With a whole pig’s leg in one hand and a knife in the other, Sebastian Cortez swiftly peels the animal’s white, hairy skin from the muscle and piles it on his butcher block. His artisanal shop, Sebastian & Co Fine Organic Meats (2425 Marine Drive) in West Vancouver, is surgically clean and cold, so there’s no smell to this operation whatsoever. In just three minutes, the process is complete: fat for sausages and crackling for roasts set aside, meat loaded into a net for brining and smoking into ham. As with other cutting-edge butchers, the philosophy is nose-to-tail use of the animal: there is no waste.
This is what 34-year-old Cortez does every day for work (and joy), and it’s a long way from where he started—as an environmental engineering student in Chile, destined for a lifetime in an office. A move to Toronto in 1999, an encounter with an encouraging chef, cooking school, and disenchantment with long, late hours on the line as a chef led him to meat. After working on an organic farm and apprenticing in several butcher shops in Toronto, he moved to Vancouver in 2006 and opened Sebastian & Co in 2007.
“It’s a lot of work, what we do,” he says, his forearms bulging as he slices into the leg. “But there’s nothing I don’t like. Every day is different. When you do charcuterie, it’s like you’re doing chemistry. You got to make sure the humidity is right, your amounts of salt are right, also temperatures.…And then butchering, Frenching, and deboning is almost an artsy thing. You want everything to look really pretty on the display.”
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