The Jamón Whisperer who's carved 40 million slices of jamón
Meet Carlos Sánchez, Master Jamón Carver
My friends,
You know there are many talented and dedicated chefs in our world of more than 30 restaurants. We have teams across the country and the world, chefs working in R&D like Charisse Grey, Jesús Serrano, Hector Contreras, and Tammy Saunders, whom I have already introduced you to here on Longer Tables.
As you might imagine, we also have an entire team working to create wine lists and wild cocktails: Beverage Director of Mercado Little Spain, Maddy Maldonado, Cocktail Innovator Miguel Lancha, Daniel Grajewski, our senior director of wine & beverage, and Josh Murski, who is on our R&D beverage team, who I wrote about recently when we talked about Tales of the Cocktail.
Today, I want to introduce you to a unique member of our team: Carlos Sánchez. He is our official Master Jamón Carver—a cortador—at José Andrés Group, someone I think of more like a jamón whisperer, because he can cut beautiful, rosy rectangles of jamón, with the perfect ratio of glistening fat to ruby red meat, from every leg of ham.
Carlos is from Burgos, a small provincial capital in Spain’s Castile and León region. He has been with us full time for four years now, but he started his training over 20 years ago!
Carlos is a butcher by trade. He started doing ham carving events, and eventually he got noticed as an expert carver. Soon, he was hired to serve at fancy parties for celebrities, including Steven Spielberg and Barack Obama.
That’s how I met him actually; he was hired to slice jamón at the Governor’s Ball at the Oscars in 2019. I happened to be there too, and I was like: Wow! This I have not seen at a party in California before. I was very impressed, so impressed that I went straight over to him and shook his hand and told him: “You and me. We need to talk.”
So we talked, and then I hired him.
We created his position of jamón carver at our restaurants. I think we are the first to do this in the world. With Carlos in this role, we are not only dedicated to carving ham, but working to make more space for people who love jamón in the United States.
Carlos is a self-taught jamón carver, but he is an encyclopedia of knowledge about all kinds of Spanish hams, the world of pigs, and how the product is made.
Carving is not a profession you can learn in a month or even a year. Carlos told me he had to buy a ham every week to practice the carving. And that can make it an expensive career. Jamón serrano can run around $350-$500 a leg, and the prized jamón Ibérico legs are $700 to over $1000. Can you imagine buying a jamón every week for years? It’s not easy.
Carlos estimates he has cut thousands of hams over his career; each ham yields a few thousand lonchas (slices)…so he estimated that he’s cut over 40 million slices of ham over his lifetime. It’s a lot of work. But he is probably one of the greatest jamón Ibérico carvers in the world, so I think it paid off.
What I love about Carlos is his creativity and dedication to the world of carving. In 2017, he invented a carving technique called the “mini tapa” to solve an age-old jamón issue, which is that many times ham is cut into pieces that are too large, making it difficult to put it all in your mouth.
His solution? A smaller cut to make a tapas of delicate jamón plated in a beautiful circular design so that it almost looks like a blooming flower. These mini lonchas are small enough to eat in one bite and easy to serve.
There is this harmony to the slices…and there is something very peaceful about watching him carve and plate the little pieces of ham into that design. I think it’s just amazing. If you want to watch him carve for yourself, check out the Madrid episode of my show José Andrés and Family in Spain.
Another thing that Carlos changed about the world of carving is to bring more elegance to the profession. All carvers in Spain wear a white chef's jacket, but not Carlos. Back in 2016, he decided to wear a suit while carving the jamón at those elite events. It makes a big difference I think, when you see him in this beautiful suit, carving with the long, thin cuchillo jamonero.
What’s I find amazing is that with Carlos, we’ve built a team of more than a dozen jamón carvers to work in our restaurants. So if you’re coming to Mercado Little Spain, any of The Bazaars (including The Bazaar in DC and our new location in New York!), Nubeluz, to Jaleo in Las Vegas or Disney Springs … I hope you have a chance to meet Carlos or one of our other carvers and taste our jamón—I think you will love it!
Lift people up and they will always do their best. That is what you are so good at, Jose!
So cool!! This is one of the things I love about Jose. He celebrates the people and the skills it takes to become a master. We just moved a few blocks away from Mercado Little Spain and bought Jose’s olives! Sabrosa! We’ll be back to try to meet Carlos and try sone Jamon!