Table Of ContentCONTENTS
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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
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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
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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
Brown%20%26%20Co.%20Orns
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 fat appealing, and the idea of poaching a rich
fatty meat in more fat enormously so. But what truly hooked me was how
amazing the duck confit was to eat—the salty, gently spiced meat was
deeply, richly succulent, the skin crispy.
I began to explore the technique. You could do so many things with duck
confit: stew it in some beans (as in cassoulet, the well-known French bean
