Category: Charcuterie

March 15, 2011

I Put The “Cute” In Charcuterie

So this month’s Charcutepalooza process was brining. The day they announced it was the day I finished off a lovely pastrami, and the week before we had eaten the last of a tongue pastrami. So that was bad timing. But it did give me an excuse to make something else.

Various forms of grilled sandwiches with home-cured meat played a big part in getting me through this winter. Versions of the reuben in particular really spoke to me, and I’ve been missing them since the last pastrami ran out. (Here’s an account of my from-scratch reuben, and here’s the post about the recent tongue pastrami). I love Moroccan flavors, and in general I prefer lamb to beef, so I thought I’d make lamb pastrami. It’s logical if you think about it; both the brine and the crust can be easily tweaked towards the Maghreb, and lamb takes smoke and strong spices really well. The Reubenesque aspects of the final sandwich all got similar modifications, and the result was a hell of a sandwich.

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March 2, 2011

Katsuobeefy

I’ve always been a fan of mistakes as the metaphorical equivalent of mutations in genetic code. Most of them result in failure, but once in a while they make for dramatic improvements that could not have occurred otherwise. It’s true in my studio, and it’s most definitely true in the kitchen, where a recent mistake made for a pretty wonderful discovery. This post is supposed to be about duck prosciutto–the first of the Charcutepalooza assignments, which I joined too late to get done in time–but I honestly don’t have much to say about it that I haven’t already. I’ve been making it for several years, and try to never be without it. Here’s a post about it and other goodies from a few years ago. And since it was a hard heel of cured duck that gave me the idea that turned this pwn upside dwn, it seemed like a legitimate jumping-off point for this post.

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February 15, 2011

Miso Bacon

You know how Coldplay sounds like diet Radiohead? That’s how regular bacon tastes compared to the miso-cured version; miso bacon is deeper, tangier, creamier, and has much more umami. The enzymes in the miso soften the meat while the salt and sugar firm it up; the result has a different density and is more sensual. The profound flavors of the miso add overtones to the meat, giving it a haunting complexity. It’s so very good.

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December 13, 2010

Ach, Tongue, Baby

Recently at a market that carries some good local meat I spied a big old cow tongue. I’ve never cooked it, but I have memories of my Grandfather serving it to me on occasion. It always sort of creeped me out; that boiled beef smell and the gray pallor of the giant tongue just didn’t add up to appetizing. I did eat it, and it did taste pretty good–if kind of bland–but I sort of filed it away in the “things old Jewish people eat because they grew up dirt poor in Poland” category and didn’t give it much thought for a long time. So, seeing in the cooler, I decided that I would give it a shot, and do what I could to minimize those qualities that had turned me off it as a child: I would make it into pastrami.

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October 29, 2010

Turn, Turn, Turn

I suppose I should write about those poor, neglected lentils, shouldn’t I.

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July 6, 2010

Joint Custody

John called me a few weeks ago and said “Do you want a whole artisanal Tennessee ham?” “Sure,” I said, on account of I’m not a complete idiot. “Why and how?” The band’s publicist, it turns out, during or after Bonnaroo, had been driving around and stopped at some joint in Gallatin for lunch. The ham sandwich–smoky, fatty, and piled high for $6–was one of the best he’d tasted. So he talked to the proprietor,…

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June 28, 2010

Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time

I taught a class on meat-curing here on Saturday (we covered gravlax, guanciale, lardo, bresaola, duck prosciutto, and then had a tasting of everything, plus some bacon). It was well-attended, and I think people enjoyed it and took away some useful knowledge. And hoo boy is there a lot of salty meat in the fridge. I gave the curing salmon to some Boston friends to take home with them, but come dinner time there was an alarming lack of actual food ready to eat. So I took the big beef eye round (16″ or so) and cut 6″ off. This did two things: it meant that I could fit the remainder in a much smaller pyrex loaf pan to finish curing, and it gave me a pre-seasoned hunk o’ beef with which to make a quick and wondrous meal. The cure was salt, a bit of raw sugar, rosemary, garlic, thyme, juniper berries, and smoked paprika.

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April 22, 2010

Salad Soup

Man, this time of year is fat with optimism. It’s on the leaner side with food, though the greens are coming along handsomely, and we’re lousy with wild foragables right now, so a good supplement can be found in my first-ever hunk of homemade prosciutto. It’s ready, because it’s only half a ham, and mostly skinless, so it dried quite quickly. It’s also bone-in, meaning it’s going to be tricky to slice it well into…

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March 28, 2010

Do A Little Dance That’s Called The "Bacon Fat"

Today I taught the first of what I hope is many cooking classes in our lovely new kitchen; we covered tsukemono, fermented pickles (kraut and kimchi) and vinegar pickles (in this case, beets because they’re ostensibly in season). It was a great group, and I think everyone had the subject demystified to the point where they can now comfortably, confidently do it at home. After they left, I got busy with some other culinary projects before the family returned (they went to a movie). Ten pounds of local pork belly had spent two weeks absorbing my super-secret miso-based cure and were ready for the smoker, so I fired it up and brought them up to an internal temp of 150˚F over the course of about two hours. Milo and I vacuum-sealed them all and put them into the freezer.

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February 11, 2010

Rub One Out

Shichimi Togarashi means “seven flavor chili pepper” in Japanese. Besides ground chili, it has nori, sesame seeds, citrus peel, sansho pepper, and poppy and hemp seeds in varying proportions. Many in the West like to call it “togarashi” because it’s easier and sounds cool, though sticklers point out that that basically just means “chili” and thus is not accurate. Those people also tend not to get invited over for dinner very often, but that’s sort…

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