LAUREL HILL — Apalachicola folks know seafood. But for the pork part of a proposed gourmet foods venture, an Italian company's partners turned to local hog farmers.
Mark and Kasia Fortune have a successful line of sausages, bacon and pork loin made from a herd of free range, pure-bred Heritage Tamworth hogs at their Big Creek Farm in Laurel Hill. To that, Michael Battaglia — an American owner of Este Farms in Tuscany, Italy — wants to add a line of prosciutto, a smoky, often thinly sliced gourmet ham that, while commonplace in most of Europe, locally sells for upward of $15 a pound.
“This group of Italians saw my website,” www.bigcreekfarmflorida.com, Mark Fortune said. “They’re doing a joint venture down in Apalachicola with mullet roe. We talked about it as possibly being the only approved Tuscan prosciutto maker in the United States.”
The Battaglias await Apalachicola city commissioners' approval of Mayor Van Johnson’s request to provide the city’s Scipio Creek harbormaster’s house, rent-free, as the venture’s headquarters for the first three years, according to The Times of Apalachicola and Carrabelle. The Times, like the News Bulletin, is a GateHouse Media operation.
“Este and the mayor aim to make North Florida a central food producer by utilizing local traditions, including farming and fishing, with Italian partners in artisan food production,” Battaglia wrote in an email to The Times. “Not only will this create local jobs, in line with Governor (Rick) Scott’s ‘jobs jobs jobs’ program, but they will be locally based, developed and run; and in tune with healthy — and good — eating.”
The company’s goal is “quality-food-based job creation in northern Florida through direct investment, (joint ventures) and other partnerships between Italian and local businesses,” Battaglia stated.
If the proposal receives approval, Fortune said prosciutto would be produced in a plant built on his farm to the specifications of Este Farm’s Italian experts. Fortune currently relies on an out-of-state processing plant to produce his sausage and other foods. But he soon will open Okaloosa County’s only USDA-approved plant, which would support the prosciutto-curing house.
Because the best prosciutto comes from wild hogs, Fortune said, he and Este partners want the federal government to allow local hunters to trap boars on Eglin Reservation, and other federal land from Franklin to Okaloosa counties, and transport them to Big Creek Farm.
If the federal government approves the plan, Fortune believes the idea can work, profitably.
“You don’t have to feed this hog,” he said. “Takes me a damn year, year and a half to (fatten a pig). Here, you get a free hog.
“We’ll bring them in, let them calm down, then would days later slaughter them,” he said.
The Times of Apalachicola and Carrabelle Editor David Adlerstein contributed to this article
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: Laurel Hill pig farmer could become Tuscan prosciutto maker