04 Tuesday Jun 2013
Posted in Making Charcuterie, Pork, Sausages
On the grill. Everything is on the grill.
We are without an oven for an extended period, so we have adapted. It is summer, after all, so timing could be worse to be forced to cook over fire regularly, but it has taken me some time to adapt. Gone are the days of baking bread for my ladies or cooking overnight in a low oven. It is probably for the best anyway since we do not currently have counter or cabinet space to spare. Continue reading »
06 Monday May 2013
Posted in Bacon Making, Cured Meats, Making Charcuterie, Pork, Smoked Meats
One bowl from my first two gallons of homemade ramen and I was hooked. It was not the best, but it was mine and it put the bug into me. Tinkering on the recipe to improve it, or in some cases make it worse, was a new “hobby”. From the order of operations to the ratio of bones to water to the time boiled, the process is set up to make it your own, but the part of the process that pleases me the most is the fabrication of the seasoning, the tare. Continue reading »
02 Thursday May 2013
Posted in Bacon Projects, Making Charcuterie, Pork, Sausages, Smoked Meats
This is an all too common tale of things that taste good together outside of sausage casing are great when encased together. One of my absolute favorite combinations is chorizo and banana/plantain. The sweet flavors from the fruit goes so well with the deep and piquant flavors of chorizo, a vastly underrated sausage that it is terribly easy to make at home. I happened to have a few plantains on hand and, with the smoker already running, I thought to take it one step further and smoke the plantains.
22 Monday Apr 2013
Posted in Bacon, Bacon Making, Bacon Projects, Charcuterie, Cured Meats, Making Charcuterie, Pork, Smoked Meats
Twitter again has proven to be a petri dish for ideas. I have been using this salt for four months or so when it was suggested that you might be able to cure meat using preserved lemons. I suggested one better, use the residual salt to actually do the curing. It takes the guess work out of how much to use. Continue reading »
03 Wednesday Apr 2013
There is a long circular path on which many of my thoughts travel. After making both giardiniera and xo consomme, I had an idea that making an aspic from both of them which encase an egg would be a delicious and interesting dish. Only once I made them, one suspending cauliflower florets in the aspic and the other peas, eating them never quite appealed. I used tumbers to create the suspension which meant that I had eight ounces of aspic per egg and that was far more oddly flavored jello than I was willing to consume in one sitting. The project went on the pile of posts that seemed like a good idea until I actually did them and goodness left the building.
01 Monday Apr 2013
Posted in Lamb, Making Charcuterie, Pork, Sausages
There are cookbooks which you breeze through and pick things out as you flip pages quickly, never actually reading much. Then there are cookbooks where you read every word, then you read every word over again and you keep reading the book from cover to cover and accidentally forget to ever cook anything from the book despite the book overflowing with dishes that appeal on most levels. The Art of Living According to Joe Beef is the second kind. To me, it is an instant classic – mixing retro French cuisine and their own playfulness. The book exudes fun and punches pretension in the throat, but sadly I have taken only inspiration, but not any dishes. On Easter, that would change. Continue reading »
28 Thursday Mar 2013
Posted in Bacon, Bacon Making, Bacon Projects, Making Charcuterie, Pâtés and Terrines, Pork, Smoked Meats
Typically when dealing with meat heroes such as St. Fergus Henderson, St. Paul Bertolli, and others of their ilk, I stay pretty close to the road that they pave. However, once I have done something enough to be able to do it from memory, I feel comfortable making bigger choices of my own. Continue reading »
25 Monday Mar 2013
Posted in Bacon Making, Bacon Projects, Butcher Cuts, Cured Meats, Making Charcuterie, Pork, Smoked Meats
Sometimes the things I throw on the smoker are fancy and sometimes they are silly, but in the case of bacon trotter gear, the output is of maximum utility and minimum beauty. It combines two staples in my kitchen, bacon and trotter gear, into a single delicious deli container full of the actual foodstuff that makes everything better, gelatinous pork stock, amplified by the flavor that everyone claims makes everything better, bacon.
12 Tuesday Mar 2013
Posted in Cured Meats, Dried Meats, Making Charcuterie, Pork, Smoked Meats
There are a ton of limitations to making charcuterie in a non-commercial kitchen. There are even more when you live in an apartment in an urban area, so when you look at projects that you want to try, but have no space to do so, you have to get a little creative. I have wanted to try making speck for some time but the thought of buying and storing another hog’s leg (who in their right mind, would do that?!?) was something that I was not quite ready to undertake. I did have a jowl. While not lean like a leg, it was just the right size and it was beautiful. Continue reading »
04 Monday Mar 2013
After a twitter rhyme regarding ham jam, I knew that I was going to try, but didn’t know when. Just before bringing last week’s country ham home, I realized that I needed to clear fridge and freezer space to make it happen. I had just a bit of some beautifully fatty country ham from Cypress left in my fridge and I had an idea of how to piece a batch of ham jam together Continue reading »
