ON A RECENT AFTERNOON, the crew at Salumeria Biellese is ...

On a recent afternoon, the crew at Salumeria Biellese is stuffing 45-day-old hunks of salted beef into windsock-sized casings, long stretches of cow intestine that resemble stockings as much as they do monster-sized condoms. As the workers load up the flat, limp casing with solid lumps of meat, the beast comes to life?a bresaola, a mild cured beef, is in the making, ready to be hung to dry for another four to six months before it can be eaten.

"The secret to this is time, there's no getting around it," says Marc Buzzio, second-generation co-owner of Salumeria Biellese, where he works with Paul Valetutti and Al Shariff. He's a maker of handmade salamis, cured meats and sausages in the Piedmontese style in which Buzzio's late father was trained. The business of charcuterie has been carried on here, a few blocks from Penn Station, since 1925. Sadly, the trend never caught on. Today in America, "salami" is more evocative of unidentifiable lunchmeat than of a long-standing culinary tradition.

Salami was originally conceived as a way of preserving meat; now that there's refrigeration, the need for meat that has been aged for several months in a natural environment has diminished, and like many so-called "artisanal" foods, a high-quality product like Salumeria Biellese's has become as much a novelty as a condom the size of a cow's intestine. Thanks to a successful wholesale clientele composed of many of Manhattan's star restaurateurs, the operation is still thriving despite the abundance of cheaper products that proliferate in the market.

The various short cuts that mass producers of cured meat use to create their products have skewed the public's understanding of what these things are actually supposed to taste like. In order to accelerate the production of prosciutto, for instance, a manufacturer might do a number of things?ranging from drying the meat at a much higher temperature than is optimal for fermentation (Buzzio dries his meat at 55 degrees), to adding more salt to the product, to "pumping," which is the injection of brine into the hind quarter of the pig from which prosciutto is cut, a process that enables the rapid penetration of salt into the meat. Steps like these can shorten the process of making prosciutto?which takes Buzzio close to nine months in total?to two or three weeks.

While the products may look similar in the end, the complex flavors of Buzzio's betray the astonishing effects that prolonged fermentation can have on taste. The cacciatorini, a peasant sausage of coarsely chopped pork, salt and red wine, gives off the zing of garlic and the blooming, heady aroma shared only with the most complex cheeses. But Buzzio says there's no garlic in the cacciatorini?it's the bacterial dynamism of the fermentation process that has simulated that garlicky bite. The prosciutto, on the other hand, is so subtle in its taste that the months of curing seemed to have reduced the flavor of the meat to its very essence.

Although Buzzio stands as a champion of "slow food," he employs a fast food vernacular to describe his product. "A couple of cacciatorinis, a piece of cheese, some bread, wine? That's a happy meal."