About a month ago, I headed down into our basement and strung two pieces of salted pork from the ceiling. I jerry-rigged a cardboard canopy to protect them from ceiling dirt and paint chips, and tilted the dehumidifier to provide a cool, dry breeze.

At the time, our landlords were on vacation, and had rented out their upstairs apartment to a nice visiting scholar to whom I had spoken all of two words. I left a friendly note on the pork jowls, and crossed my fingers, hoping that I wouldn't hear her screaming from the top of the stairs when she flipped on the light to see hunks of flesh dangling from the rafters.

Guanciale is a type of dry cured pork, much like pancetta or prosciutto. While prosciutto is ham, and pancetta is pork belly, guanciale is made from pork jowls. The jowls, or guancia, are the cheeks of the pig, which are thickly striped with fat, much like the belly. Guanciale is reputed to have a much richer, porkier, meatier flavor than pancetta, and luckily for impatient me, it has a much shorter hanging time as well.

Inspired by this article, and the timely arrival of pork jowls on my CSA add-on list, I decided to give it a go. I also followed Batali's simple recipe. The basic dry-curing process calls for coating the jowls in a salt, sugar and spice mixture and keeping them in the fridge for a week before hanging for another three weeks or more. The salt forces the liquid out of the meat through osmosis, inhibiting the growth of the bacteria that causes spoilage. Meanwhile, the sugar feeds the friendly Lactobacillus bacteria, which create an acidic environment that further discourages spoilage.

I was surprised to see how much water the jowls gave off over the week: over two cups. I drained it off a few times, and found that in the last two days, no additional liquid was released. At this point I patted the meat off and strung it up with cotton twine and a little sprig of rosemary. It dripped very occasionally for the first day, so I placed a plastic bag underneath. After a few days, the meat was dry and firm, and had a noticeable porky smell, a little like a wet dog, if that dog were a pig. As the days went by, the meat darkened slightly and the smell faded, becoming the more appetizing scent of cured pork. And today I cut it down and tasted it.

So how was it? Stay tuned!

Interested in trying it yourself? Here are some