For the Love of Charcuterie

Charcuterie board from the Happy Gnome.  Photo by Rob Robitaille.

I don't like charcuterie.  I am passionately in love with it.  I can think of few things so gratifying to eat.  Charcuterie, when well executed, is incredibly flavorful and decadent.  But, what is charcuterie?  If you are unfamiliar with the term, I will bet that you know exactly what it is and have probably eaten it.  Charcuterie was a way to preserve meat, typically pork, in the days before refrigeration.  The process typically involved some type of salting/curing, smoking, drying, or potting.  Today it exists simply because it is delicious.  Some common, modern examples of charcuterie are ham, bacon, dry cured sausage, pastrami, corned beef, confits, and rillettes, to name but a few.  I have always dabbled in the art of charcuterie, but really became passionate in the past ten years. So, lets dissect this a bit and talk about some of the main areas of charcuterie that most people would care about.

Salt Cured Food

This is one that most people are familiar with.  The important thing about salt cured foods is that most, but not all, also use sodium nitrate/nitrite, which are critical in dry cured foods in order to protect against botulism.  The process is complex, but just be aware of the role sodium nitrate/nitrite plays in curing.  Examples of this type of food are bacon, prosciutto, pancetta, ham, corned beef, pastrami, sausage, beef jerky, and gravlax, just to name a few.  This is a prime example of the carry-over from the need to preserve, to not being able to imagine life without these.  Can you imagine a world with no bacon?  Steven King couldn't even top that horror.  Once cured, some of these foods, like corned beef, are simply cooked.  Some are served as is, like gravlax.  Some are smoked, like bacon, pit ham, and certain types of sausage.  And then there are some that are hung to dry without any cooking, like prosciutto, pancetta, some types of ham, beef jerky, and sausages like salami, soppressata, pepperoni, chorizo, and bresaola.

Although most salt cured foods are a type of animal protein, it is not limited them.  Fruits and vegetables can be salt cured as well.  Examples of this are sauerkraut, preserved lemons, fermented pickles like the ones you get at a good deli, and kimchi.  Not surprisingly, I have every one of those examples in my fridge right now.

Confit and Rillettes

Confits are essentially foods that have been cured, placed in an earthenware container, covered in fat, then slowly cooked until extremely tender.  Then, they are left to cool so that the fat firms up, thus sealing the food and preserving it for an extended period of time.  On the of most popular examples is duck confit, a personal favorite of mine.  Duck leg quarters are salt cured with some aromatics.  Then rinsed, dried and placed in a crock or similar dish and completely covered in rendered duck fat.  The duck is then slowly baked in the oven at round 180 degrees for several hours.  Once done, it is allowed to cool in the cooking vessel and then stored.  They are good right away, but are even better when allowed to "ripen" for a week or two in the fridge. They can be used as ingredients in other dishes, or roasted until the skin is crisp and eaten as is.  They can also be turned into rillettes.

A rillettes is often, but not always, made from a confit.  One thing that remains fairly constant, is that the meat is cooked with a descent amount of fat.  Other things can be added such as onion, carrot, celery, garlic, and any other herb or spice that you like.  The whole thing is then turned into a paste that can be spread on bread.  Like confit, it can be potted and covered with fat as a form of preservation.  In the age of refrigeration, this is mostly just a decadent and wonderful accompaniment to a great craft beer.

Dry Cured Foods

Dry cured foods, as we have already discussed, are foods that have been salt cured then allowed to dry.  Because they are cured and are dry, they will keep without refrigeration for along time.  These are among my favorite because of the buttery feel they have due to the amount of fat in them.  However, this is perhaps the most difficult of all charcuterie in the it is very finicky about temperature and humidity.  Also, our friend, and sometimes enemy, mold can jump in an wreak havoc on even the bet laid plans.  To be honest, outside of jerky, which is sped along with a dehydrator, I haven't dabbled much in this area as I do not have, what I feel, are the right conditions or location for this.  Add a few house cats into the mix and it gets even worse.  So, I have this one on my bucket list and will attempt it at some point when I find the right place.

Smoked Foods

We have already touched on this above, because to really preserve a food, smoked food must first be cured with salt and sodium nitrate/nitrite.  Then, the food is smoked, which adds another layer of preservation on top of the curing.  The process of smoke curing is so complex, that I am not even going to attempt to explain it here.  Let's just say a really complex set of chemical reactions take place that help cure and add flavor.  Again, this is not something that we need to do any longer to preserve our food.  The real fun is more to do with using the smoke as a seasoning.  Different foods lend themselves to different types of smoke.  Fish go better with lighter smoke flavors from woods like alder.  Pork and poultry is good with fruit woods like apple, and nut wood like hickory and pecan.  Beef can take a lot of flavor, so it can be paired with mesquite, hickory, pecan, and walnut.  Let's not forget the little known, but wonderful corn cob, which is great with pork and poultry.  Seriously.  I wouldn't lie about charcuterie.

I hope this has helped you understand charcuterie a little better.  As I said, most people have eaten, or at least heard of most of these foods.  This is just a basic primer into charcuterie, but the subject is very extensive and whole books have been written about it.  If you are interested in learning more, I highly recommend CHARCUTERIE The craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn.  It talks about the stuff I discussed above in much more detail and is filled with recipes that most people can do at home (perhaps with the exception of dry curing).  If you really want a deep dive into what really happens when you cure meat and smoke it, I recommend On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee.  McGee, as it is sometimes simply referred to, is arguably the best text on the subject of food and cooking.  It goes into great detail on the physics and chemistry of the kitchen.  Be advised, it is not an easy relaxing read.  It is basically a text book written at the college level, but I recommend it for anyone that takes cooking seriously and wants a great reference for the kitchen.  Have fun.

The Most Important Tool in the Kitchen - Your Brain

Illustration by my good friend Bradley "Doc" Cripe.  Amazing artist*, philosopher, and all around good egg.

It seems like the more complex life becomes, the less people think about stuff.  I don't know why that is.  Are we too dependent on the things that are external to us without having to put forth any effort?  Television, smart phones, computers, I'm looking in your general direction!  I personally think that it may be the case.  I contend that you need to take ownership an put forth the effort to understand what you are doing, no matter what it is.  Take cooking for example.  Like it or not, cooking, albeit something that everyone can master, is complex, even at a basic level.  Biology, physics, and chemistry are hard at work in the food world, even when we aren't.  Once you get into the game, it gets even busier and you can't expect to sit back and let things sort of happen.  If you do, you will be faced with disappointment most of the time.

So, here is my point.  I can't tell you how many times I have heard someone complain about making a recipe that didn't turn out.  Too salty, dry, mushy, whatever.  They even say that it seemed like a lot of salt, or that it seemed like a long time to cook.  My response is "Who's in charge here?"  The recipe?  No, the cook is, and it is their responsibility to catch these things before they become problems.  I'm not advocating that you need the skills and insight of a professional chef, but at the same time, you are in charge of something akin to a lab experiment each time you make a meal.  Listen to that little voice that is trying to warn you that you are about to screw up. Most of the time when I screw up, and yes, I still screw stuff up, it is because I ignored that little voice.  When things go awry, it usually not come as a huge surprise because I remember that voice that I ignored.  Can things go awry even when you are on top of your game?  You bet.  But a lot of stuff falls under rookie mistakes and most of them are preventable.  Everyone makes these mistakes from time to time regardless of experience level (although I would guess Eric Ripert makes way, way less of them than I do).  When I started cooking I made these types of mistakes because I didn't know any better.  Now, it's because I wasn't using my brain.  Hey, the title says that it is an important tool, but you first need to use it.  Most of the time the prevention of problems is as simple as taking the few seconds to just think about what you are doing.  Which brings me to the chicken soup example.

When you make chicken soup, you need to start at the beginning.  Seems obvious at first, but maybe not.  Let's think about this for a moment from the perspective of someone who wants homemade chicken soup for supper.  The though process should go something like this.  What's in chicken soup?  Do you have the ingredients on hand?  How long does each ingredient take to cook? Are you using prepared stock?  Is the chicken that you are going to add to it already cooked?  How long does each type of vegetable take to cook?  How long does it take to cook noodles?  Once you start to think about all this stuff, you can start to see the soup come together in your mind and you can build the time-line.  I probably goes something like this:  Brown your meat and reserve.  Then sauté some aromatic vegetables in the pot in some reserved fat from the meat.  Add stock and bouquet garni of aromatic herbs along with some salt.  Simmer until the soup has some body.  You may be adding other ingredients during the simmering process depending how long they need to cook.  Remove bouquet.  Add cooked chicken and dried noodles.  Cook until noodles are tender.  And, if you are the son of a German mother, drizzle in some beaten eggs while stirring to form egg "ribbons."  That is a really basic example, but you get the point.  If you throw everything together and cook it until the ingredient that needs the longest cooking time is done, your noodles will be mush and your chicken may have fallen apart into strings.  Even something simple needs to be planned out to some level.  That is not to say a peanut butter sandwich needs much planning, if at all, but most things can benefit from this to varying degrees.  On the other end of the spectrum, many dishes that would be considered advanced, will probably fail spectacularly if a fair amount of planning isn't employed.

Another area that can be problematic, even for people who are very good at thinking their way through a recipe, is determining the quantity of food to prepare.  Typically, this is not too difficult, but it gets more sketchy when you start dealing with foods that change drastically in volume.  Greens and mushrooms are shining examples of this.  These items cook down to a shadow of their original volume.  This is where that brain comes in again.  When you choose mushrooms for a meal, you first need to understand that they yield much less, depending on what you start with.  Let's use a simple button mushroom, or cremini, because they are fairly common.  This example is for something like a side of stewed mushrooms to accompany a steak dinner.  First, I like to remove the stem, because they are a bit woody.  Don't worry, you can save them for soup stocks, so nothing is wasted.  You can see that, before you even cook them, you are losing volume.  Once they stew down, a full pot of mushrooms will be reduced to about half.  The reason mushrooms are my favorite example is because I have been to countless meals where the mushrooms need to be rationed because the cook failed to account for loss.  I typically plan for 1/2 - 3/4 pounds of fresh mushrooms per person depending on their affinity for them.  I hate to run out, but if I make too much, they are excellent left over, or can be repurposed into mushroom soup, or into scrambled eggs.  See, always be thinking.  Same thing with greens, such as spinach.  A huge pot of greens will not amount to much.  In fact they are even worse than mushrooms, it's just that greens are not served very frequently in this area, which is a shame.

I have and will continue to make mistakes in the kitchen.  But they are much easier to swallow when it is something out of my control rather than inattention to detail.  And when it is your fault, accept it and learn by it.  A final note: Everyone makes mistakes but don't view them as failures, but rather a learning opportunity.  You always learn more from them then you do from your successes, and are not to be feared.  So, go forth and boldly cook, and above all, have fun.

 

 

*I have seen Doc draw things on a bar napkin that I would have framed and hung it in my house.