I’ve got a t-shirt that announces “Bacon is meat candy,” and, in addition to my maple-syrup cured bacon, Bali Bacon is another one that proves the truth of this dictum.  In addition to being cured with generous amounts of Big Tree’s palm sugar with ground ginger, it gets coated with more of it when it comes hot out of the smoker. But it’s not sickly or cloyingly sweet.  Ginger is a natural partner for pork, and it gives it a subtle spiciness, while Big Tree’s long pepper also brightens and punches up the flavor.  The result is a mildly sweet and spicy bacon, coming to you from the South Pacific.

Here’s my recipe:

one, 5-pound chunk of pork belly
40 g salt
5 g cure #1
70 g Big Tree palm sugar with ground ginger
10 g Big Tree long pepper

For me, this this bacon makes Sunday morning.  It’s great with pancakes, but the perfect accompaniment is Sharon Kramis’ buttermilk scone recipe from the Fannie Farmer Baking Book (page 582).  Just substitute candied ginger for the currants.

In addition to restocking the Club with all the kinds of bacon I’ve made before – maple-syrup cured bacon, black pepper-coated bacon, Bali bacon, and black bacon – I’m experimenting with one totally new one: a bacon cured in Scotch Whisky.  This is for my good friend, Pompom, who (for better and for worse) has introduced me to the pleasures of good Scotch.

Hogshead is not the piece of meat I’m trying to cure; it’s the name of a good, blended malt Scotch.  When I heard the name and saw this picture on the label, I knew this is the Scotch to use.  But first the alcohol needs to be cooked off.  (In her cookbook, The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen, Paula Wolfert quotes Thomas Keller to the effect that alcohol will denature and “cook” the proteins in meat, sealing the surface and preventing absorption of a marinade or cure.  Since acids have the same effect, as in ceviche, this makes sense to me.)  So I warm the Scotch up in a pan, light it, and when the flames die out (which takes a couple minutes!), then I add puréed golden raisins, Lyle’s Golden Syrup, and take it off the heat.  When this mix cools down, I add salt, cure #1, and just a wee bit of mace and long pepper.

Here are the exact quantities I’m working with: Read the rest of this recipe »

After last month’s NY Times article came out, my stash of Nduja was depleted in 9 hours, 41 minutes, and 17 seconds.  Lots of interesting comments have been coming in.  As the largest maker of Nduja in the country, Chris Cosentino’s Boccalone got the lion’s share of the coverage, but a number of correspondents, including a few Calabrians, have confided to me that they have tried it and found it wanting: disappointing, inconsistent, or even downright “terribile!”  So you might just have lucked on the best Nduja in the US, right here.

One of the interesting points in Julia Moskin’s article was how nduja gets “translated” when it’s made over here.  The Calabrian original is rude and crude, rough and tumble, and “absolutely takes the top of your head off,” as Nancy Harmon Jenkins says in the article, so there’s plenty of room for a “meatier and mellower” version.  In addition to the pâté I created, I like this version made with bison meat.  Besides, a more traditional nduja salami, made entirely from pork belly, can take the better part of a year to ferment and dry, while this one should be ready in a little more than a month.  Hopefully it will be enough to keep the ravenous hordes from pounding down my door, while the killer nduja slowly cures.

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Here’s another fun-fact-to-know-and-tell that I came across recently in my reading about the state of food in the US: the average American spends only 15 minutes a day preparing food.  In the next decade, that’s expected to drop to around 5 minutes a day.  Big food processing companies are banking on it.

I was chewing over this factoid, while cooking in my kitchen recently.  There I was, mincing pounds of vegetables, and pickling them, just to have the relish that I was craving to go with dinner.  All in all, it took about an hour and a half (and if I’m skewing the average so wildly by spending that much time on just a condiment, that means an awful lot of people are not spending any time at all preparing their own food).

I was also thinking about another book I’ve been reading, Shop Class as Soulcraft, written by another refugee from the University of Chicago; thinking about cooking as another manual competence that’s disappearing, another vanishing skill, another dying craft.  While advertising implies that cooking is beneath us or beyond us, that it’s either a “drudgery” from which “convenience” foods promise to liberate us or a skill so rarified that it should be left to professionals, in reality it’s one of the most basic ways in which we take care of ourselves.  Can taking care of ourselves ever be beneath or beyond us? Read the rest of this recipe »

As traditional as matzoh ball soup, latkes are another standard deli item.  But, as Jason Brechin wrote recently, don’t count on still being able to find a good one at your nearest Jewish deli.  Pancake houses usually also have a “potato pancake” on the menu, but they are similarly disappointing: greasy, dense, bland, and – if not served piping hot – fuggedaboutit!

Latkes are also traditional for Hannukah (as is any other simple carb fried in oil, like donuts), and tonight is the last night.  So get out that cast iron skillet and get cooking!

Latkes I made at home were similarly disappointing, until I discovered the potato pancake recipe in the Joy of Cooking.  Soon after, when I made these latkes for a Jewish friend, her eyes rolled up into her head, a smile broke out on her face, and she turned to her spouse and said in a loud whisper, “You’d never know!”

The secret for great, crispy latkes, not surprisingly, uses the same technique for anything you want crispy on the outside: make sure the food is dry and the oil, the pan, or the fire is hot.  To get the potatoes dry, the Joy of Cooking has you roll the grated potatoes in a kitchen towel and then wring the towel over the sink, squeezing the bejeezus out of the potatoes.  (This is a good job for anyone who’s been working out recently and is looking for opportunities to show off their upper body strength.)  I suppose you could just spread the potatoes out on towels for awhile, and blot the moisture out of them, but where’s the theater in that!

The Joy of Cooking recipe is still a little bland (I know, I know, that’s like carping about Jewish cooking being Jewish) and a little eggy, so here’s Larbo’s version:

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If pâté en croute doesn’t trip off your tongue, try the good, old, plodding English “meat pie.” I’ve always thought of pâté, sealed in a pastry crust, as one of the most elegant presentations for charcuterie – and one of the most intimidating! But, hell, making pie is supposed easy as, well, pie, so I plunged in and made a couple pâtés for Tuesday’s party as well as this pheasant pie, which my family gobbled up beforehand.

The pheasant was a big hit Tuesday night, so here’s the recipe. The preparation is a little involved, with diced pheasant meat and mushrooms laid in a turkey forcemeat (think turkey bologna), but you can easily double or triple the recipe for the forcemeat and make several at the same time. My Killer Cutting Robot handled a triple recipe with ease.

I started with recipes in Fritz Sonnenschmidt’s Charcuterie book, but his versions came out too bland for my taste, so I’ve jazzed them up:

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Trotter Gear sounds like the name for a line of cookware or chef’s wear from Charlie Trotter’s restaurant up in Chicago, but it’s actually Fergus Henderson’s name for a rich, meaty broth made from the wonderfully named pig’s “trotters,” or, as we refer to them in the US, “hocks” (a term with a pedigree going back to the Middle English hough and Old English hohsinu meaning “heel sinew”). The pedestrian name is “pig’s feet.”

I got Fergus Henderson’s first book, The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating, as a great present a few years ago, and it has this to say about pig’s trotters: “These are one of the most gastronomically useful extremities. If your butcher has pork, there must be a trotter lurking somewhere. They bring to a dish an unctuous, lip-smacking quality unlike anything else. The joy of finding a giving nodule of trotter in a dish!” (How can one not love a cookbook that waxes rhapsodic about offal?) After I had a chance to eat at his restaurant in London last spring (dragging along my son, who discovered, much to his surprise, that Roast Bone Marrow and Parsley Salad is really quite delicious), pig trotters have been on my list of things I really must try.

Fortunately Stan Schutte was able to get the Amish folks at Das Schlacht Haus to stop throwing all his pigs’ feet in the dumpster, and Fergus Henderson’s latest book, Beyond Nose to Tail: More Omnivorous Recipes for the Adventurous Cook, actually includes a recipe for Trotter Gear. I cooked up a big batch over the Thanksgiving weekend, my fridge is now well-stocked with this essential “cook’s friend,” and I am cooking up great plans for it.

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This recipe is based on Maynard Davies’ description of a traditional bacon called “the Staffordshire Black.”

As he explains, in Secrets of a Bacon Curer, this version comes “from the north of the county where they had the mining industry, and where they made all the china. All of this was hard manual work and the Staffordshire workers needed a good quality bacon to give them energy. The Staffordshire Black was cured with dark treacle and sugar and its sweetness gave them energy.

“In the pottery industry, once the huge bottle kilns were fired, the firers were not allowed to leave it, so they used to have to sleep round the kiln until it was ready. The kiln firers used to have a boy to fetch the beer and a boy to cook the meals, and the majority of the meals were cooked in the bottle oven.

“They cooked the bacon on a shovel where it cooked very quickly so you needed a bacon cut that could take the heat. They would also add eggs and cheese and served it all up on the Staffordshire oat cakes – that is a traditional Staffordshire breakfast. They used to put the bacon, cheese and egg on the oat cake and roll it all up and eat it like that” (144-5).

With only this decription to go on, here is the recipe I came up with:

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Whan that Octobere, with his snew shoures calte,
The harte of manne hath shivered to the roote,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimage,
And bringen home som bacon for to priketh hir courage.
– with apologies to Geoffrey Chaucer!

In his Guide to Better Bacon, Ari Weinzweig says that Nueske’s is the bacon that they sell and use the most at Zingerman’s Deli and Roadhouse, and he quotes R. W. Apple’s claim, in the New York Times, that Nueske’s is “the beluga of bacon, the Rolls-Royce of rashers.” In other words, well worth a pilgrimage when you find yourself visiting friends who live a mere 40 miles away. After eating it at every meal for a couple days, I can pronounce that it is indeed superb bacon. Nearly as good as the bacon that I make and offer to TLP members.

But don’t take my word for it; judge for yourself. I bought a whole, 10-pound slab, and, as a special offer this month, Nueske’s bacon will be available to any member placing an order. If you think Nueske’s bacon tastes better, I’ll refund the money you wasted on my bacon. That’s putting my money where my big mouth is!

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OK, all you Nduja lurkers out there, hitting on this site just to get your pork fat and chili fix: here’s a recipe to rewind your minds and rethread your heads.

Nduja pâté. Yes, that’s Nduja – the crude and rude, rough and tumble, Calabrian salami that meatheads everywhere are plugging in to fire up their search engines – and pâté – the suave and elegant embodiment of classical French cuisine – together for the first time. A marriage made in heaven or al inferno?

What inspired such a culinary creation – besides the obvious explanation that I’m “crazier than a shithouse rat,” as Scott so succintly put it? It all has to do with texture. The Calabrian Nduja I had a chance to sample in London has a smooth, creamy texture, exactly like what you get from the Liver Terrine a la Parisienne in Frentz and Poulain’s Charcuterie book. Not surprisingly, the mix of meats is about the same, a 2:1 ratio of pork belly to liver. The final reason for nduja-izing pâté is pure greed. Pâté I can eat the same day, instead of waiting for it to ferment, smoke, and then slowly dry for weeks or months.

Here are the main ingredients for the meat mix:

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