Xesc Reina, the charcuterie maker who has revolutionised 'sobrasada'


By Cuixot de Porc Negre Mallorquín Date:

From chocolate to curry, Xesc Reina revolutionises this sausage, for many people on a par with the best ham.
His pieces, weighing more than 25 kilos and made with Mallorcan black pigs, are sold in Switzerland, and from Korea they come to learn his technique. The "charcusine" is born. 

Xesc Reina revolutionises the world of sausages They christened it Tuscana. It has a reddish skin, thin, somewhat sandy to the touch, and when you get close to it, it looks like the surface of a distant planet. It weighs almost 30 kg. It's chubby and chubby, but it makes up for its ugliness with an unctuous and memorable interior. Tuscana is a sobrasada. Atomic. Radical and different. Like its sisters raised in this dryer in Inca (Mallorca), who are called Helena, Margarita, Pancracia, Gertrudis... "I look at the saints' calendar of the week and choose names for those who weigh more than 25 kilos. It's absurd, but that way they stop being a number, a lot. They don't listen to Beethoven because I listen to them. I also speak to them, I know them. And I don't whisper them: I know perfectly well how they work and evolve". Nobody like Xesc Reina (Sant Hilari, Girona, 14 May 1962) has so revolutionised the, a priori, prosaic world of charcuterie, especially that of sobrassadas.

He has given them a new gastro-plastic universe where colours, flavours and contrasts, textures and madness explode. He makes them with chocolate (Valrhona, with 70% cocoa), with cod (which moved Ángel León himself, chef of the sea), with raw-milk Mahón cheese, with blue cheese, with curry, with dreams and deliriums to come? He does what no one else does. They call him a genius, a revolutionary. Also sacrilegious from the mouths of a few purists of the sacrosanct island sobrasada who are reluctant to move forward. Little does he care, abstracted, with his shining gaze fixed on his crypt, in his fantastic drying room at 12 degrees and 80% humidity.

Time seems to stand still in this a la carte, signature sanctuary that the sausage company Can Company, for whom he works, doing, marvellously, whatever he wants, has set up for him alone. "It makes me laugh when people say that you can't make curry or cocoa sausage when decades ago grandmothers here would grate dark chocolate on top of the sobrasada if it was a bit stale. To begin with, I am a traditionalist, because without tradition, the basis of everything, you cannot advance or improve. Innovation is a process of growth of that tradition. It's true that I don't want everyone to like me, but I'm not eccentric, what happens is that the chef is allowed to experiment with everything and the charcuterie maker is not", he denounces with a certain denouncement.


Xesc shows his amorphous creations with delight, passion, undisguised lasciviousness. Excessive sobrassadas, like exuberant and free meats painted by Rubens. Reina says that "they are wine, they are alive" and that their "traditional stringing must dose equality, but without pure mathematics". He hangs them straight. They fold. They sink and bulge into the skin made of the stomach of the pig that contains them. "Too bad you can't take a picture of the smell. If time has a smell it smells like this. Go on, get in there and breathe it in," he urges the photographer. Oreadas waiting for their optimal moment of consumption, sheltered by a blessed greenish fungus that regulates their PH, all these beasts await departure. Tuscana has a name, a price and a destination. Some 1,200 euros (between 30 and 40 euros per kilo of sobrasada) has been paid by a neighbour in Switzerland for this beauty that has spent a year in these facilities that can house up to seven tons of sausage. Tuscana would withstand up to five years of curing, but always on the island, since its particular microbial flora, which gives it its intense flavour, would not act in the same way outside Mallorca.

The profession

Reina's story is not rooted in the island. Her mother, from Sant Hilari in Girona; her father, from Osuna in Seville; he "total charnego". When her mother emigrates from the village, she decides that her children should eat no other meat or sausages than those of her hometown. And the water, Fontvella, which comes from there. So the family got a fellow countryman - a certain Mariano Casas, who made wood-fired sausages - to take their consignment of pork products to Mataró every week. The curious young Reina, who had no pedigree or roots in the sector, asked Mariano if he would teach him the trade. He was 17 years old. "I was slaughtering pigs for two years. I don't do it any more. I learned a lot and set up a shop that was open in Mataró for about 10 years. Then I went to the Pyrenees to learn more about the trade, on my own", he says. In 1985 he enrolled in vocational training at the Escuela de Charcutería in Barcelona. After two years he was already a teacher, the youngest teacher in history. Since then he says he has taught "thousands of courses, although I have slowed down lately. I teach ideas, to create and imagine, without recipes or papers, I teach students to be able to make a sausage with squid in sauce, a pea burger, tripe Madrid-style or vegan charcuterie without tofu or seitan, but legumes".

After some professional wanderings (many companies, many more courses), Reina landed in the Balearic Islands. It was for a month. She is still there. First he joined a student in a business called La Matanza Mallorquina (1996-2002, ruin), and then he set up the restaurant Espaig Xesc Reina in 2000 (ruin, "people didn't understand anything") until he arrived at Can Company (brutal success). This sausage company, with experience in cereals, wanted to make the big leap to charcuterie, and that's why they told him in 2015 that "they were looking to sign the Messi of the sector", Xesc explains without arrogance. Can Company, run by five brothers, has been his big playground ever since. With 800 plots of land all over Mallorca, it has native cows and sheep, and above all, a herd of around 1,200 pigs of porc negre, the Mallorcan black pig in danger of extinction. There are only 1,682 breeding pigs left in the 53 active farms on the island.

Pig with a nutritionist

On the beautiful estate of Es Bosch Vell, in the municipality of Santa Margarita, 350 mothers and two male breeding pigs live and splash about, which will later become culinary delights. "They eat barley, rye and broad beans from Mallorca. They don't eat anything we don't grow ourselves, like paprika, which is fresh fruit, a natural antioxidant.... These free-range pigs even have a dietician to increase the good oleic acids," he explains. For the sobrasada del negre, he selects the best lean pork loins, as well as the best lard, to which he adds a secret combination of Tap de Cortí's excellent paprika, pepper and salt.

It is said that even Joselito, legend and holy father of pata negra, called him to tell him that he had "died of taste" when he tasted it. "With sobrasada we had stagnated, and Xesc has come to fill a need, because there was no quality reference. He has dignified a queen, which already existed, by putting better clothes on it," says Mallorcan chef Andreu Genestra, Michelin star with the establishment of the same name in Capdepera (Mallorca). "My grandmother was a butcher and slaughterer, and she made five-kilo sobrasadas that she dried in the cellar at home. And now Xesc comes along and makes one that weighs 25 kilos. That makes the Mallorcans itchy, but it's welcome because it internationalises us," adds Genestra, who has a sobrasada cutting board in his restaurant ("a sobrasadero"), which he refers to as a "gastronomic luxury, on a par with the best ham".

Those consulted believe that both Reina and Can Company have created, developed and materialised a utopia with Mallorcan porc negre, which now has "a name, a surname, a DNI, a history of purity, of breed and of agri-food development". Of the 19 producers operating on the island, nine of them work with black pigs. Sobrasada with Protected Geographical Indication accounts for 88% of production. Last year, almost 2,000 tonnes were produced with this seal, and the black pork production reached 130,000 kilos, an increase of 29% compared to 2016, with an international demand that has soared by 40% in just one year. Sobrasada knows no borders. "In May a guy comes from Korea to learn charcuterie. He comes to my house, I teach him the whole methodology and he leaves", says Xesc, who adds that his sobrasadas "are not unusual. I made the one with cod because I was asked to do so in a presentation. I combined Portugal and Galicia in a sobrasada with undesalted cod. We opened it after four months and it was great".

 

"Good Fat"

This Catalan from Mallorca says that he loves cooking "even washing the dishes", and that twice a year he organises "hooligan meals" just for friends. "I like the good fat of the sobrasada, the good fat as the Americans say, because it is of interest in my cooking. I made a arroz a banda simply topped at the last moment of cooking with chunks of their basic sobrasada. It was a spectacular sea and mountain. Reina is on the right track, welcome to people who revolutionise. And in this case with truth, a lot of traceability and a lot of message", argues María José San Román, alma mater of Monastrell (Alicante, one Michelin star). Between Can Company and Xesc Reina, they have also endeavoured to recover old sausages such as noras (sausages with dried fruits such as dried apricots or plums), blanquets (sausage with sweet touches), figatellas (white meat and liver) or various black sausages (also called camaiots). It also makes a fuet made from loins, legs and back of porc negre, without additives and cured for 60 days. Genestra has a starter on the menu of noras, cream of milk with almonds and fennel salad "that surprises both foreign and local customers", says the chef. It is, therefore, exquisite charcuisine, in a novel neologism that honours such an atavistic profession.

The spigot of Xesc Reina's imagination continues unabated. The same man who, years ago, fantasised about sausages made of rovellons (chanterelles) and was taken for a madman (today millions of kilos are sold every year), today imagines sobrasada bread, "honeycombed and tasty", just like sobrasada and whisky curing at the same time, amalgamating both materials in his drying room in a dream "that lasts for 20 years".

 

Black pork, gold in the mouth


Of Asian origin for some, Celtic for others, and historically associated with the Talayotic culture of the Balearic Islands, porc negre began to be marketed in 1830, although it was not until the 1970s that sobrassadas began to be made with its meat and fats. The pigs are very hardy, and their diet of pasture is supplemented with barley and rye, peas, figs, almonds, carobs, mastic and scrubland grass. Anatomically, the two mammels hanging from both cheeks and the slate-coloured skin that gives it its name stand out. It has drooping ears and weighs approximately 150 to 250 kilograms. They have a high level of marbled fat, and the reddish and dark colour of their meat. The most common fatty acid in Mallorcan porc negre is oleic acid, a monounsaturated fatty acid present in olive oil and beneficial for cardiovascular health.