Charcuterie_ The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing - Michael Ruhlman [9]
Digital kitchen scales are widely available and can be found starting at about $30. Having a scale that weighs up to five pounds is useful but not critical for these recipes where it’s the ounce measures that are most important. It’s also helpful to have a scale that converts ounces to grams and vice versa.
• An instant-read thermometer. Cooking the food to the right internal temperature, and not beyond, is critical to the success of any dish (not least of which are sausages, which people tend to overcook). Digital thermometers are preferable because of their speed, but analogue instant-reads, which are a few dollars cheaper, are just as good. Digital thermometer-timers are a great convenience. These have a probe attached by a cable to the timer and will sound an alarm when the internal temperature of what you’re cooking has been reached.
• A sausage stuffer. There are various types of stuffers, but the best are cylindrical ones that have a hand crank. These make the work very easy, quick, and clean, but they’re expensive, upwards of $200. Steel stuffers that press the meat through a tube are less expensive, starting at about $70, but messier to use. KitchenAid makes an inexpensive stuffer that attaches to the grinder; it is acceptable for basic, and occasional, sausage making, but it can be problematic (grinding directly into the casing skips the important mixing step—but some chefs swear by stuffer attachments).
• A terrine mold. Le Creuset makes excellent, handsome enameled cast-iron molds with lids, from about $65 at J. B. Prince (see Sources, page 304). Other specialty stores such as William’s-Sonoma and Sur La Table also carry various porcelain terrine molds. (Generally, though the material and size won’t affect the quality of the pâté.)
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SALT:
HOW THE MOST POWERFUL TOOL IN YOUR KITCHEN TRANSFORMS THE HUMBLE INTO THE SUBLIME
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Salt, whether dry or in a brine, is a powerful rock that not only keeps our bodies alive but has helped us to preserve food for millennia, shaping civilizations as it graces our kitchen table. The following recipes describe how and why it works and some of the amazing food you can create when you use salt as a lever.
The Basic Dry Cure
Fresh Bacon
Pancetta
Guanciale
Salt Pork
Salt Cod
Fennel-Cured Salmon
Duck Prosciutto
Beef Jerky
Lemon Confit
The All-Purpose Brine
Herb-Brined Roasted Chicken
or Turkey
Garlic-Sage–Brined Pork Chops
Corned Beef
The Natural Pickle
Pickling Spice
Traditional Dill Pickles
Home-Cured Sauerkraut
Salt, one of those items in everyone’s daily life, is completely quiet, resting inside a shaker on the kitchen counter or box in the cupboard, never calling attention to itself, plain, prosaic, no dramatics, humble—a rock, after all. In truth, though, it is a miracle. Its place in the history of civilization attests to this, as does in equal measure its place in the human body. Without the mineral sodium chloride, our muscles would cease to function, our organs would starve. Because our body doesn’t produce it and because we need it to survive, humans developed a distinct sense for salt, and our bodies are highly attuned to the need for salt.
Historically, human beings have gotten plenty of salt from meat, and non–meat eating animals have relied on salt licks, or natural salt deposits. Beyond our bodies and beginning with the earliest known civilization, salt, a very concentrated pure form of these two essential elements, sodium and chloride, has been the foundation of entire economies, has provided the means (via food preservation) for a surplus of food on which communities survived, has been glorified in religions, has been a prized catalyst