Content about Charcuterie
August 22, 2011
Saving andouille from the supermarket.
This didn't start off as a gumbo mission, though I did end up there (more to come on that front soon.) No, the saga began simply: about three weeks ago I needed andouille for a Dinner Tonight. All I could find at the grocery store was a product that claimed to be the right stuff, but had all the character of cheap bologna and about as much spice as, well, cheap bologna. I was angry.
Then I drank too much whiskey and started to dream...
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March 15, 2011
A quicker, easier process than the whole brisket
Corned beef is one of the more basic and surprising kitchen experiments. But I think that people still think it's pretty nuts. I'm staying in California for a couple weeks, and had to buy the ingredients, cook, photograph, and eat this project while staying at someone else's house (sorry for the lack of pictures). First of all--it's really tough cooking somewhere you don't have all your familiar tools! But I...
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March 15, 2011
Here's a video on 5 ways to make duck charcuterie--redefining what we mean by eating nose to tail. Also, check out the PC's Beginner's Charcuterie post where Blake takes on duck prosciutto!
Duck Charcuterie 5 Ways (and Recipes)
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February 15, 2011
Plus, a Killer Recipe To Use It In
We are thrilled to be participating in Charcutepalooza, an organized blogging movement of people writing about the noble art of charcuterie. Scores of people around the country (or even the world?) are making and writing about bacon, pancetta, and other delicious variations this fine month of February—and throughout the year, will be embarking on ever-cooler projects like brining, and smoking and drying and fermenting (the organizers...
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January 26, 2011
We've joined the Charcutepalooza movement, also known as a group of bloggers led by the folks over at Mrs. Wheelbarrow's Kitchen who are embarking on 12 months of charcuterie-making. We're throwing our hat in the ring...winner gets a fancy trip to France! See also: Charcuterie Archives on The Paupered Chef
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Everyone loves bacon, but it's not always the same thing.
British Bacon vs American bacon
If you've been reading the site lately, you may have been following Nick on his rather strange quest to recreate a full English breakfast from scratch (his first project was the British banger sausage). Why, I don't know. But when Nick proposed that I take over the homemade bacon portion of the project, I leapt at the opportunity to contribute. Homemade meat curing has long been a hobby of mine,...
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March 30, 2010
How to make better bangers
As I was digging into making my own British bangers for my Full English Breakfast challenge, I kept stumbling onto the same sad story which may or may not be complete bullshit: During the early 20th century thanks to two World Wars, meat was scarce in England and pork sausages were padded with some grains and extra liquid to help stretch the meat reserves. When cooked, these padded sausages had the tendency to burst out of their...
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March 16, 2010
Can you replicate the best English breakfast at home?
To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.
- W. Somerset Maugham
I survived my half a year in England on a diet of boiled potatoes, canned peas, Heinz beans, and 99p egg and cress sandwiches I purchased from a convenient store. The dollar was nearly worthless next to the mighty pound at that time, and I hoarded what little cash I could for bus passes and the odd pint, relegating whatever was left to keeping...
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March 4, 2010
A tastier and quicker version of the classic.
I'm tired of people lying about cassoulet. Every recipe I've ever read calls it a "peasant dish," and the fact is, cassoulet is really, really expensive to make. You need duck confit, which, if you don't buy pre-made, costs you either in the form of overpriced duck fat or the need to buy a whole duck to render it yourself. Then, you need fancy sausage, preferably the garlicky "Toulouse" variety, which is...
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January 14, 2010
Can steamed duck legs tasted better than ones poached in duck fat?
The question about whether a steamed duck leg tastes as good duck confit has been boggling my mind for months ever since I read this article in the New York Times. Finally, last night, after spending the previous three days hacking up two ducks, rendering loads of fat, and figuring out what to do with the heads (Jonathan Gold actually sent me some interesting options on Twitter), I finally sat down to a blind taste test.
A...
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January 7, 2010
Last year I fell in love with blood sausage. Maybe that sounds strange. So let me explain.
In Estonia, around Christmastime, they begin to fill up the meat counters, black and smooth. Just piles of them. When Christmas comes, everyone roasts pork and potatoes, makes sauerkraut, and serves them with blood sausages. And it wasn't until I had them as apart of this ritual that I began to understand.
Blood...
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September 7, 2009
The best kind of wedding appetizers.
A pure expression of the pig: nothing extraneous, nothing wasted. Pork, salt, and a little bit of time: that's all you need to make rillettes. It was a beautiful idea which had led me to the kitchen, where I had 25 pounds of pork (a ball of lard, huge hunks of shoulder, and a bag of spare ribs larger than a medium-sized dog) and where I realized I was in over my head.
Confiture de cochon--"pig jam"--is what the...
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June 24, 2009
Insight into perfecting 90 minute, no-soak beans and homemade bratwursts.
It's been a delicious week. I've been doling out my homemade bratwurst to close friends and making batches of 90 Minute, No-Soak beans just because I can. I know some people had some questions about both of these posts, and this week has given me a few more insights to both processes which hopefully will answer some of them. Also, Michael Ruhlman wanted to see my amateurish spreadsheet I created to find a bratwurst...
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June 18, 2009
The ultimate guide to the Midwest's finest encased meat.
My little adventure with bratwurst reached its pinnacle after a tortuous three hour process of grinding, mixing, stuffing, poaching, and charcoal grilling. What I faced, fortunately, looked a lot like the bratwurst of my wildest fantasies. It was perfectly plump, gushing with juice, and absolutely haunted by charcoal smoke. I stuffed that sausage into a huge roll and piled it high with sauerkraut and grainy mustard. ...
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June 11, 2009
How do you make this Wisconsin classic?
I have been thinking about bratwurst for days. What started as an idea for a simple cookout on my little Webber Grill has now completely consumed me because I simply can't find the right recipe. The question eventually led me to walk into Hot Dougs on a recent Wednesday and ask Mr. Doug himself what was in the sausage.
But first, do you know? What is it, exactly, that makes a bratwurst a bratwurst? I know...
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May 21, 2009
Blake finds hidden gems in France.
Our goal for eating in France, as our budget was limited, was to find simple and unpretentious food. And though we hit the ground running with a list of online recommendations culled from a number of sources--an article in Travel + Leisure, searches on Chowhound and eGullet, guidebooks galore--some of our best and most memorable meals came from eclectic little spots that nobody had written about. One was hidden on a side street...
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May 13, 2009
How to pickle brisket.
I was standing in the meat section of my local Korean grocery store (the excellent Joong Boo Market) with fellow food blogger Brian, from the Daily Ikura. He was talking me through his favorite Korean dishes and ingredients, and I was loving it. We were discussing uses of red bean paste, which ramen was worth its price, and whether some brands of soy sauce were really so good you could sip them. Then I picked up a hunk of...
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March 25, 2009
Blake discovers South African dried beef.
By Blake Royer Here in Estonia there is a word,...
Here in Estonia there is a word, kevadväsimus, that translates as "spring fatigue." It's the expression that refers to a grim mood that seizes us all when the sun has come out and the days are growing longer yet all other signs still point to winter. We know the weather will improve, but it's that sliver of hope that makes it now harder to endure. For...
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February 23, 2009
Make the perfect topping for your pizza.
For the sausage novices, nothing could be quite so easy as this recipe from Michael Ruhlman's Charcuterie. Because I was using it straight away I had no need to stuff it into casing only break them free a moment a latter. I essentially just mixed everything together, ground it on the small die of my meat grinder, and cooked it. It was about as time consuming as cutting up a bunch of vegetables. And since I...
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February 2, 2009
Welcome to our Perpetually Late Year-End Roundup. It's a tradition here at The Paupered Chef that we tend to pull off sometime in January or February. Maybe we only put this thing together for our own amusement, because when you're constantly writing and thinking about new things, you sometimes forget where you've been. It's illuminating, to see what captured one's imagination over the course of a year-- especially with a blog that...
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November 30, 2008
A baby step towards making salami.
It's similar in appearance and texture, and has that unmistakable salty tang of cured meat. I'm surprised it never occurred to me before, but the idea is simple. Pork tenderloin, which is already in a convenient salami-like shape perfect for slicing, makes a perfect dry-curing project.
There is already one traditional cured meat called Lonzino, Italian, which is made not from the tenderloin but the regular boneless...
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October 13, 2008
Well, just look at that! After all my anxiety and the lack of sausage stuffer before I started this adventure, on the third day I ate hot dogs. They looked like hot dogs, smelled like hot dogs, and tasted like that perfect hot dog you always dream about (well, at least I dream about hot dogs). Unbelievably beefy and with a hard snap from the sheep intestine, this was a truly wonderful dog.
Too bad it was such a pain to...
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October 6, 2008
(Scene at the Paulina Meat Market in Chicago)
Butcher: "Number 37!"
Me: "Yeah, that's me."
Butcher: "What can I get for you?"
Me: "Yeah, I'll take 10 feet of sheep casings."
I don't say that often enough in life, and up until this Saturday it had never crossed my mind. But here I was at Paulina Meat Market ordering sheep intestines from butchers that make their own fine sausages. The...
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September 18, 2008
How to make the staple Mexican sausage.
The recipe comes from Diana Kennedy's "From My Mexican Kitchen". This particular version comes from the Michoacán region. She does give direction on how to stuff the mixture into casings, but I bailed out early. Some day.
As first sausage making experiences go, I'd have to say this was pretty remarkable. I got about 2 pounds of fresh sausage and spent about $12 dollars. ...
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July 23, 2008
If you haven't signed up yet, there may be a few spots left: tomorrow, at the Whole Foods on Bowery at 7pm, I'll be teaching a class about salt preservation and the basics of dry-curing meat. We'll be starting gravlax, bacon, and duck prosciutto projects. The class is an incredible deal, and you'll walk away with two pounds of meat to finish curing in your apartment.
The Daily News did a nice writeup, too, if you're interested in...
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July 2, 2008
How to smoke pork belly at home.
First, I needed to find some pork belly with its skin still firmly on. My previous attempt removed it, along with a lot of precious fat directly underneath. My bacon didn't have nearly enough fat on it to fry up, so instead cooking up beautifully in a pan, it burned. My local butcher wouldn't sell me a piece with the skin on unless I bought 10 pounds, a fact I still find ridiculous. A commenter pointed out...
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June 15, 2008
My most ambitious meat curing project yet recently emerged from an unplugged fridge in my living room. It was a pig cheek from a heritage-breed pig, also known as the jowl, which was salted and seasoned with sugar, black pepper, and thyme leaves, then left in the bottom of my real fridge for a week to release moisture. After that, I hung it to dry in the unplugged fridge for three more. It would become a Roman bacon, called...
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May 30, 2008
We've done our fair share of charcuterie projects on this site and enjoyed every minute of it. There have been successes, and there have been failures, but all in all, it's some of the most fun we've ever had making food.
I'm beyond thrilled to report that on July 24th, Whole Foods Bowery in New York City will be offering a class for all interested in learning the basics of meat curing. The class will help students get their first...
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The other Italian bacon.
It took me almost a month and calls to half the butchers in New York before I could get my hands on a pair of pig jowls. Here’s the problem: they want you to order the whole head. And while I had a wonderful time watching pot-roasted pig heads go ferrying by my table at the Spotted Pig, when it was under the tutelage of British chef Fergus Henderson, the thought of lugging a 40 pound hunk of decapitation around the city...
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March 10, 2008
Time to play catchup. Blake has been on the forefront of this curing business for awhile now and I just couldn’t stand back while he was slicing off hunks of his own fresh bacon and duck prosciutto. I picked up a duck and a pork belly and got to work.
It might seem a little redundant to document two projects that Blake has already covered, but in all fairness, these are different. I tried to learn from his mistakes...
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February 12, 2008
Sometimes you just have to start. I have been wanting to make beef jerky for a while now, but had always stumbled on how I was to actually dry out the meat. I don’t have a smoker, and it didn’t sound like any of the other methods were going to work. But hey, I thought, cowboys did this; I can do this. So I bought some lean beef, sliced it thinly, and coated it with some salt, onion powder, garlic powder, and...
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February 8, 2008
Make your bacon at home.
The bacon most of us know it is made from pork belly, but there are also variations made from other cuts, notably the cheeks and jowl, which makes guanciale--a porkier tasting, fattier cut that's a staple in properly-made Spaghetti alla Carbonara and Bucatinia alla Amatraciana. Hog jowls are difficult to find, though, especially because a butcher would probably need to order an entire head in order to get them for you--and unless you'...
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All content copyright Nick Kindelsperger and Blake Royer.
