ukrainians are demanding when it comes to salo.
Because it’s a popular, everyday product, there are no set recipes or techniques, and there are as many opinions on how to salt it as there are farms. I don’t find information in the gastronomic literature either. Ukrainians haven’t yet begun to describe the regional variations. But all the oral and written advice that I can gather agrees on one thing: you have to start with good raw material.
Vismaliti
White back fat — without veins of lean or with only a single thin pink streak near the skin — is called in Kyiv “generalsky” or “pansky” (pan being the word for “lord”). A 150-kilo adult pig has surprisingly little of this fat much loved for its sweetness, only around six kilos. And it is only the back fat and the belly that are taken for salting. In all, by weight, a pig contains as much fat as meat, sometimes even more fat than meat; it all depends on the breed, the age, the nutrition. The fat in other parts of the carcass is harder, and it’s cooked, smoked, or rendered.
Choosing the fat for making salo starts with examining the skin. I remember shoppers at the markets using their fingernails to make sure it was thin and separated easily. Thinness indicates a young animal; easy separation indicates freshness. And the tenderness of the skin depends on the sex; a sow’s skin is always tenderer than a boar’s. But one of the most important factors is how the skin was singed after slaughter to get rid of the hair. Done badly, the skin toughens. Later, at the table, you can’t eat the rind, while you do eat a good rind; it’s even a delicacy.
In Ukrainian villages, pigs are slaughtered twice a year in cold weather, in autumn until December, for Christmas, and in spring before Easter, though also at other times for weddings. Immediately after slaughter, the skin of the animal must be vismaliti, “singed.” If you’re traveling through the Ukrainian countryside and see smoke rising from a farm, you can be sure that a freshly slaughtered pig is surrounded by straw torches. It’s a lot of work. The skin becomes coal black, and then it has to be scraped and washed, but the process is rewarding. The skin becomes thinner and it keeps the smoky smell.
Many people have switched to singeing with gas burners for speed and convenience, but the skin burns too quickly, preventing the fat beneath from heating and melting slightly; the rind remains hard. In industrial slaughterhouses, the pig instead undergoes “depilation” — the bristles are removed with brushes. That leaves the skin thick and whitish, and tasteless, of course.
Properly prepared skin is easy to distinguish — it’s light yellow with brown marks. A uniform color comes from gas, while a uniformly dark color means an old animal. Another criterion of quality is smoothness. And a good seller always offers you a knife, so you can make sure the skin is easily pierced, not like rubber or plastic.
The aroma and thickness
“The fat must be bought at the market: don’t trust supermarket products,” says Vladimir Stankov, former chef of the restaurant Dacha in Odessa. “Most of the time, they are presented in little trays, where they are impossible to touch or smell. But fat, you absolutely have to smell it! For example, after being burned, the skin always reveals whether the animal was castrated! The unpleasant smell of the boar is immediately noticeable.” I spoke with Elena Nikiforova, chef of the Ukrainian restaurant Shinok in Moscow. She is more radical in her choice of fat for salo, using only fat from the sow. However, I think that’s not essential.
“Never buy frozen fat,” Alina advised. “That hides the smell. You have to smell the freshness. Like a good pickle! The boar, it will smell of urea.” She also confirmed what I’ve known for a long time: when you buy fresh fat, bring matches. Light one and bring it close to the rind. The smell will tell you everything about the product! When you burn a little piece of skin, it reveals the pleasant smell of burning straw, and above all it reveals the odor of an uncastrated male.
The overall thickness of the salo is also important. It can be thin (three centimeters) or thick (more than ten centimeters). As they say in Ukraine, “two fingers” or “four fingers.” It depends on the age of the animal: the older, the thicker the fat. No one buys shmat more than six centimeters thick, because then the fat can turn out too hard, especially near the skin. But too thin is not welcome either; the ideal is from three to six centimeters.
When you shop, a match comes in handy a second time. It will enter the fat itself easily if it’s good fresh fat. “I like belly with a few stripes of lean,” Alina told me. In the Basque shop, we chose belly with streaks, and my friend told me above all to look at the first streak, closest to the skin. “It should be about a centimeter wide and slightly pinkish, not red. This meat is fattier than regular meat, so its color isn’t saturated. (The next streak is redder and harder.) If it’s red, that’s because it’s less tender than it should be.”
The salt
Salting is traditional and very common in Ukraine. The pieces of meat or vegetable, packed in wooden barrels, keep for several months in the cellars of each house. Sea salt, from the Black Sea, has been used in Ukraine for centuries, and from Roman times on there was rock salt. Ukrainians have traded salt for almost 500 years. Among the salt regions, a special place is occupied by the southeastern Donbass, where huge deposits of rock salt were formed 250 million years ago in the former Perm Sea. Ukraine is also known for its salt lakes, the largest of which, Sivash, has an area of 2,560 square kilometers.
Salt, mostly quite coarse, has never been expensive in Ukraine. Once, when I was talking with a farmer in the Donbass about the price of salt to preserve different products, he smiled and said, “There is no lack of salt! Look, there’s a mine on the edge of the village!” You don’t need expensive salt to make salo.
Dry-salting
Dry-salting consists of burying the pieces of fat in salt, so that it draws out all the liquid. The best thing about the process is its simplicity. The pieces can be of different sizes, not necessarily identical. Alina and I cut two kilos of fresh back fat into pieces, most about five centimeters wide and 20 long, but also some 15-centimeter squares. It isn’t essential to calculate the amount of salt, because, as the saying goes, “It takes what it needs.” The salt only penetrates to the extent there is a little water in the fat, so there’s no risk of oversalting.
We needed altogether about two kilos of salt: first to generously rub the pieces of salo, then to form a thick layer at the bottom of a flat, wide enameled container (terra-cotta or glass is also suitable), and then to completely bury the fat. After that, you head for the fridge (or simply a deep cellar at 3 to 4 degrees C [37 to 39 degrees F]), and wait.
The thinner the pieces, the sooner the salo will be ready. In one day, the salt penetrates about 0.5 centimeters. Italians similarly prepare the famous lardo di Colonnata, glory of Carrara, by placing it in marble coffers in cool cellars. After three days, we took the salo out of the fridge, and the salt all around it was wet. It had drawn most of the liquid. Some people stop at that point, but we wanted saltier and above all tenderer salo. So, after carefully wiping off the salo, we repeated the procedure. The salt-covered pieces went back in the fridge. After another three days, the surrounding salt was almost dry, and the texture and taste had softened.
Seeing a slight dampness on the largest pieces, I suggested putting the salo back in the salt again for a day or two, but Alina said it was time to add flavors. Until then, we had used only salt; now we mixed in other things. Most often, garlic accompanies Ukrainian salo, and it was part of the three typical mixtures that Alina proposed. We started by pounding the garlic with salt, judging the amount by eye.
For our first mixture, we added paprika to the garlic. I had tasted salo with paprika in Ukraine, in the small city of Vinogradovo, where Ukrainians of Hungarian origin live. (The border with Hungary is only a dozen kilometers away.) It’s better to add a little water to the mixed garlic, salt, and paprika, to obtain the consistency of mustard. We spread it generously over the salo; the white surfaces should not be visible at all.
Our second mixture was garlic and black pepper. Again you need a thick layer, and you can’t be afraid to use too much pepper. In Ukrainian markets, I’ve seen salo streaked with black from incisions made before salting and filled with pepper. You can also prick the fat and insert minced garlic, but it’s best to do this at the final stage of salting, when the salt is dry, or the garlic could turn bitter.
Our third mixture was garlic with hot pepper and bay leaf. Bay leaf is the only ingredient you should be wary of; its strong taste can kill all the others. For two kilos of fat, three leaves reduced to powder in a mortar were enough.
We wrapped each piece of salo separately in parchment to put in the fridge for another three days. (In the freezer, salo will keep for several months, and, frozen, it’s easier to cut it into translucent slices.) Before eating, you scrape the salo with a knife to remove the spices, but apart from that, it’s ready to serve.
The other way to salt the fat for salo is in brine. Those who advocate it clearly like their salo streaked with lean, because brine and lean go well together. Salt firms up the protein in the lean, and with dry salt there is a risk of making the lean too dry, hard, and salty. In brine, however, the lean stays juicy. Osmosis creates a balance between the amount of salt in the brine and the meat.
We definitely had to calculate the amount of salt for the brine. The best ratio I found on my own was around 60 grams of salt to 1 liter of water. Alina, looking at my experiments, said her popular method was much easier and just as accurate. You simply place a raw egg in lukewarm water and add salt until the egg floats. I did that myself, and it indeed works, and the salt ratio is about the same as I had obtained by my calculations.
For brining, the fat is generally cut into cubes and even bars, but always of equal size so the salt penetration takes the same amount of time. We boiled the brine, waited for it to cool to room temperature, then poured it into the large glass jar we had already filled with cubes of fat. If the container is tall and filled with pieces, it’s best to check with a thin stick, stirring to be sure all the air has escaped, and adding more brine if necessary. If the container is flat and wide, however, you put an upside-down plate and a weight on top, so that the fat “drowns.”
Again we put the salo in the fridge, and after three days the brine had turned cloudy, the salt water having “drained” the blood from the flesh. We replaced the cloudy brine with fresh brine, and along with the garlic we added traditional spices: black peppercorns, bay leaves (again not too much, three leaves for one and a half kilos of fat), and hot pepper. In Ukraine, dill seed is also popular, and in the Carpathians I encountered mountain herbs, in most cases basil and thyme. In three more days, our salo was as tender as we wanted.
Of course, white fat without any lean can also be brined. And with either white or streaked salo in brine, the pieces are stored in the liquid, and a few are removed just before serving. You dry them, and you rub them with the spices you like, like breading them. A very common brine in Ukraine is made with onion skins. They don’t give a particular taste, but they make a beautiful golden color that many people appreciate.
Brining is also the method used by the Italians in Valle d’Aosta to make lard d’Arnad. The salting is done in large square chestnut containers called doils. The use of wood must be specific to the mountainous places. An owner of a small farm in the Carpathians who came to sell her salo at the Vinogradovo market told me that she too salted it in chestnut barrels.
But I have not found any explanation anywhere for why Italian lardo, whether in Colonnata or Arnad, is salted for so long, up to six months for lardo di Colonnata! Salt penetration stops as soon as the fat has received the amount of salt it needs. In part, this can be explained by the size of the pieces: unlike the Ukrainians, the Italians use whole uncut shmats.
“Lardo becomes even more delicious over time,” the producers in Colonnata and Arnad explained to me, without really backing up this argument with science. Personally, I didn’t find any difference in taste. The French and Italian chefs and butchers from whom I sought an answer gave the only explanation that seemed logical to me. In Italy, people worship traditional processes. And in the past, pigs were slaughtered only once a year. The fat was salted and then consumed little by little. Keeping the lardo continuously in salt or brine ensured that it would remain in good condition.
All the salo Alina and I made, by whatever method, was ready in ten days. Everything was there: the melting texture, the aromas of garlic and spices, the thin rind, the salty taste. We served it simply in the finest slices on lightly toasted bread. We also prepared borscht for the occasion, and on the table we put salo pounded with garlic (always!), so that each guest could put a little of the mixture in their soup.
We even chopped a piece of salo with pepper and dill seed to spread on rye bread, like a kind of rillettes. In Ukraine, salo finds many more uses. The salo from belly, when rendered, yields shkvarki (cracklings) for omelettes, potatoes, and many other preparations. The rendered fat goes, for instance, into the pan for cooking blinis or deruny (a kind of latke). Salo is good for stuffing and barding lean beef and rabbit, for adding to chopped meat, which becomes juicier, and of course, it’s essential for sausages.
All these can be prepared using either dry-salted or brined salo. But there are still the boiled, smoked, marinated kinds… One day, Alina and I will go shopping in the Ukrainian markets in her native Derajnia, in the rebuilt Irpin, in Kyiv, and in Odessa. When the war is over, after the victory. ●
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