Meat Your Maker

Chef Rich Freedman really gets into his work.

by Drew Lazor

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Published: Jul 1, 2008

ALL-TERRINE: Freedman, formerly of the Sidecar, looks over his scrapple. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

"Who makes scrapple, dude?"

A fair question that I do not know how to answer. Except I do. The guy posing it (rhetorically) is chef Rich Freedman — and he's whipping up the stuff from scratch right in front of me.

Freedman tasks me — noob observer taking up space in the 103-square-foot kitchen of the Sidecar Bar & Grille — with dicing up a container of scrubbed-clean pork snouts into 1-inch cubes and pushing them through a meat grinder with a wooden dowel. He soon scuttles over to the stove top and promptly falls into a workmanly trance, prodding and folding an oil-drum-sized pot of flesh-toned mush — 5 pounds duck, 5 pounds snouts, 2 pounds cornmeal and additions like minced onion, sage and marjoram — with a mammoth wooden spoon that wouldn't look out of place slung over the mantel of an Alsatian country cottage.

Most store-bought scrapple carries the color of Dickensian gruel. Freedman's scrapple is different. Even though it's meant to set overnight in duck-fat-greased terrines before being served up for brunch, the chef can't resist: He flattens a bit into a patty and tosses it into a skillet dressed with a drip of oil. Quick flash on either side and it's onto a plate, sinfully golden-brown, newly formed crust popping and sizzling like raindrops on the hood of an overheating car.

Freedman grins and hands me a fork. It's rich in all the right ways, but the big difference between it and its crud-gray counterpart is that it's so well-mixed that you can actually taste each spice in each bite — that big spoon is not just for appearances.

From January 2006 through this June, Freedman implemented his mastery of old-world charcuterie — painstakingly crafting meats by hand — at Adam and Jen Ritter's bar at 22nd and Christian. Though he recently left the Sidecar job for a new gig — chef de cuisine at Harry the K's at Citizens Bank Park — his mark on the gastropub's menu is unshakeable. The chorizo crumbled over the nachos? From scratch. Ditto for the Cajun sausage, duck confit and corned beef. The addictively smoky tasso ham topping the Sidecar burger? Like the scrapple, the stuff takes three days to make — one night curing in salt, a second chilling in a Cajun spices and a third slow-smoking over hickory chips.

Not many people in Philly practice centuries-old European meat-making techniques when shortcuts — outsourcing, automation, pre-fab ingredients — lurk around every pantry. But Freedman has an advantage: Meat's in his blood. His maternal great-grandfather, Salvatore, was a New York butcher who counted Jackie Gleason among his regulars; he and Freedman's great-uncle Joey Zarcone founded a shop in Florida called Joe Z's Meat Market, where the now-36-year-old first observed his elders crafting sausages by hand.

Freedman was born in Philly, but spent his early years in Lancaster County and West Chester before coming back to the city to attend Drexel. It wasn't long before he began paying "more attention to the ethnic markets in the city [than he] did to Statistics and Accounting 104." Freedman left, eventually landing in the Art Institute of Philadelphia's culinary program, from which he graduated in 2003.

He credits AI charcuterie professor Colleen McDonough with unearthing his passion for the process. Something about the fastidious nature of charcuterie called to him. He remembers one session where he prepared spicy poblano sausages, spreading a bunch of handmade links over a hot grill. "I was so ecstatic that I had someone take a picture of me," he says. "No one understood my excitement."

But after watching Freedman make sausages — slipping soaked casings onto the business end of a piston-style stuffer and throwing his shoulder into the hand crank, coaxing the meat mixture out at a smooth, even clip — it's apparent the operative term isn't excitement. It's clarity. The chef speaks enthusiastically about what he's doing, of course, but when he's in the muck of it, you can tell he cherishes the meticulous labor — to him, it's anything but burdensome.

"There is a real connection with the people who spent sleepless nights obsessing over the most miniscule detail of something another person will be enjoying," says Freedman. "[Whether] you are making 500 or 5,000 pounds, that attention to minute detail can be lost in the interest of saving time and money. But that's not going to happen at the ballpark."

What is going to happen: Freedman's rolling out his very first batch of handmade bratwurst emulsified with beer for this weekend's Phillies home stand against the Mets. If things go well, there's the possibility his handiwork could spread to concession stands throughout the park. But don't think Freedman's going to change a single thing about the process. "I will still be making it the same way," he says. "Machines are nice, but sometimes you have to feel the stuff to make sure it's right."

(drew.lazor@citypaper.net)

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