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I did a fair bit of Spanish cuisine this spring, and in the process I bought a few specialty items from La Tienda.com, which is one of the biggest importers of Spanish foods online. My larder now contains some incredible smoky pimentón, five pounds of Calasparra rice for making paella, and a few other goodies from Spain.
So, needless to say, I get a small-but-steady stream of e-mail spam from them announcing their latest specials, new products, etc. A couple of months ago, I got a somewhat breathless missive announcing that they had finally been able to secure a supply of authentic top-quality jamón íberico -- the famed dry-cured Iberico ham. Like Prosciutto di Parma and the more common Spanish Serrano ham, Iberico is aged over a long period of time under carefully controlled conditions, then sliced tissue-thin.
It's very hard to get quality Iberico ham outside of Spain, so it was a major coup for La Tienda. If you wanted to buy it, you had to be willing to wait at least a year to get it, because they've pre-ordered from the supplier, and they're only selling full hams at a total price of about $1200.00 a piece. So I took a pass on ordering it.
Little did I realize, though, until I read this NYT article last week what a sensation this offering has caused within the Foodie world. The foodie featured in the article even went to Spain so he could "visit" his ham. The article illustrates the unabashed trendiness of foodies: prosciutto is now totally pedestrian, darling, and Serrano is so last year, so anybody who is anybody is lining up to buy their own bone-in Iberico. The story alos talks a little about the challenges La Tienda has to go through to convince the USDA that it was okay to import the product; as you might recall, the USDA set down a handful of regulations a couple of years ago about food safety that have wreaked havoc with being able to legitimately import many traditionally-made foods.
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