"Experiment" #1 - Coppa Battle

My first experience with overpriced cured meats comes from my time as kitchen manager of a wine bar in New York. The place was legit, and you wouldn't believe the kinds of things we could do with a hot plate in a 6'x6' basement cave. One thing we knew well was that people love salty, fatty things while they're getting tanked, er, enjoying wine flights and making erudite tasting notes. As such, we had a lovely charcuterie plate on the menu.

When I first started at this place, the owner would make a biweekly (is that the one that means twice a week?) trip to some hip specialty store in the Village and buy a bunch of meats. Having grown up in Brooklyn, the home of poorly lit ethnic delis with questionable health codes and absolutely delicious foods, I challenged her to a taste test and brought in some mortadella from an Italian place by my house. The mortadella from the place by my house was more flavorful, with bigger chunks of pistachio, for something like half the price. I've been skeptical of hip specialty stores ever since.

I've actually been down for poorly-lit delis and skeptical of pretty much anything else for a lot longer than that. When I was a kid, you could get 2 oz. of osetra caviar in Brighton Beach for $30. For the uninitiated, Brighton Beach is a freaknasty, gritty Russian-saturated part of Brooklyn, where except for the El train and some street signs in English, you'd believe you suddenly got transported to Odessa. The stores where you got the stuff were always a little bit suspect, but it was all worth it, because they were probably the last places on earth where my grandma could have bought caviar with foodstamps. And buy caviar with foodstamps she did, every week, so I could eat it on a bagel with a thick slab of butter in the morning. It does bear mentioning that, about 1 of 10 times, the "caviar" would be rotten and inedible, but for $15/oz, you can't really complain.

Anyway, enough about how great my childhood was. Onto something bigger and better: today's "experiment," Coppa.

Hyped, Branded, Expensive Entity A: Coppa from Boccalone, in the Ferry Building. Here's the Boccalone Ferry Building page, for context.

vs.

Obscure, Possibly Generic, Possibly Coming from Some Poorly-Lit Ethnic Market, Cheap Entity B: Coppa from New World Market, a Russian store in the Outer Richmond neighborhood

The shopping experiences were not really worth mentioning except for one small detail. At New World Market, a swarthy middle-aged redhead used her massive Eastern European upper body, which surely would have given her huge evolutionary advantage when the family ox was too sick to plow the rye fields, to slice the hell out of my coppa. I think she was done in under 2 minutes. At Boccalone, they took my name and asked me to come back in 5 minutes. I spent that time buying massively overpriced chanterelles and scowling at hipsters.

A picture's worth a thousand words, so here you go. Note the prices per pound under each meat product. Do NOT note the shoddy photoshop workmanship:

Fancy Coppa	Cheap Coppa
$32/lb	$10.99/lb

As you can see, the fancy coppa is almost exactly triple the price of the cheap coppa. At first glance, it certainly does look better. It looks handmade, rustic, less uniform. Does it taste any better, though?

PROCEDURE:
Put 2 kinds of coppa on two numbered plates. Harass people you know until they try the meat products. Convince coworkers that the past is in the past, and you're really not trying to poison them, really. Ask for feedback and write down some of the funnier shit that's said. Et voila.

RESULTS:
7 people preferred fancy coppa. 5 people preferred cheap coppa.
Of the 12 surveyed, 5 said that the two kinds were almost indistinguishable and cast their vote on the slimmest of margins.
Based on some laughable (given the sample size) statistical analysis (a chi-square test, if you must know), there is NO SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE between the two coppas.

MY FAVORITE COMMENTS:
With respect to fancy coppa:
"This is kinda nasty [insert disgusted face here]."
"Hmmm... you only get a hint of the Safeway salami taste at the end."

With respect to the cheap coppa:
"Man, this smells like my socks after a rainy day [insert disgusted face here]."

CONCLUSION:
The consensus among the tasters seemed to be that the fancy coppa was more rubbery but also had more spice. The cheap coppa was unanimously described as more tender and soft. Given how close the votes were and how huge the disparity in price is, I'm going to have to relegate Boccalone coppa to the land of the overhyped and unsubstantiated. All standard disclaimers apply.

"Experiment" #2 is forthcoming, once we all recover from the meat sweats.