Bill Miner has put quite a few miles on his car lately. The chef/owner of Il Porcellino Salumi at 4334 West 41st Street has been driving to Basalt every week for the past three months to get his wholesale business off the ground. In January, he signed on to take over the commercial sausage kitchen formerly operated by Avalanche Cheese Company in Basalt, and since then he's been working with his team to turn primal cuts of pork into a line of fermented, dry-cured salami that will be sold in shops and restaurants all over Colorado.

The mountain-town facility is a USDA-inspected kitchen that is currently only licensed for this style of sausage, but Miner hopes to soon receive approval to begin making other Italian-style cured meats so that Il Porcellino's line of wholesale products will more closely resemble the current lineup at the Berkeley deli. For now, the team is cranking out about 1,200 pounds of salami a week in 200-pound batches. That's about eight times the volume produced at the original shop, Miner notes.