Time is the ultimate currency marking our conscious experience. Some believe time to be linear, others cyclical. Adagio Salumi marks its time in what is not left at the end of the day, endeavoring to put as much back into their corner of the earth as they extract.
“What a road paved in pig mud,” jokes Adagio co-founder Gerry Garcia. He and his business partner, Anthony Pedonesi, own and operate a 250-acre open pasture regenerative hog farm in Rockdale with a capacity of more than 1,000 hogs. Their hog farm of heritage breeds, which include Berkshire, Hampshire, Duroc, Landrace, and Red Wattle, supplies all of the pork that Adagio cures.
A chance encounter a little more than five years ago grew a multigenerational family tradition into a sustainable hog farm, a salumeria that is the first of its kind in Texas. Garcia was remodeling Pedonesi’s neighbor’s house one day when he saw Pedonesi’s son playing outside and thought that his boy and Pedonesi’s could be good friends.
“I got familiar with [Garcia’s] craftsmanship and enjoyed his personality, and the next thing you know, I am asking him to quit his job and go into business with me,” Pedonesi says.
Adagio was born of Pedonesi’s and Garcia’s shared passion for eating. Pedonesi is a third-generation salumerian and Garcia was raised dressing animals, unbeknownst to each other. Serendipity.
“We were not intending to be hog farmers,” Garcia says. But after crisscrossing Texas visiting multiple hog farms, they couldn’t find enough of a supply of pork raised in a way that they wanted it to be raised, so they created that environment. “We wanted them to be doing pig things … we wanted these animals that had access to air and oxygen, and plants, we wanted them to graze on a salad bar,” he continues.
Happy hogs make for a better overall salumi. After researching sustainable and regenerative husbandry practices, the best philosophically and practically for what they wanted to do, Garcia and Pedonesi created a hybrid grazing practice of free-range and pasture-raised hogs to create a better quality of life for their passel and for the land.
“What’s important to us also resonates with Austin in general, and that is being in control of what we’re putting into our bodies.” – Adagio Salumi co-founder Anthony Pedonesi
Through regenerative farming and rotational grazing of their hogs, Adagio claims to have reduced the amount of water needed for their farm. This significantly reduces the need for plowing, as the hogs naturally root through the soil, aerating it and spreading seeds. In turn, this reduces the amount of insecticides and pesticides needed for a healthy pasture. Their end goal, in short, is to create a sponge with the topsoil through these farming practices, allowing them to maximize the rainfall by reducing the waste from its runoff.
These practices and the fruits of their labor endeared them to their first distributor, Antonelli’s Cheese Shop. They are poised to grow nationally, starting with placements in H-E-B’s Central Markets statewide.
“Antonelli’s absolutely adores Adagio for their great-tasting cured meats in addition to knowing that they are also a family-owned, small business based out of Austin,” says Jensyn Hartzell, brand marketing coordinator for Antonelli’s Cheese. “We love that they use sustainable practices.”
Barclay Stratton, co-owner and chef of Golden Hour Cafe & Wine Bar, uses rotating Adagio selections for Golden Hour’s apero plate during their snack hours. Stratton cooked in Tuscany, Italy, for a spell and declares that Adagio’s is the best salumi he’s had in America – the closest in craftsmanship and quality to the salumi he experienced in Tuscany.
Pedonesi’s familial legacy is steeped in the genesis of salumi in the western world. Around 160BC, Cato the Elder wrote De Agri Cultura (On Farming), the oldest known work of Latin prose and the Western world’s first farmers’ almanac. In it, he gives a recipe for curing pork hocks primarily with salt and finishing them with smoke. Cato was from Tusculum, an area just about 16 miles northwest of present-day Rome. Pedonesi’s grandfather, a salumerian, emigrated from Rome at the beginning of the 20th century.
Ironically, Pedonesi didn’t envision himself butchering animals when they started the salumeria. “[Gerry] is an artist with a knife,” he says, humbly crediting Garcia’s butchery as one of the major components that makes Adagio what it is.
Garcia learned to dress animals when he was 6. He dressed venison and goats with his uncles and father, and it turns out this knowledge comes in handy when you open your own salumeria and start breaking down whole animals. Garcia has an affinity and inclination for butchery, Pedonesi says, a skill that became an indispensable asset in the formulation of their vision.
Time is a constant theme throughout our conversation and their journey.
Adagio, meaning “at a slow tempo or pace,” is a fitting name for their brainchild (they first branded themselves as the Salumeria). The thought, time, and effort of what they’re doing is a sublime orchestration. The acute attention to detail necessary in the long process of raising, then curing meat is fraught with a high potential for hiccups.
The average feedlot hog raised on corn and soy, pumped with hormones and antibiotics, is ready for slaughter in about nine months; Adagio raises their hogs on a diet of peanuts, hazelnuts, seasonal treats, grain sorghum, milo, and a salad bar for anywhere from 18 months to two years. Depending on the water content desired, or lack of, a salumi can cure anywhere from just under a year to two years. Each bite literally takes years to make.
The quality of Adagio’s products is informed by a dedication to natural ingredients. Two ingredients, Swiss chard powder and cherry powder, stand out on the label of the sleek black tube housing Adagio’s The O.G.
“The known way of combating botulism [a potentially deadly spore that can grow in some foods under specific conditions] is through nitrites, which are converted into nitrates. We needed a solution for botulism … we found that Swiss chard actually enhanced our product and provided that minimum requirement to extinguish the botulism threat. We took something healthy out of the garden and were able to satisfy a crucial requirement, and in the process eliminate the need for synthetic nitrites and nitrates,” says Pedonesi, who was previously a biomedical engineer.
Cherries are naturally high in ascorbic acid, basically water soluble vitamin C; cherry powder is used for preservation and color retention.
Pedonesi and Garcia have a seemingly clear vision of growth, but unlike the chef-driven culture of reinvention and reinterpretation one might mistakenly group them in, these gentlemen are driven by the idea of historical preservation and respect for tradition born from necessity and survival.
“What we do here is we find the recipe, the reason behind the recipe, the story, the culture, the family even, the cross section of streets of where it originated, and to the best of our abilities re-create it,” Pedonesi says.
Garcia adds, “Don’t elevate it, just honor it. Just go back and learn the way it’s supposed to be done, go back and learn why it was done a certain way. Food, traditionally, was not a luxury, it was a necessity. We are just trying to go back in time and rescue those tastes that were otherwise lost.”
“What a road paved in pig mud.” – Adagio Salumi co-founder Gerry Garcia
Garcia and Pedonesi strive for subtlety and nuance. Everything starts from the ground up. They feed their hogs indigenous spices and herbs in search of a specific flavor profile they are attempting to recapture. While most palates might not be able to single out those flavors, that minute element pervades.
Adagio is scaling as we speak. They are currently constructing a new facility that will allow them to grow “one hundredfold,” with curing chambers “five times” what they currently can do, the partners say. Their ultimate commercial plan is national distribution in major grocery stores.
Ideally, Adagio will curate an experience, the Cure Box (currently offered at adagiosalumi.com), to be delivered to your door with historical information to learn the stories behind the salumi. They want to share what they have learned because they are passionate about their craft. Pedonesi also says that they have a plan for a certification process for farms that want to raise Adagio-quality hogs in order to address the plan for national scaling, which is not possible from the farm in Rockdale.
“What’s important to us also resonates with Austin in general, and that is being in control of what we’re putting into our bodies. Our salami is nothing but the pork we raise, salt, and spices,” says Pedonesi.
Even with their plan laid out, how does this scale? It is consistent for how we interpret a certain lifestyle of eating and consuming, but will it work in the long run? If they are as aware and passionate about their expansion and growth as they have been about what they have currently built, it just might.
Only time will tell.
This article appears in August 11 • 2023.