Content about Curing
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 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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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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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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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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February 4, 2008
It didn't look pretty. After two days in the fridge, my fennel-cured salmon looked something like a disaster. A lot of the liquid had somehow seeped out of my protective covering. This worried me because that meant the brine didn't probably coat the fish during the cure. It might not be done. How would I know if it worked?
Ruhlman said to give it a touch. "The salmon should be firm to the touch at the...
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January 30, 2008
Sparked with inspiration by Blake’s duck proscuitto, I procured Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie and dug in. Don’t let anyone fool you; it’s intimidating stuff. Curing food is the exact opposite of the cooking I’ve become used to. I love to take fresh ingredients and then cook them quickly, without much fuss. This process, hopefully, highlights the good quality of ingredients I’ve been...
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November 28, 2007
A results of a simple dry-cured meat project revealed
About ten days after I hung a salt-cured duck breast in the vestibule of my garden apartment, wrapped in cheesecloth and suspended by kitchen string in a little tent of wooden dowel rods, I retrieved it, unwrapped it, and laid it on a cutting board in my kitchen. It was my first attempt at curing, my Duck Prosciutto.
The flesh had taken on a dark red, almost black color on the outside, and the fat had become yellowed. The...
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November 1, 2007
There are two kinds of cookbooks: some I buy and use, and others I buy and admire. I plan for the former, but end up doing the latter. I have cookbooks about offal, bread-making, and curing meat, but I’ve yet to order beef bones to roast. I have a copy of the River Cottage cookbook, which tells you how to deliver a lamb, dig for scallops, grow carrots, make bacon, and butcher a pig. But I don't have a farm, livestock, or a...
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All content copyright Nick Kindelsperger and Blake Royer.
