Iowa & the Amana Colonies
Eastern Iowa region. La Quercia's home; the Amana Colonies' German-American hog-curing tradition is the historical anchor.
Iowa is America's largest pork-producing state, and eastern Iowa has the strongest claim to a regional cured-pork tradition — anchored in the Amana Colonies, a cluster of seven villages founded in 1855 by German Inspirationist immigrants who maintained traditional German pork-curing practices through the 19th and 20th centuries. The Amana Colonies' communal meat-shop traditions produced the regional smoked-and-cured ham, summer sausage, and Black Forest-style smoked products that defined eastern Iowa charcuterie before American industrialization homogenized the broader regional food culture. La Quercia (founded 2005 in Norwalk, Iowa, near Des Moines) is the modern producer working in this regional tradition — Italian-style dry-curing using Iowa Berkshire and heritage-cross pork, leveraging Iowa's pork-production infrastructure for sourcing while producing genuinely European-quality aged whole-muscle product.
Typical products
- La Quercia American prosciutto
- Amana smoked ham (traditional)
- Iowa-cured pancetta and coppa