Category: Charcuterie

June 15, 2011

A Tale Of Two Sausages

This month’s Charcutepalooza task was stuffing, so I made sure to get a pork shoulder and a bunch of duck legs in addition to casings, and I froze all the meat so I could grind it in a semi-thawed state, which makes for the best results. I had a couple of ideas, and both were meant for hanging rather than fresh eating since the first batch of salami came out pretty well. I got them both ground and had the mixtures ready to go. Then, lo and behold, it was made known to me that a couple of damsels were distressed about the prospect of stuffing for the first time all by themselves. So, through the magic of Twitter, soon they both had lots of lurid pictures of my sausage.

Oh, and we arranged for them to come over and learn stuffing at the side of a master someone who has totally done it a couple of times before.

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June 8, 2011

Like Knockers In A Wind Tunnel

So in anticipation of today’s big stuff-a-thon, yesterday I ground a couple kinds of sausage meant to hang and cure into salami. But of course all of that pungent meat, fragrant with garlic and spices and the like, was impossible to resist once it came time to shake the magic dinner 8-ball.

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June 6, 2011

Kvellin’ Like A Felon

It’s funny how sometimes we randomly reach the critical mass needed to push us headlong into a new endeavor. Recently I was talking to some friends about their homemade bagels, and then I saw this post on a reader’s blog and it suddenly hit me that making bagels is just making rolls with some toroidal geometry and boiling thrown in. And the presence in the fridge of homemade lox and cream cheese provided all the impetus I could possibly have asked for to shove me face-first into the wonderful world of bagel making.

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June 3, 2011

If This Is Going To Be That Kind Of A Party, I’m Going To Stick My Dick In The Mashed Potatoes

May 12, 2011

My Salami Brings All The Goyim To The Yard

This month’s task was grinding sausage, which was exciting because the post announcing that fact came out just after I had ground and stuffed a bunch of sausage, and some salami meant for aging as well. The fresh sausage has made for some wonderful meals, but it was the salami that I was really excited about.

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May 10, 2011

Nose To The Grindstone

This month’s Charcutepalooza project was grinding sausage. As luck would have it, that announcement came just a few days after I had ground and stuffed a whole bunch: some for hanging, and some for eating fresh. This post deals with one of many subsequent meals featuring the fresh sausages.

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April 18, 2011

Arm In Arm Down Bourbon Street

There’s a good fish market that’s just far enough away that I don’t make it there very often. When I do, though, I always try to hit their freezer section to allow for more future meals than the fresh cases can provide. On my last trip, I got the unagi we had the other night, and I also bought a package of frozen crawfish. This was right around the time I was curing the shoulder for the tasso ham, so you can probably guess what I had in mind: jambalaya.

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April 14, 2011

Kraftsmanship

This month’s Charcutepalooza project was hot-smoking, which is something I’ve done a fair amount of since buying my trusty smoker back in 2001 when we moved to the Brooklyn place with a deck. It has gotten a lot of loving use since then, helping ducks, chickens, pork bellies, briskets and many other things attain shiny umber patinas and diabolically delicious depths of flavor. As with so many other culinary urges, the seeds for smoking were planted long ago by since departed family. My Grandfather had a smoker, and his smoked chickens were truly things of beauty. Being an engineer–and one who built furnaces at that–he had long, complicated theories about how to control the smoking environment to achieve the best-tasting results: his favorite formula was that the humidity should increase over time in inverse proportion to the temperature inside the chamber.

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April 13, 2011

There’s Nothing Funny About Cylindrical Meat

The best thing about succeeding at something new and technical in the kitchen is that it builds one’s confidence for other projects. The Camembert and other cheeses made me realize that doing is everything; after a few tries one develops the beginnings of a feel for the method, and the results provide positive feedback in the most encouraging form: excellent food. Every time I make a food that seems to fall outside of the “normal” homemade category (vinegar, cheese, bacon, maple syrup, etc.) I am astonished not only at how easy it was but at how much better the result is than almost anything I could hope to buy, even for a lot of money.

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March 24, 2011

It’s Just Emotion That’s Taking Me Over

One of the things I like about winter (apart from the fact that it’s over) is the limitations that it imposes on those of us who try to eat local food. I find that constraints spur creativity, whether in the studio or the kitchen. No matter how narrow the spectrum, it still contains infinity. And being forced to dig deep and pay attention to subtle differences can make a huge impact on the result.

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