Charcutepalooza Challenge: Cream of Cauliflower Soup with Smokey Blue Cheese and Pancetta Croutons

I tried to ignore it, the silly (and yet somehow inspired) hashtag that started appearing on Twitter right after the New Year. #Charcutepalooza. But it kept showing up, with increasing frequency, in my Twitter feed: #Charcutepalooza. #Charcutepalooza. Everybody, it seemed, was tweeting about Charcutepalooza.

If you are a food lover on Twitter, you are probably familiar with the term by now. But just in case, let me fill you in. Charcutepalooza is a food project; its subtitle is The Year of Meat. It was started by my friend Cathy Barrow (who tweets as @MrsWheelbarrow) and her friend Kim Foster (who tweets as @TheYummyMummy). The aim? To tackle a new charcuterie project every month for a year; to use your homemade charcuterie in a recipe; and to post what you make every month.

Within minutes, it seemed, dozens of food bloggers had joined the Charcutepalooza party. You can read about the project in much more detail here, and see the list of participating bloggers (now more than 300) here.

I resisted through January’s challenge, which was homemade duck prosciutto. I am not particularly fond of duck (unless it is paddling around in a pond). And I am busy, as we all are. Who has time to make their own charcuterie? As much as I love a good challenge in the kitchen, there was no way I was going to take that on. I have enough on my plate.

But when participating bloggers started posting their gorgeous photos of duck prosciutto and the delectable dishes they made with it, I felt a twinge of regret. The more they posted, the more I twinged. And so when the February challenge was announced–homemade pancetta–I caved. I adore pancetta, which is, essentially, Italian bacon–pork belly cured with salt and spices and used to flavor soups, stews, pasta sauces, and more. I am almost never without a piece of pancetta in my fridge or freezer and I use it a lot. In fact, if you were to look at a cross-section of my arm, it would probably look like a roll of pancetta. That’s how much I love it.

I knew, though, that I would enjoy the challenge more if I had a partner in meat-making, so I asked my friend Nancy Purves-Pollard, who owns La Cuisine, in Old Town Alexandria, to join me. I am glad she said yes because, as it turns out, she is a master roller and trusser, and it was she who finally got our rather thick slab of pork belly to roll properly, and she who so expertly tied it.

In keeping with the rules of the challenge, we bought our pork belly from The Butcher’s Block, which sells meat from local and regional farms that use sustainable agriculture practices. We seasoned the meat and let it cure in my small garage refrigerator. Then we tied it and let it dry (I set it on cheesecloth on a rack in my husband’s wine cellar for about a week). When we cut into it, we had…pancetta.

Really, the whole process was much easier than I thought it would be.

The question then became: what to make with our pancetta? To see what Nancy did, head over to her blog on La Cuisine’s web site. As for me, I decided on soup. Now normally I am a hearty soup person–vegetable, grain and bean soups, with handfuls of greens stirred in, are what I like. But I wanted to give my homemade pancetta its due; I did not want it to get lost in the mix. I found a beautiful, snowy white head of cauliflower at MOM’s, in Del Ray, and suddenly I couldn’t think of a better way to showcase the pancetta than in a creamy cauliflower soup. It sounded just right to me for late winter. It was pure luck, however, that while at the store I happened to pass the cheese case and spied the wedge of Rogue Creamery’s Smokey Blue. And that’s how I came up with Cream of Cauliflower Soup with Smokey Blue Cheese and Pancetta Croutons. Last minute inspiration. It’s my favorite way to cook.