La Espanola Meats is the house that pork built.
Twenty years ago, Juana and Frank Faraone bought a tiny Spanish deli in Lomita. Juana, a native of Valencia, Spain, and an enthusiastic cook, started making Spanish-style sausages. She went back to Spain and traveled around the country swapping recipes with small-town butchers, and her product line expanded. Over the years, Juana and her American-born husband brought their two daughters into the business.
In 1995, La Espanola moved into a USDA-inspected meat-processing plant built to its specifications in nearby Harbor City. In less than two decades it had gone from a local shop taking in $40,000 a year to a $2-million business supplying restaurants and Spanish-food lovers around the country. A lot of that comes from cheeses, wines and other imports, but Spain's love affair with the pig is the foundation.
This is obvious the moment you step into the shop, from the hams hanging in the corner and the big deli counter selling nearly two dozen kinds of sausage, most of them deep crimson with Spanish red pepper (pimenton). You can also find dry-cured pork loin (lomo embuchado), ham hocks (lacon codillo) and even bones (huesos de jamon) for sale.
The meat plant, which occupies most of the building, features specialized Spanish pork-handling equipment. One odd-looking device is a sort of workshop bench jig designed for holding a whole aged ham at any angle you choose for convenience in boning out the meat.
The most impressive item is the computer-controlled meat mixer, which looks like a muscle-bound stainless-steel cement mixer--it can hold 400 pounds of sausage meat. When it's turned on, a lid automatically seals the top so mixing can take place in a partial vacuum, to compact the meat by keeping pockets of air from forming in the mix.
Next to it is the stuffing machine. Just transfer a couple of hundred pounds of sausage meat into it, fit sausage casings over the nozzles and press a button, and the casings start to fill. The sausages are transferred to a work table by hand. "Eventually," jests Alex Motameri, the Faraones' son-in-law, "we'll probably get a machine to do that too."
La Espanola makes two kinds of blood sausage (morcilla), one with rice in it and one flavored with onions. Blood sausage has to be cooked as soon as the casings are filled to solidify it, so the plant has a room-sized industrial oven exclusively for cooking rack upon rack of morcilla.
