At our 6.20 Picnic x The Local Butcher Shop founders Aaron and Monica Rocchino shared more than just their story at Oliveto, the restaurant where they first worked, met, and fell in love: They also shared their delectable hash. Aaron and Monica were kind enough to share the recipe so you can enjoy it at home. Plan a trip to The Local Butcher Shop in Berkeley to make it for a weekend brunch! Here’s Aaron:

The Butcher Hash came to be out of necessity of wanting to use something that normally didn’t get used. When we slice bacon for customers, you get to the end of the slab, and then you can’t get beautiful, even slices. We can sell these as bacon ends to people who want to cook with it, but we accumulated more than we could sell. The same goes for ham, corned beef, pastrami, bologna, mortadella, pancetta, guanciale and salt pork. All these bits get mixed together and cooked with onions and stock. And then you have Butcher Hash!

The proportions change pretty often of what type and how much of each cured item is in it, but we really just go off of taste.

Butcher Hash

Ingredients

Equal parts volume yellow onions and bacon ends
About the same amount of deli meat butts
A bit of potatoes (anything but russets and Yukon gold has good flavor and not starchy)
Chicken or Pork Stock
Salt, as needed

Dice potatoes in small pieces and cook until they are tender—not mushy or falling apart.
Send deli meat butts through grinder, followed by bacon ends. Be sure to keep them separate.
Cook bacon to render out the fat and add some color.
Remove the bacon but save the fat in the pan.
Sweat onions until they are tender, glossy and slightly wet.
Add deli butts, rendered bacon, cooked potatoes, and add enough stock to moisten and cook for about 15 minutes. (We use pork stock just because that’s what we have the most of. Chicken stock could work just as well. I wouldn’t use beef because the flavor gets too strong.)
Taste and add seasoning (salt) as needed.
After the mixture has cooked and come together, let it cool. You don’t want it to be too wet or else it won’t stick together. But if it’s too dry, then it will crumble and be dry-tasting.
Once it’s cooled, what we do at the shop is form it into little hockey puck patties and sell it that way. Or you can just keep it in the form that it is and treat it like a regular hash like we had it at Oliveto.

If this were something you would want to make at home we could always sell the Butts and grind them for you! Enjoy!