Charcuterie_ The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing - Michael Ruhlman [7]
Take time to look at the bowl of diced pork that will form the basis of the terrine; the duck breast or pork loin, nicely trimmed, that will be placed inside; and the fresh mushrooms, the minced shallots, the chopped parsley, peeled garlic cloves, the ramekin of kosher salt. It’s a tantalizing sight because you know all those ingredients will be transformed in a delicious and dynamic way, and it’s going to feed people, your friends and family, in a way that they’re not accustomed to. That’s part of the pleasure of cooking.
The ingredients you’re about to use should look good as they are, individual and organized, before you even get going. If you start sloppy, how can you end clean? Stay organized as you go, and keep your work surface bright.
Enjoy the tools of the craft. For many of these recipes, you’ll need some kind of meat grinder. For many of these recipes, we relied on a KitchenAid mixer with a grinder attachment and a 5- or 6-quart bowl. Could you use a hand-crank grinder? Certainly. Or could you get by with just a food processor? Sure, though the texture of some of the products will be different. Could you make the recipe by hand, with just a knife and a cutting board? For the most part, yes, but it would be more difficult. Having the right tools makes a difference here as it does in any craft.
The individual techniques involved in charcuterie are not hard—you don’t have to flute mushrooms, for example, or haul twenty gallon stockpots around the kitchen—but much of this type of cooking takes plenty of time and good attention. There’s a reason these kinds of foods are less common in restaurants than, say, grilled steak, sautéed chicken, or other heat-and-serve items. Life at home, life in a restaurant, is busy. Who has the time? Often we don’t, but when we do, when we make the time, there’s no more satisfying kind of cooking than this and the highly crafted, intensely flavored food that results.
The art and craft of charcuterie today includes many kinds of what are classified as garde-manger techniques (i.e., cold food preparation), such as those for making pâtés and terrines, whether classical (meat or fish blended with fat) or modern (vegetable terrines such as a roasted portabello and red pepper terrine bound with a fresh herb vinaigrette), such as confits and rillettes of duck, goose, pork; and all manner of sauces for countless canapés, appetizers, and first courses.
The backbone of charcuterie is meat or fish that is ground or pureed with seasonings and then cooked, a preparation called a forcemeat, or farce, from the French farcir, meaning to stuff. But the recipes here, encompass a range of techniques that extend beyond classical charcuterie, fundamentals important to many areas of cooking, such as poaching, steaming, sautéing, braising, sauce making, and seasoning. These recipes focus on various uses for proteins, whether egg white, gelatin, meat, or fish; cooking with plenty of fat or cooking very lean; and knowing how and when to do each. Learning the craft of charcuterie extends a cook’s abilities beyond those required for charcuterie alone, and it will open new vistas for most home cooks.
This book begins with the importance of, and effects of, salt and with recipes that rely on salt as the primary preserving mechanism. We move on from there to the use of smoke, with recipes that combine salt and smoke (most smoked items must also be cured).