Charcuterie_ The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing - Michael Ruhlman [35]
As with foods high in fat and cured foods, smoked cured foods should be eaten in moderation. Smoke is composed of many wonderful compounds but some harmful ones too. Again, Harold McGee: “Prominent among these are the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, which are proven carcinogens and are formed from all of the wood components in increasing amounts as the temperature is raised.”
The All-Important Pellicle
Of smoking basics, the only issue that isn’t a matter of common sense is the importance of allowing the food to dry long enough before smoking to form a pellicle, a tacky surface that the smoke will stick to. (This is especially noticeable with salmon, which develops a distinctly tacky feel when dried.) If you put damp meat or sausage into a smoker, it won’t pick up the smoke as effectively as it would if dried uncovered in the refrigerator overnight. Yes, food will still pick up smoke if you don’t give it a chance to develop a pellicle, but the end results will be superior if you do.
Little House in the Big Woods
One of our favorite scenes in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s classic series comes in the first pages of the first book, Little House in the Big Woods. Laura describes Pa hanging strips of venison inside a length of hollow tree and building a fire of moss and bark and green hickory chips inside to smoke the meat, which had been salted for a few days. After several days in the smoke, Ma would remove the meat, wrap it in paper, and store it in the attic. Pa, Laura writes, knew meat thus prepared would keep anywhere in any weather.
Indeed, the whole of that first chapter is a primer in food preservation. The Ingalls family salted fish and kept it in barrels. They stored root vegetables in a cellar, braided and hung onions, stockpiled gourds in the attic. They kept cheeses all winter in the pantry. They fattened a pig for slaughter in the late fall, and whole pages are devoted to how they used it. Hams and shoulders were salted and smoked, lard was rendered and stored in jars (the cracklings reserved to flavor johnnycakes), the head boiled till the meat was meltingly tender and mixed with the “pot-liquor,” then cooled into sliceable headcheese. Salt pork was stored in a keg in the shed, and all the little leftover scraps of meat Ma chopped fine and seasoned with dried sage from the garden, then rolled into balls for sausage (the balls would stay frozen in a pan in the shed “and be good to eat all winter”).
There’s a reason that food preservation opens this durable multivolume saga: It was the most important thing settlers on the frontier did. To survive a Wisconsin winter in the late 1800s, preserving food had to be a matter of course. The early settlers knew how to preserve food—or they simply didn’t last very long.
Not a single recipe that follows is required for your survival, but they all taste really good and are fun to make. Here, of course, is smoked bacon, bacon in its most familiar form, but there are also other great pork preparations defined by smoke, such as Canadian bacon (smoked loin), hocks, and the regional specialty from Cajun cuisine, tasso ham, made from slices of shoulder, as well as poultry, fish, even chile peppers and nuts.
HERB-BRINED SMOKED TURKEY BREAST
Turkey is an underused bird, probably because it’s been debased by an industry committed to growing turkeys that have enormous quantities of white meat, or perhaps it’s simply our holiday conditioning. But when treated with care, a turkey is a great meat to cook at any time of the year. One action we can take, besides buying turkeys from small growers, is to give the meat extra moisture and flavor by brining and then smoking the bird. The curing salt in the brine will give the meat the customary cured flavor. Turkey takes smoke beautifully (try grilling a turkey, and you’ll see immediately). The herbs can be varied according to your tastes; their flavor here is secondary to that of the brine and smoke.
This recipe is for a bone-in turkey breast, but you can brine, then smoke a whole turkey (or chicken, for that matter),