Charcuterie_ The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing - Michael Ruhlman [1]
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
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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
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Sometimes 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