Charcuterie_ The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing - Michael Ruhlman [0]
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
Charcuterie 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