18
COR
TWO 2019
Q&A with…
Johann Mantinger, 62, can slice speck more quickly than an entire football team can eat it.
Johann Mantinger, South Tyrol’s fastest speck slicer
Johann, what does it take to become the fastest speck slicer in the region? I participate in all sorts of competitions. Sometimes the judges are looking for precision and sometimes it only comes down to speed. Once I was up against 18 other competitors and was able to cut twice as many bite-sized portions as the runner-up. Another time, I competed against an entire male veterans football team from Cologne: I betted that I could slice five kilograms of speck faster than they could eat it. And I won!
even been interviewed by the BBC. Everyone calls me “Gletscher-Hans”, which means “Glacier Hans”. “Glacier Hans”? Why not “Speck Hans”? Because I used to be a ski instructor. One of my pupils found my name too difficult to remember so she renamed me “Glacier Hans”. And it’s stuck. The Italians call me “Giovanni del ghiacciaio”, which is the perfect translation of my German nickname!
Do you cure speck yourself? Of course I do! I’m a small-scale farmer with twenty pigs. Speck is my life, professionally and privately. I look A true speck connoisseur like after my piglets Johann has no need to use a cutas if they were my ting machine. All that’s required babies. I’ve actually is a sharp knife, a typical South become a bit of a Tyrolean speck board and lots of star. I’ve appeared muscle power! He cuts a piece on TV cooking of the cured ham, around three shows and have centimetres thick, lengthways from the joint, removes the rind and slices it as thinly as possible. If the speck is to be used to make traditional dumplings, it needs to be chopped into small cubes and not slices.
How he does it
T H E L O C A L M AG A Z I N E
