This Deli Turns Into Philadelphia’s Best New Restaurant at Night

Heavy Metal Sausage Company is a deli

and then it is a restaurant on Thursday and Friday nights.

The mix of meat products available are definitely

spanning multiple cultures.

We push into the realm of unseen products,

like Zungenblutwurst, Leiberwurst.

The shop is a combination of more than just

what the typical person would think of,

coming into a deli,

and overall just helping build a community

around locally sourced products.

[rock music]

Hey, my name's Pat Alfiero.

I'm the chef and co-owner at Heavy Metal Sausage Company.

So why don't you guys come on in.

So this is the shop, all 250 square feet of it.

Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 10:00 AM

to 4:00 PM, we are a deli.

Thursday and Friday nights we transform into a restaurant

that we call Trattoria.

The deli case changes depending on the day.

So this is all of our production space.

We have a pretty simple layout.

Butcher block, a little low boy over there,

pots cooking for dinners at night,

a few induction burners and an oven.

Oh man, why did I do this?

It's 9:00 AM.

Our dishwasher broke and we're gonna fix that first.

The grounding prong broke off in the outlet.

So until we can call our dishwasher company

who we rent this from, I'm gonna put a new plug on it

so we can use it for today and probably tomorrow,

probably for the next week.

Calling a repairman does not give me an item

to then make money off of.

In a business that's our size,

those outside expenses can be what could like,

damage us or hurt us if there's too many of them.

Alright, let's see if this works.

I'm not an electrician.

Don't do what I do, call someone if you need to.

Yay!

Okay, now we can prep.

So it's 9:32 and we're really far behind now.

The first task is we have to pull the beef

out of the oven that braised overnight.

The beef is for Trattoria service Thursday

and Friday night, for entree.

So these are beef shanks that we got

from Happy Valley Meat Co-Op.

We took them off the bone, we braised them in red wine

and some veal stock and a whole lot of onions.

Today we're gonna reduce the braise

and turn it into somewhat of a coating, stew-ish sauce.

So the Trattoria dinners, we wanna put out grandma vibes,

so trying to do some like classical things

but stew 'em in like a fun way

that's maybe a little different.

So this is loosely based off of a Sicilian dish

where the wine is Marsala instead of red,

but there is still like lots of onions

and you reduce the braise and caramelizes the onions.

Tomorrow we'll caramelize everything

and then mix everything back together.

Al, we're coming down.

So this will go in the walk-in.

Tomorrow we'll portion 'em out for dinner service.

This is Alessandra, this is our lonely, full-time employee.

She's just down here and kind

of chipping away at some things.

So I'm just finishing a mustard,

got the chickens butchered,

and then I'm gonna move on to Zungenblutwurst.

Alessandra, her main role here is to take care

of Heavy Metal as the deli,

and then I'm, especially on Wednesdays,

are focusing on Trattoria

and getting big projects done for that.

So next up we're gonna strain some stock, roast some bones,

get another stock running.

So let's get to it.

So it's about 10:15.

This will be a duck- and goose-body stocks.

So we're gonna roast bones, get 'em in the pot.

This is a goose body, this is a duck body.

Geese are definitely a little bit bigger.

The geese, we save the bodies for stock for us,

then we take the whole breastplate off,

dry age that for our December menus.

We braise the legs, dry-age and roast the breasts.

It's a nice dish, it's fun.

We did it last year and I wanna do it again this year.

The difference in flavor between geese and duck,

I find that geese are a little bit more hardy

and they have a little bit more oil.

They're a little bigger,

so they have maybe a little more texture

and they definitely hold up to dry-aging pretty well.

So for the ducks, we remove the breasts, remove the legs,

save the bones for stock,

or now that it's soup season,

we will put the bones in the case

and sell them for people who wanna make soup at home.

So we're just gonna load these in the oven.

These will roast at 400, for I don't know, 45 minutes,

half an hour, until like, the color's right,

then we'll throw 'em in the pot.

We have a delivery coming.

It's 10:20, we're gonna go grab that.

It's mostly wheat berries and flour.

We are going to be milling some of those wheat berries

to make our own flour.

[rock music]

We mill about 50% of our flour here, in-house,

at least for our breads, we mill all

of our pasta flour in-house.

There are some flavor benefits to milling.

And when you use white flour, it all kind of like,

tastes the same, but when you use whole wheat,

fresh milled flour, you're really getting a lot

of different flavors.

To the point where, we'll,

actually depending on the pasta sauce,

change what flour we use to like, best match that sauce.

When we're milling, I've found that I have a

almost allergic reaction to the flour dust.

The rye's the worst of all of 'em.

I typically wear a mask while I'm milling.

This is actually a common thing for bakers as well.

You get like, I think it's called baker's lung,

but it's just from inhaling flour.

We're milling about five kilos of rye

and then after the rye's done,

and I'm gonna weigh that out now,

we're gonna mill about two and a half kilos

of hard wheat that will then get sifted.

It's important to sift it, I think, for two reasons.

The first is, we don't really, as a people,

enjoy whole wheat pasta all that much.

I think that it definitely has this connotation

of being like a health food and like,

you have to suffer to eat it, kind of feeling.

The other thing is that structurally, it's easier

to build gluten when there's no bran in the way.

So the bran essentially acts like little razor blades

when you're trying to make a dough.

And if you don't want to deal

with those little razor blades, then you just sift it out.

Super simple, we have a sifter, it's got sieves,

put the flour in it, turn it on,

it vibrates, sifts the flour.

We used to do this by hand, it sucked.

Now we don't do it by hand, it doesn't suck.

[rock music]

So it's 11 o'clock, it's time to get the second smoke

on these ring bologna that we make in-house.

We use our oven, which isn't a smoker,

but we've made it into a smoker.

So we pretty much take a pan of wood chips, like this.

These are coming from one of our farmers

who had a bunch of fruit trees that they took down,

chipped 'em up, and now sell 'em as firewood,

which is really useful.

We light it, close the door,

and then we control the smoke level

by controlling the fan speed.

So the higher fan we do, the harder it'll smolder,

the more smoke it creates.

The second smoke brings it

to the internal temperature it needs to be

to make it food-safe and ready to eat.

So 155 degrees for these.

And then the second smoke also kind

of solidifies the like, beautiful amber color

of the smoked meats.

I grew up with ring bologna

and it's something that's like, near and dear to my heart

and I wanted to give it to Philly.

And I'm just really proud of the fact that we've been able

to do this, not having like the necessarily proper pieces

of equipment to do so.

So before the day gets away from me,

I want to introduce my partner, Melissa.

She does almost all the front-of-house

and all the backend stuff that keeps the business running

and humming away.

Just getting the menus all set to send out

to the dinner guests this week.

We are a BYOB, but I do like to come up

with pairings every week for our guests.

I am a certified sommelier so I like to kind

of lend people a hand in choosing

what they bring in for our dinner each week.

I mean it's a small space, so we can max, do 14 people.

So it does have a communal setting.

Up until very recently we lived upstairs.

So it is very much like coming into our home.

[rock music]

It is 11:30 right now.

Alessandra's going to be doing the Zungenblutwurst.

It's been here since the shop opened.

So it's an all-pork sausage that is mixed with blood

and cured pork tongue, stuffed into a large diameter casing.

And then we use these as like, a cold-cut deli meat.

We double grind to finely ground sausage.

It'll allow the sausage to become more homogenous,

similar to bologna.

You wanna grind on the larger die first,

so that we don't build up too much friction,

'cause heat's the enemy here,

and we don't want the fat in the meat to get too warm.

If it does, it will not be able to bind itself together

with the blood and everything else that's in it

and it will break out of its homogenous mix

while it's cooking.

I was was not someone who grew up eating blood products.

So this was definitely something

that I was admittedly apprehensive to.

I think it's a dynamic sausage to have.

I love having it on the menu.

It definitely takes a moment for people to digest

and understand what we're doing with it,

but I think that it's a great example

to showcase at least one organ.

So you have these pockets of tongue,

that are really beautiful and are contrasted with the blood.

I think it's awesome.

It's a really sturdy, hardy sandwich overall.

Served on rye with some pepper relish, lettuce,

and garlic mayo.

And then from this point we will mix in the blood

and pork skin puree.

I wanted to do a blood-based deli meat

mostly for me, but also to get people

to start looking at things a little differently.

And I think that maybe even just in our little bubble,

we've been able to do so.

So ring bologna's done on its second smoke,

these will air-dry for about an hour.

That'll help the color deepen

and get around the whole thing.

Oxidization will occur and that helps with color development

in smoked sausages and smoked products.

And then we'll get 'em in the walk-in

when they're ready to go in.

[rock music]

So it's about 12 o'clock, we're gonna get our dough made.

The dough is for pasta for this weekend's Trattoria dinners.

It will be a ravioli that's gonna have a sheep filling

of some form, most likely some chiles,

and some dried oregano, maybe a little cheese.

We're still workshopping it.

The old brain hole.

So we get our eggs from Horseshoe Ranch.

This is their words, best eggs damn eggs,

and I agree with that.

We'll set this to one, we'll get it rocking.

We'll just add our eggs and this'll mix

for about 10 minutes or so.

We'll let it do its thing.

But while that's mixing,

we're gonna start mixing some bread.

First of five breads that we're gonna be making today,

is the focaccia.

Because we don't really sell bread,

I don't like to consider us in the same realm as a bakery.

And especially being friends with a good amount

of bakers in the city.

They are so much more talented than I am.

I've just kind of figured out how it works best for us.

The next bread we're gonna do is the panere,

so the Northern Italian rye bread.

We use this for our sandwich bread

and then we also use it in the dinners

as a part of our bread service.

This does not get mixed in the mixer, this is all hand.

If like three years ago, you would've told me

that I was gonna make the same bread recipes every day

for a year, I probably would've told you

that you're [beep] nuts,

'cause like I just move so fast.

It's like, I wanna change and I want to,

but like the bread is like you can make the

same dough every day and it's different every day

and it's frustrating and interesting.

And so now we're gonna pull the pasta that's ready.

I'll give it a quick knead, and make sure it's good.

And then then we will wrap in the plastic wrap.

It'll soften out a little bit in about an hour

or two, hydrate fully, and then we'll be able

to roll some pasta.

It's now two o'clock.

Alessandra's gonna start stuffing Zungenblutwurst

that you saw her mix earlier.

We're gonna start with Capicola,

and the Capicola's gonna be stuffed by hand.

So yesterday what I did was I cured some pork,

let it sit overnight.

And so now we're ready to go.

They get compressed to kind of eliminate any air pockets.

And then once it's as tight as possible,

then we cook it off.

It has a really lovely, subtle warmth to it.

We add Calabrian chiles in

and I love that it's more of a disjointed deli meat.

It's not a homogenized one.

So you really get to see the result of this cubed pork.

It's a circular tying motion.

So we're really trying to compress it as much as possible

and eliminate as much air as possible.

So by using like centrifugal force,

it makes it a little bit easier than sitting here

and tying it on, like, on a surface.

Once we're done, I double-knot it.

We cut the edges off so it can actually fit in the oven.

We always perforate the casings after we're done stuffing

to allow for some air.

And then we're gonna move to Zungenblutwurst.

So now we're actually gonna use the stuffer.

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna take

our Zungenblutwurst farce.

We're gonna put it into this capsule.

And it's important that when you're putting it in,

that we're not incorporating too much air.

All righty, we are in.

Can't wait to find out later if I got sausage

in my armpit or not.

It's important to really have like, a continuous flow,

and be steady with how you're cranking.

All right, so we're at the end,

and there she is in all her glory.

[soft music]

Pat, you wanna come feel?

Yeah. Pop a piece first?

Yeah.

So we're gonna hang these

and then once we're ready

we're gonna put them into the oven.

They're gonna cook in perforated pans

for about three hours and then they'll go downstairs

to be hung again.

And then we'll be ready to go for tomorrow,

for service, for retail, for sandwiches.

While under pressure, it's being cooked

and it's expanding, it's pushing out liquid,

it's pushing out gelatin.

And then as it cools down,

it all contracts back together into a solid sliceable thing.

Alright, it's three o'clock.

Now that those are in the oven,

we're gonna start making a filling for our raviolis.

We kind of make these things up as we go.

We had rendered a bunch of sheep fat two weeks ago

and we saved all the particle bits

that were left over from that rendering.

We're gonna take that and we're gonna turn into a pasta

filling with ricotta.

We have some beef filling here

that was from another batch that we'll fold in.

We'll probably give it some spices,

maybe some Calabrian chile,

some coriander, a little bit of garlic,

we'll see what happens.

I don't know yet, but we're gonna be using the dough

from earlier that you saw us mill,

and make with all those beautiful eggs.

It's really just like looking at

what we have available to us,

looking at what we need to get rid of,

looking what maybe I spent too much money on,

and now I need to make some money back. [Pat laughing]

Just give it a little...

The nice thing with it is that it's already cooked

and everything.

I have an idea of what the sauce is gonna be like,

white wine, some chiles, very straightforward,

maybe some like, dried oregano.

So I really don't wanna overly spice the filling

if I'm gonna have those things as the sauce.

I also really love making people feel like,

they like, just ate way too much

and have to go lay on a couch.

It's such a good feeling.

Until Melissa tells me that I have to go do something

and then I get up, reluctantly.

Living and working with your life partner,

I think, is is pretty tough.

And we go through, highs and lows.

Melissa's over there like, waiting for me.

What's this mother [beep] gonna say? [Melissa laughing]

Being able to like, have somebody

that understands everything that you're going through

and is right there with you, is really nice.

And not everybody gets to experience that.

If we can survive this, we can survive anything.

We just finished filling, it's good to go.

So now we're gonna just sheet out some pasta.

We use this little handy-dandy ravioli mold.

So we'll do this fold and then we'll do a couple

of double folds until it gets to the right width

and then we'll do our final roll-through.

So we're just putting little balls of filling in.

Put this sheet over top.

That'll be nice little sheep ravioli.

Cool, that's it, raviolis are made.

Alright guys, it's five o'clock, we got some pumpkins

to roast, some vegetables to steam, some ricotta to whip.

It never really ends, so you guys gotta get outta here.

Thanks for coming in and please swing in

and eat some of our food.

Okay, bye.

Go birds.