Breakfast sausage in High Definition

"Ignorance is like a delicate fruit; touch it, and the bloom is gone." - Oscar Wilde

Flavor is a lot like TV. In isolation and in the warm glow of ignorance, a normal CRT television portrays an acceptably faithful depiction of the world. Greens look green, reds look red, and everything is perfectly unremarkably nice. But take a journey out into the world and glimpse an HD television, and suddenly the universe is a different place. After you've witnessed the raw,visceral screamingly bright pore-level detail oozing from a wall-sized HD demi-god, your rounded glass simulacrum will never elicit anything but ennui.

I have tasted HD breakfast sausage, and until I took it out of the package, I didn't realize the depth of my own ignorance of this morning staple.

The packaging was already promising. I'm a sucker for compelling typography, so the blood red block characters on plain straw-colored background betold authentic meaty goodness before I grabbed it eagerly from the cooler case. Those big letters spelled Boccalone, which means 'big mouth' in colloquial Italian. It's the most recent project of Chris Cosentino (of my neighborhood's Incanto and Iron Chef America fame) and his business partner Mark Pastore. Boccalone first came to my attention a few months ago when, walking past Incanto, I saw a little sign touting something about a CSA for meat. Meat, delivered on a weekly basis - it's a brilliant triumph of civilization, and I'm amazed it hadn't been thought of earlier.

The Boccalone project has now expanded past the signup list of initial members into a full-on brand of delicious meat products, both fresh and cured, available from grocery stores and markets like Avedano's Holly Park Market in Bernal Heights here in San Francisco, where I got my mitts on some. It's all done correctly, using natural methods, humanely-sourced meat, and the flavors are so real that it makes Jimmy Dean taste like a sage-flavored sponge.

I could tell of the tales of pancetta or guanciale or salted pork liver, but this particular morning's foray into Boccalone's world came from their Easton Breakfast Sausage. Why Easton? Apparently it was famous for a time on the east coast between the Civil and Second World Wars, when Cosentino's English-descended kin produced Easton's Newport Sausage in Rhode Island. The inclusion of adventurous and fashionable bitter orange zest among the other potent herbs makes me wonder whether the original recipe has been updated since those early days, but regardless, this is a sausage that makes its presence known in the kitchen. I opened the package and immediately encountered an earthy and tart aroma, a more powerfully..well, meaty note than accompanies most grocery-standard meat products.


After a visit to the cast-iron frying pan in a little oil, the little Eastons joined the plate with a couple of slices of toast and another citrus diva, my own homemade marmalade, to bring me breakfast in breathtaking high fidelity.