Charcuterie_ The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing - Michael Ruhlman [4]
I wrote about Brian taking the test in an article and in a subsequent book, Soul of a Chef, and we became friends. In the meantime, soon after he returned home from the test, he was asked by Schoolcraft College, in Livonia, Michigan, outside Detroit and not far from his Five Lakes Grill, to become a chef-instructor in, coincidentally, charcuterie.
It’s in the nature of the chef to accept with cheerful willingness a workload that is completely impossible. It’s a matter of pride and a personal challenge, even, taking on a third job when two full-time jobs are really already just a little too much. And a chef does this not wincingly or with a sigh, but rather with a breezy immediate response: sure.
Brian’s days began at 5:30. He taught and lectured on butchery in the morning, “demo-ing” whole pigs and lambs, taking primal cuts of beef down to the subprimals of shoulder, shank, strip loin, tenderloin, blade, flank. He taught charcuterie in the afternoon. Then school let out around three, at which time he would cruise a half hour to Five Lakes Grill, where as owner he still worked the line. He might have to leave the line briefly when one or another of his five kids had a soccer game—as coach, he had to be there—or to interrogate his teenaged daughter’s suitors, but the majority of his waking hours were spent making, serving, or teaching food and cooking.
By the time a critic from The Atlantic Monthly showed up to review his restaurant, Brian had been preparing charcuterie for two decades and teaching the art and craft of it for several years. So it’s not surprising that while his restaurant offers an array of contemporary American regional cuisine, it was the pork, duck, and pâté that Corby Kummer singled out:
The pork and the duck were the best I’ve had in years—anywhere, even in southwestern France, where every house is a farm and every farm fattens a few ducks. Specifically, Polcyn’s forte is charcuterie. . . . Every day a different pâté or terrine is offered, and the peppery duck pâté I tasted was a tour de force. Each component— the firm little chunks of duck leg, the pistachios, a soft pink-and-red forcemeat of pork and duck—had distinct texture and flavor; the aftertaste was clear and pleasant, with none of the muddy residue most pâtés leave.
Brian is an exuberant chef, devoted family man, and articulate teacher, but, most important, he loves everything he does and, in the culinary realm, he especially loves charcuterie. We’d remained in touch, and when I called him to say I wanted to write a book about this subject that I too love, he happily said, “You bet.”
Brian, a native of Michigan, born to a Polish father and Mexican mother, has a lively manner and a teaching style that wouldn’t be out of place on the comedy circuit. (“This weekend at the restaurant,” Brian will tell his students to begin the day’s lecture, “I smoked some duck breast. Excellent flavor, but really hard to keep lit.”) He grows so excited when speaking about food and cooking he bounces as he talks.
“My Polish grandma, my father’s mother, made kielbasa every Christmas and Easter,” Brian told me when we sat down to talk about the book. “Then my mom took over the job. Looking back on it, it was always good food, everything made from scratch. We didn’t have any money, so everything was used and used well. Kielbasa was the holiday ritual. We’d grind the meat and season it. The next day we’d stuff it, tie it into big rings, hang the rings over a broom handle on chairs, put the dog out, and set the kielbasa in front of the fire overnight.
“But here’s the thing. No one’s been able to reproduce Grandma’s kielbasa. After she seasoned the meat, Grandma would put it beneath her bed. I don’t know if she was trying to keep it from us, from kitchen mice, if she thought something about the conditions under the bed were special,