Charcuterie: the craft of salting, smoking, and curing

444 Pages·2005·5.48 MB·English

by  Michael Ruhlman

CONTENTS
Foreword by Thomas Keller
1. INTRODUCTION
The Reason for This Food, This Book: Why We Still Love and Need
Hand-Preserved Foods in the Age of the Refrigerator, the Frozen Dinner,
Domino’s Pizza, and the 24-Hour Grocery Store
2. RECIPES FOR SALT-CURED FOOD
Salt: How the Most Powerful Tool in Your Kitchen Transforms the
Humble into the Sublime
3. RECIPES FOR SMOKED FOOD
Smoke: The Exotic Seasoning
4. SAUSAGES
The Power and the Glory: Animal Fat, Salt, and the Pig Come Together in
One of the Oldest, Divine-Yet-Humble Culinary Creations Known to
Humankind
5. RECIPES FOR DRY-CURED FOOD
The Artist and the Sausage: Techniques and Recipes for Individualistic,
Idiosyncratic, and Temperamental Dry-Cured Meats
6.PÂTÉS AND TERRINES
The Cinderella Meat Loaf
7. THE CONFIT TECHNIQUE
Fat: The Perfect Cooking Environment
8. RECIPES TO ACCOMPANY CHARCUTERIE
Sauces and Condiments: Not Optional
Acknowledgments
Sources
Index
Other food books by Michael Ruhlman
BOUCHON (with Thomas Keller, Jeffrey Cerciello, and Susie Heller) A
RETURN TO COOKING (with Eric Ripert) THE SOUL OF A CHEF:
THE JOURNEY TOWARD PERFECTION
THE FRENCH LAUNDRY COOKBOOK (with Thomas Keller and Susie
Heller) THE MAKING OF A CHEF: MASTERING HEAT AT THE
CULINARY INSTITUTE OF AMERICA
CHARCUTERIE
The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing
.....
Michael Ruhlman
and Brian Polcyn
Illustrations by Yevgeniy Solovyev
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON
For Julia and Donna,
Alana, Alex, Carmen, Dylan, Ben, Addison, and James
FOREWORD
C
harcuterie is everywhere around us, but most in America don’t recognize it as
such. Bacon, sausages, hams, pâtés, and terrines are all part of this great culinary
specialty. In the world of cooking, charcuterie is in a class by itself.
My first exposure to charcuterie, like so many Americans, was cold cuts:
Oscar Mayer bologna and salami. Unless you were the child of European
immigrants, you probably never had a great dry-cured sausage, a saucisson sec,
or a soppressata as a kid. When I was growing up in Florida in the 1970s,
charcuterie like that wasn’t available. Thanks to the extraordinary changes in this
country, you can now find it in upscale grocery stores.
Americans travel more than ever and are more likely to explore regional
specialties throughout the world. As we move through our lives, as we travel and
explore, our reference points change. Our experiences of charcuterie gather and
we learn that those baloney cold cuts we took for granted as kids have their roots
in mortadella and the other emulsified sausages popularized in Bologna; that
packaged grocery store salami is a descendant of the dry-cured sausages called
salume, works of great craftsmanship and great flavor.
Making those food connections, and recognizing those reference points, is
important because it deepens the experience of cooking and eating. And
understanding that the historical roots of charcuterie reach hundreds of years
back, and that the fundamental methods of charcuterie, namely curing and
preserving, reach all the way back to earliest civilization, makes us realize that
this specialty is one of the most important kinds of cooking there is.
In this book, Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn subdivide charcuterie into its
component parts, first describing curing meats, fish, and vegetables with salt.
They explore the many variations of the pâté and the versatility of the confit. But
of all the food we call charcuterie, my favorite by far is the sausage, and sausage
is the backbone of Charcuterie. What’s best about this part of the book is that
Michael and Brian not only describe in detail the various stages of sausage
making but also isolate the key steps and techniques that can elevate a good
sausage to a great one. In addition, they give what amounts to a primer in the key
points of dry-curing sausages and whole cuts of meat, a segment of charcuterie
that’s really in its infancy here in America.
This book is important because so few people understand what charcuterie is
or recognize it as the great branch of cooking that it is. Charcuterie represents
some of the oldest methods of cooking, and so has deep culinary roots and an
important role in the development of civilization. It has a long and varied place
in restaurant kitchens, and is now enjoying something of renaissance in the
American restaurant, especially with regard to dry-cured items. Charcuterie is
amply represented at my bistro, Bouchon, and is also at home at the French
Laundry and Per Se, my four-star restaurants.
At Per Se, Joshua Schwartz makes a form of lardo, salting and dry-curing
fatback from just above the pork shoulder, and serves very very thin slices of it.
For a special dish, he’ll wrap a slice of lardo around an asparagus tip and a slice
of truffle and serve it as a canapé. But lardo is delicious on its own. Its texture
and flavor are amazing—there’s nothing like it—and it couldn’t be easier to
make. All it takes is good pork—that is, organic or farm-raised pork—which is
now available not just to restaurant chefs but to home cooks everywhere via the
Internet. I want to stress how simple and natural the method is: good pork, salt,
and time are the principal ingredients. That something so easy to make is also so
extraordinary to eat is part of its pleasure.
Charcuterie is appropriate at every level of dining, and it runs the entire gamut
of cooking. That includes home cooking, where charcuterie once played a huge
role and will again—not one day far in the future but now. Some charcuterie
techniques couldn’t be simpler. A BLT is one of the best uses of charcuterie I
know, for instance. Making your own sausage and frying up some patties is no
more difficult than grinding your own hamburger, but to season it yourself, and
to cook and eat what you’ve made, is a very special thing. Charcuterie is
sometimes relegated to fall and winter cooking, but it should be an important
part of your kitchen year-round.
A final reason Charcuterie is important: it recognizes the pig as the superior
creature that it is. From a culinary standpoint, the pig is unmatched in the
diversity of flavors and textures it offers the cook and the uses it can be put to—
from head to tail, from ham to tenderloin, it’s a marvel. A piece of pork belly can
be brined, roasted, grilled, sautéed, dry-cured, braised, or confited, with widely
varying results. This is a very hopeful time for the pig in America, and this book
underscores that fact.
Come to think of it, this book reminds me what a hopeful time it is for cooking
in general in this country. This may well be the most exciting time ever to be a
cook and a chef in America. And Charcuterie is a perfect example of why.
—Thomas Keller
1
THE REASON FOR THIS FOOD, THIS
BOOK:
WHY WE STILL LOVE AND NEED HAND-PRESERVED
FOODS IN THE AGE OF THE REFRIGERATOR, THE
FROZEN DINNER, DOMINO’S PIZZA, AND THE 24-HOUR
GROCERY STORE
.....
S
ometimes books are the result of a surprise, in this case a surprise (via duck
confit) that became a fascination that transformed into a quest to understand this
food that we still categorize under the broad label of charcuterie, a range of
preparations from sausages to pâtés, confits to cured salmon, all of which have
some sort of cure and preservation at their core. This is not a thirty-minute-meals
cookbook, not a book to help you get dinner on the table fast or tell you how to
whip together an impromptu dinner party for eight. It is a book about
craftsmanship, for people who love to cook and eat. In this chapter, Brian and I
describe its genesis—that is, why on earth we would devote two years of our
lives and an entire cookbook to a love song to animal fat, to salt, to the pig—as
well as how to use our recipes.
A powerful mania descended on me a decade ago when I first tasted duck confit
(confit de canard): duck salted for hours, if not days, then poached gently in its
own fat, and then submerged in that fat and left to “ripen.” What amazed me first
was that you could poach meat in fat. I found the idea of poaching anything in