The sign on the side of the whitewashed, steeply gabled farmhouse reads "Sausage Chalet" in Gothic letters. Though this building rises like a vision in the Czech countryside (or perhaps like Epcot Center), it actually graces Austell and is the headquarters for Patak Meat Products.

To get to the heart of the matter here, you have to walk through the retail shop and the chattering Ukrainian shopgirls carving off tastes of smoked Moldavian sausage. Behind them is the factory where Anthony Patak feeds dun-colored meat paste into an extrusion machine that spits out chains of knackwurst as long as double Dutch jump ropes.

Joey Ivansco/Staff (ENLARGE)

Grab some crusty bread, butter or mustard and your choice of nitrate-free, cooked Primo Naturale (left), sopressata (by pickles), rectangular Hunters Salami or Bosnian Suduk (beef salami) for lunch.

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Further back are the two smokers that permeate this facility with the heavy musk of apple wood and maple smoke. Keep going, because then you find the door to the temperature- and humidity-controlled drying room. Open it and breathe in the funky-sweet balm and startling sight of 10,000 or more salamis, hanging in close rows, waiting for the action of time.

Kelly Patak waits, too, impatiently, for the Spicy Hungarian to finish its 60-day cure so she can ship it to delis and retailers nationwide. "The demand is more than we can meet," she muses. "It's just been over the last year and a half, but suddenly everyone wants salami."

Strange but true: Salami has become popular — not in cafeterias and lunchrooms, so much, but in the kinds of restaurants where people ask after the origins of olives, and in the very best food stores. Salami, it seems, has gone gourmet.

Consumers are getting keen to an important distinction — that between heat-cooked and cured salami. Both are produced in the United States and abroad, but the dry-cured meats — which ferment in their casings — have the tangy, lingering, funky flavor that excites so many new fans.

"We're selling twice as much salami as prosciutto," says Bess Boeri, who cherry-picks the finest Italian-style meats and cheeses to sell inside Via Elisa fresh pasta shop.

Nearby, at the gourmet market Star Provisions, owner Anne Quatrano is ramping up the house meat-curing program and putting the finishing touches on a kind of exhibition salami kitchen visible behind a glass wall.

"We think customers will want to see it being made," she says with a laugh. Even if not, they'll likely enjoy a peek into the aging room, where the house salami, bresaola, hams and other meats will hang, curing, letting time do its magic thing.

At wine bars, tapas bars and Italian restaurants, salami is the new prosciutto. Krog Bar chef John Allen helps customers forget the soggy sandwiches of their school days and learn about the newly popular (and yes, trendy) kinds of dry-cured sausage on his tapas menu. His list features finocchiona, a Tuscan-style salami speckled with fennel seed; sopressata, a coarse sausage marbled white and pink; and calabrese, a southern Italian specialty that glows with hot red pepper.

But as epicures start to throw these terms around, they need to learn the tricky lingo. Sometimes a salami is just a salami; sometimes not.

"You have to be careful of what you're talking about," warns David Biltchik of the Italian National Association of Meat Processors. "And the definition in Italian isn't the same used here."

While Italian salami is a specific family of dry-cured sausages, in this country the word refers to a wide range of sausages distinguished by their speckled commingling of flesh and fat and by their joke-inspiring shape. Many salamis that would be dry-cured in Italy, such as Genoa, are often cooked here.

Biltchik also points out that very little of the Italian salami that people love is, in fact, Italian. He estimates salami to be less than 1 percent of the $50 million to $75 million market for processed Italian meats. (Prosciutto is more than 90 percent.)

Ever since 1994, when a group of people were sickened with E. coli after eating dry-cured salami, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has cast stringent oversight over imports and domestic producers, who must submit costly proof that the centuries-old curing technique is safe.

"I don't like the Italian stuff I've tried," Boeri says. "I get the feeling they're only sending us what they think the government will allow."

Boeri sells salami from Salumeria Biellese, a New York producer that has emerged as one of the heroes of the back-to-the-cure movement. Others include P.G. Molinari & Sons of San Francisco; Paul Bertolli, an Oakland, Calif., restaurateur who sells handmade salami nationwide though his new company, Fra'Mani, in Berkeley; and Armandino Batali, father of TV chef Mario, who ships product from his Seattle shop, Salumi.

Eastern European dry-cured meats are also beginning to show up on the gourmet radar for their gutsy flavors of smoke and spice.

Anthony Patak, a Czech émigré who has been making sausage for 45 years, produces five fully dry-cured salamis using traditional methods. (He also makes cooked salamis and all kinds of sausage and smoked meats.)

"It's all natural," he says, tramping through the small factory in an apron, brimless cap and rubber work boots. "We don't use any culture starters or preservatives" beyond curing salt.

Patak starts by freezing the meat to kill off any potential pathogens. He combines ground meat (beef and pork), spices, curing salt and plenty of fat, stuffs the salamis in casings and cold-smokes them for nine hours. They emerge smoky to the core but still perfectly raw. After that they hang for three to six weeks, depending on the variety.

In the drying room, the salamis shrink as they lose moisture to evaporation and as natural bacteria ferment the meat. A byproduct of the fermentation is lactic acid, which wards off harmful bacteria and gives salami its incomparable tang. When the pH reaches 5.3, the salami is ready.

Some sausage makers take it higher and sourer, but not Patak. "I like it nice and mellow," he says.

Patak's business is anything but mellow, and the drying room is stuffed to capacity at all times.

Meanwhile, supermarket sales of plain old heat-cooked lunch meat salami are on the slide. According to a study commissioned by the International Dairy-Deli-Bakery Association, Americans bought 51 million pounds of salami in 2006 — or 4 million fewer pounds than they did in 2003.

Goodbye lunchbox, hello antipasto.

Five facts

1. Some say salumi: Now that the gourmet crowd is as hot for cured meats as it was for cheeses last decade, the Italian term "salumi" has come into vogue. This refers to the whole category: prosciutto, hot coppa, smoked speck ham, the delicate-if-freaky cured pork fat called lardo and, yes, all kinds of salami.

2. Counter intelligence: Dry-cured salamis are safe at room temperature. "Just leave them on the counter," advises Kelly Patak of Patak Meats. Cut salamis are unlikely to spoil at room temperature, but they will dry out.

3. What's in a name: Leave it to the French to come up with the poetic name rosette de Lyon — i.e., "rosebud of Lyons" — for a famous dry-cured sausage. Why rosebud? Um, because French butchers pack it in the largest natural casing, near the part of the pig euphemistically called the "rosebud."

4. Pecking order: Salami is the fourth-most-popular deli meat sold in supermarkets — after turkey, ham and beef but ahead of bologna.

5. Summer dreaming: Summer sausage is so named because it was traditionally fermented so that it would keep throughout the long, hot, unrefrigerated summer.

Source: International Dairy-Deli-Bakery

Association

Here's a short list of some of the best dry-cured salami out there:

Patak Meat Products
in Austell)

Spicy Hungarian Salami: Full flavors of smoke and spicy paprika.

Hunters Salami: Unusual rectangular shape and intense smoke flavor.

Moldavian Salami: Beefy, peppery and sweet.
Available at: Patak Meat Products (4107 Ewing Road, Austell, 770-941-7993, www.patakmeats.com); DeKalb Farmers Market (3000 E. Ponce de Leon Ave., Decatur); European Market & Deli (2179 Lawrenceville Highway, Decatur).

Salumeria Biellese
(made in New York)

Piemontese: Mild, salty flavor with an appealing funkiness.

Black Pepper Sopressata: Beautiful coarse salami with cracked pepper dripping from the edges.
Available at: Salumeria Taggiasca (inside Via Elisa at 1750-C Howell Mill Road); DeKalb Farmers Market (3000 E. Ponce de Leon Ave., Decatur); http://www.salumeriabiellese.com.

Fra'Mani Handcrafted Salumi
(made in Berkeley, Calif.)

Nostrano: Great, lingering porky flavor, less salty than most.

Toscano: Peppery and assertive.
Available at: Star Provisions (1198 Howell Mill Road); http://www.framani.com.

Salumi Artisan Cured Meats
(made in Seattle)

Salumi Salami: House special, flavored with ginger.

Mole: With chocolate, cinnamon and ancho chile.
Available at: http://www.salumicuredmeats.com.

P.G. Molinari & Sons
(made in San Francisco)

Finocchiona: Flavored intensely with fennel seed, pepper and garlic, with a pronounced acidic tang.
Available at: Star Provisions (1198 Howell Mill Road); Krog Bar (112 Krog St.); http://www.molinarisalame.com.