Mike Sula has written another, great, meaty article for the Chicago Reader, this one on the “charcuterie underground” or the “growing” “charcuterie resistance” movement. This Little Piggy gets a mention, but the focus of the article is on the guys behind the pig’s head, Erik and Ehran, who run a similar kind of private charcuterie club on Chicago’s north side.

As Mike Sula stresses, small one- or two-man businesses like E & P Meats are just the tip of the charcuterie iceberg. Restaurants all over (real restaurants, I mean; you know, where people in the kitchen still cook, instead of just reheating frozen, prepared foods) are offering a selection of “house-cured” meats, and you can bet your Aunt Fanny that almost all of them are doing it without the knowledge or approval of their local health department, which would require them to invest the money and time in dedicated facilities and in getting a HACCP plan (Hazardous Analysis Critical Control Points, pronounced “hassip”) approved.

Of particular interest to me was the response that Mike got from a spokesman for the Chicago Department of Public Health:

(more…)

I see that I posted on the nduja di buffala one month ago. Since then, it’s been hanging in the meat-curing fridge, slowly drying out and mellowing. Well, given the quantities of hot peppers in this sausage, “mellowing” is not exactly the right word; you don’t “mellow” a blast furnace; you might break it in, but you’ll never “mellow” it.

When it was fresh, the version I made with bison instead of pork shoulder was nice and spreadable, easily melting into hot pasta so that it needed almost no sauce. A month later, it’s still a fairly soft salami, but no longer spreadable. I plan on hanging the rest another month or so to see what kind of dry salami this makes. Interestingly, the more traditional version made with all pork was distinctly different from the start. While the buffalo one firmed up quickly, the pork version started out almost squishy and, a month later, is now soft and spreadable. I mixed some into whole wheat pasta yesterday for my local, semi-regular basque lunch club, and it got rave reviews. Just make sure you have a pitcher of water and plenty of beer on hand!

Now for the flavor. When fresh, the heat from the chilis was hot and bright, like a newly-formed star. Now, like an aging star, the heat is darker and more smoldering, but, if anything, it’s more dense, more concentrated. Fermentation and curing have contributed an earthy funkiness to the sausage. Munching on it causes a nice, cooling sweat to break out on the top of your head. The heat that I wanted is there, but not quite the richness or the depth of pepper flavors that I remember from the original, eaten at that stall in London’s Borough Market, almost two months ago. Scott, who has launched his Sausage Debauchery blog, has been indefatigueable in trying to track down Calabrian peppers in this country (you could say his imagination has been enflamed by this recipe), and it looks like he finally found some, for a very reasonable price, in Brooklyn. As soon as I get my hands on some of this concentrato di pepperoncini I’ll make another batch and report.

All in all, I’m quite pleased with my first attempt to reproduce this salami. I think the recipe is a keeper, and I’ll just keep experimenting with the mix of peppers–and probably never stop!

Nothing quite breaks your heart like a broken emulsion. It’s bad enough when it’s a mayonnaise that you’ve been whisking for awhile, but when its’ a twelve-pound batch of sausage that you’ve spent a month planning, a week getting ready, and an entire day working on… Well, let’s just say that it’s a good thing we don’t keep any guns in the house.

An emulsion involves two liquids that normally don’t want to mix; when you get one to stay dispersed in the other, without separating or “breaking,” it thickens up and emulsifies. The kind of emulsions cooking is concerned with are almost always fat and water–think of oil and vinegar in salad dressing or the oil and little bit of liquid in mayonnaise. When it comes to emulsified sausages, the fat is usually pork fat, dispersed in liquid, usually water. To disperse the meat fat it has to be pounded or chopped for quite awhile, and to keep the emulsion from breaking, everything has to be kept cold, so the water starts out as crushed ice. Finally, you also need an emulsifier to keep the molecules from just clumping back together in pools of oil and water–in this case, skim milk powder. Whip these together so that the fat molecules break down and stay dispersed in the water, control the temperature so that the emulsion never “breaks,” and the result is a very fine, light and delicate–almost creamy–sausage. If the emulsion breaks, as this one did during cooking, the sausage becomes drier and chewier and ends up surrounded by a layer of fat around the casing. It still tastes alright, but the texture and appearance are unacceptable, so I’ve taken it off the club offerings. If any TLP members would still like to try some, I’d be happy to include a piece for free with your order.

(more…)

OK, if you’re tired of me sticking tongues out at you, here’s a review of a new book on charcuterie by an acknowledged master.

Fritz Sonnenschmidt is a Certified Master Chef, who joined the faculty of the Culinary Institute of America in 1968 and retired in 2002. He authored and edited the book, The Professional Art of Garde Manger, which has been a standard textbook for many decades. Michael Ruhlman memorably describes Sonnenschmidt as a master of the cold kitchen, “who is very nearly a perfect sphere,” so presumably he has vast experience in eating charcuterie as well as preparing it.

Published by Delmar Cengage Learning, this book sets out to be a textbook for both the culinary student and the keen amateur. In the Preface, Sonnenschmidt declares “For some time now I have felt the need for a comprehensive and detailed book on preparing sausages, pâtés, aspics, and salsas the easy way, as my masters taught me.”

If indeed it were “comprehensive and detailed,” it would be worth the hefty $62 asking price. But the first five chapters, covering equipment, the raw materials, seasonings and cures, sausage casings, and the smoking of meats–all in less than 50 pages–are woefully inadequate.

(more…)

If you read my previous post on bacon explosion, you saw what a cheesy recipe this is. Layers of bacon, sausage, and bacon, all topped with barbecue rub, rolled up together, hot smoked, and slathered with barbecue sauce. Weighing in at 5000 calories and 500 grams of fat, it’s gross, an obscene monument to excess. In other words, it’s a great barbecue original, a classic piece of Americana.

The woven bacon wrap on the exterior of this is beautiful enough to deserve making it, but the recipe could stand some improving to say the least. First yuck, their bacon and Italian sausage comes off the rack at the supermarket. Second yuck, the point of bacon wrapped around the outside is to baste a leaner forcemeat in the middle, whereas they have fatty bacon basting fatty sausage, all wrapped around more fatty bacon. Hey guys, how about going for some flavor here, instead of just wallowing in the grease? For my version, I decided to feature the versatility of pork and combine four very different layers, each one adding different flavors.

If the original bacon explosion is pure, cheesy food porn, this is still totally over the top, but it has a lot more meat to sink your teeth into–more like Robert de Niro and less like Ben Stiller.

(more…)

Apparently I’m way behind the curve on this one.

Two pounds of Italian sausage.  Two pounds of bacon.  Take half the bacon and weave into a wrap.  Take the sausage and spread it on top.  Crisp up the rest of the bacon and sprinkle it on the sausage.  Sprinkle layers with bbq rub.  Hot smoke for two hours and coat with bbq sauce.  How could 5000 calories and 500 grams of fat taste any better?

If you read the NYT, you’ll have seen this featured in today’s dining section.  The authors/perpertrators of the bacon explosion posted this recipe on their blog just before Christmas.  According to the Times article, they have had 400,000 hits since then.  By the time I post this, I’ll probably be the twenty-thousandth website to link to their recipe.  Obviously, someone knows a lot more about marketing than I do.

This certainly exemplifies the saying of Larbo that “Nothing exceeds like excess.”