Category Archives: Charcuterie

The cart of salting, curing, and smoking meats and various other items. Items include bacon, pancetta, coppa, salami, prosciutto, and more.

Dry-Cured Ham at Home

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: January 9, 2012

Ham, dry-cured for eight months, removed from bladder (this photo by iPhone, the ones below are by Donna)

On a recent trip to Charleston, SC, to promote Twenty, my first stop, thanks to a tweet from Ideas In Food was to the kitchen of Cypress, where chef Craig Deihl gave me a truly impressive tasting of his dry cured meats and sausages. Damn they were good—highly recommend you wonderful folks in Charleston stop in for a taste. One of the items he sliced for us he called "knuckle." Now one of the hardest parts of understanding salumi is getting a handle on terminology. When I inquired further he used the Italian term, fiocco, which is a name for a boned portion of the ham (the other larger boned cut is called culatello). The above cut ...

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Sugar Shack

By emilia | Published: January 2, 2012

It may already be booked for this season, but you need to check out Martin Picard's place, via Canane a Sucre.

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Top Posts of 2011

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: December 31, 2011

Photos by Donna Turner Ruhlman

The economy struggled but cooking and writing about food sure didn't! My colleague Emilia and I decided to have a look at the most popular—or most viewed is perhaps the better phrase—posts from this site this year. By far the most exciting blog event of the year was Cathy Barrow's and Kim Foster's Charcutepalooza. What an amazing thing happened, and all because of that catchy hashtag on Twitter. This would not have happened without Twitter. Congrats to all who participated and who pushed themselves to cook in unfamiliar and often difficult ways! Special congrats to Cecilia, who blogs at One Vanilla Bean, and Peter, who blogs at Cookblog, as the two year's end finalists. Good luck to you both! Top ruhlman.com posts from ...

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Curing Ground Meat: Soppressata

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: October 18, 2011

Soppressata w-credit In honor of this month's #charcutepalooza challenge over at Mrs. Wheelbarrow, I'm reposting this soppressata recipe from a couple years back. Wishing all who take up the challenge well. Happy curing! While David Lebovitz considers molecular gastronomy and  The Alinea Cookbook in a long and thoughtful post today (he approaches with great skepticism, as he's a traditionalist at heart, and leaves with appreciation having come back round to where he'd begun but by a whole new route), I would like to consider some of the oldest molecular gastronomical magic known to man.  Combining ground pork and salt and seasonings, introducing to it some microscopic creatures, and waiting for it to dry a little, to achieve a tangy flavorful sausage that has never gone above room temperature. In December, a few of us went in on a pig.  One of the pleasures of hand-raised hog is ...

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The Lessons of Pork Belly

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: September 27, 2011

 

Crispy Pork Belly with Caramel-Miso Glaze/photos by Donna Turner Ruhlman

These are some of the pix we didn't use in the new book, Ruhlman's Twenty, and I wanted to share them because they make me hungry for pork belly. But when I sat down simply to mention this dish, Crispy Pork Belly with Miso-Caramel Glaze, it surprised me with all the lessons it has wrapped up in it. First of all, it's a delicious dish (I was delighted that Rob Misfud, in his review of the book in Toronto's Globe and Mail, tried it and loved it—while it's not difficult, it's more involved than most of the other recipes in the book).  But go below the deliciousness and you will see it's a lesson in braising, in understanding the nature of pork skin, of the power ...

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How To Make Beef Brisket Pastrami At Home

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: September 9, 2011

Slicing Hot Pastrami/photo by Donna Turner Ruhlman

I've written about pastrami short ribs, and love them because they've got the perfect meat-to-fat ratio. But ever since the arrival of a Big Green Egg (planning a review soon), I've wanted to do a proper pastrami, which is essentially a corned beef brisket, coated with pepper and coriander and smoked (the result above was perfect—look at that awesome fat). While I've published the corned beef recipe from my book Charcuterie, I haven't really talked about smoking strategies at home. I recommend two different methods: stove top and in a kettle grill. Stove-top smoking is easy with an inexpensive ($43) Cameron smoker. I bought one a few years ago and it works great for bacon and would work great for this brisket. Briskets require long low ...

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Also posted in Beef, Brines, Butchery, Charcutepalooza, grilling, Main Courses, outdoor cooking, Recipes, Technique | Tagged , , | Comments closed

Pig Ear and Parsley Salad

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: September 7, 2011

 

Pig Ear and Parsley Salad/photo by Donna Turner Ruhlman

Even James, the guy who handed me a bag of 20 pig ears, gave me a funny look.  "What do you do with 'em?" It's not obvious, even to farmers, not in America. It wasn't obvious to me till I had my first one several years ago at Michael Symon's Lola, fried crispy on the outside, gelatinous and chewy on the inside, their richness offset by the sweet-sour heat of pickled chillis. Michael said he'd had a similar reaction when he'd first had one from Mario Batali. Where did Mario first have them? "The ears were a prized part of eating whole suckling pigs on weekend lunches in Segovia, Spain, near where we lived in Madrid throughout high school," he said in an ...

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How To Prepare and Cook Beef Heart

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: August 18, 2011

Beef Heart with Herbed Vinaigrette and Arugula/photo by Donna Turner Ruhlman

Heart is an excellent muscle to eat: it's lean and flavorful (meaty but not organy—it's a hard working muscle, not squishy spleen), it's got a good bite, and it's inexpensive (I bought the three-pound grass-fed beef heart for six bucks last Saturday). And one more thing: it puts to use a cut that is often thrown away; it's important that we do our best to make use of all parts of the animals we kill for our food. I use a beef heart here, but you can use a veal heart which is a little more tender and mild.  I first had beef heart a couple summers ago when Pardus visited. He stuck it on skewers, a good strategy because ...

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Questioning Pork Belly

By emilia | Published: August 15, 2011

Pork belly futures market is over in the Chicago Exchange. Why?  Bacon consumption has risen, forgotten local sources, seasonality lost? Soluions needed, via Food Tech Connect.

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How To Roast a Suckling Pig

By Michael Ruhlman | Published: August 1, 2011

The start of the pig roast. Photo by Joshua Kulp

Chefs Christine Cikowski and Joshua Kulp, among the growing legions who are making our food better and helping us to appreciate it more, call their moveable feast Sunday Dinner Club because it evoked a time when their families shared a long meal together.  Sharing meals with the people you love is far more important than I'd ever realized, a fact that deepens the more I cook, read, and listen to other cooks, both home cooks and professionals.  I love that spirit. Sunday Dinner Club is an unusual Chicago-based business created in 2004.  What the chefs do is host dinner parties in their home and invite people on their mailing list to attend. The mailing list has been cultivated over ...

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Also posted in aromatics, Charcutepalooza, grilling, Guest Post, outdoor cooking, Pork!, Recipes, Salumi, Technique, Tips | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

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