And then there was sausage!
I got a book on charcuterie, cleverly named Charcuterie, and . . . WOW, this stuff will kill you. I mean, okay, I know that all sausage is bad for you, as is all bacon, terrines and confits, etc., etc. But the academic knowledge of the awfulness of how "bad" cured meat is changed when you see what actually goes into it. It stops being academic. Still, the book was utterly fascinating. The prose occasionally got lurid (okay, I get it that you like pork!) but since the book is mostly techniques and recipes . . . well, I finished a good chunk of it in one sitting it was so fascinating.
I mean, take a pork belly confit as an example. You take a bunch of pork belly - six pounds - and cover it with salt and cure it. Then you put it in a Dutch oven and cover it with fat and cook it at 250 degrees for three hours. Then you store it in its protective coating of fat in the fridge. To serve, you take it out and warm it to room temperature and then you deep fry it. So, what you do is take pork belly, mostly fat, and poach it in fat and then deep fry it in yet more fat. That's the kind of book this is.
On the other hand, and the authors point this out, people who routinely eat fast food have the gall to look down on sausage? We'll gladly eat a pizza, loaded down with salt and fat, but then we don't have the nerve to look askance at a confit?! Which is insane, of course.
At the same time, staring this in the face is . . . wow! Just looking at all of it in the face is just a little weird.
But Adrienne is interested for me to explore this world of pig fat, hehe. She points out that none of my cooking experiments have gone too awry (sometime I might make a lousy dish, but overall it's been pretty splendid for us). So, it looks like we'll be getting a meat grinder and a sausage stuffer and either a smoker or a smoke box for the grill.
Since she leaves for GDF today, I was looking for some projects to do while she's gone. I was thinking of making my own bacon - makin' bacon! Not just reg'lar bacon, but perhaps also a cured Italian bacon. I'll also brine a chicken or two. Stuff that doesn't require too much additional equipment, to get an idea of how all of this works. The authors of Charcuterie say that store bought bacon stinks on a lot of different axes, so I suspect I'll be using that as a measure of the utility of this book.
I mean, take a pork belly confit as an example. You take a bunch of pork belly - six pounds - and cover it with salt and cure it. Then you put it in a Dutch oven and cover it with fat and cook it at 250 degrees for three hours. Then you store it in its protective coating of fat in the fridge. To serve, you take it out and warm it to room temperature and then you deep fry it. So, what you do is take pork belly, mostly fat, and poach it in fat and then deep fry it in yet more fat. That's the kind of book this is.
On the other hand, and the authors point this out, people who routinely eat fast food have the gall to look down on sausage? We'll gladly eat a pizza, loaded down with salt and fat, but then we don't have the nerve to look askance at a confit?! Which is insane, of course.
At the same time, staring this in the face is . . . wow! Just looking at all of it in the face is just a little weird.
But Adrienne is interested for me to explore this world of pig fat, hehe. She points out that none of my cooking experiments have gone too awry (sometime I might make a lousy dish, but overall it's been pretty splendid for us). So, it looks like we'll be getting a meat grinder and a sausage stuffer and either a smoker or a smoke box for the grill.
Since she leaves for GDF today, I was looking for some projects to do while she's gone. I was thinking of making my own bacon - makin' bacon! Not just reg'lar bacon, but perhaps also a cured Italian bacon. I'll also brine a chicken or two. Stuff that doesn't require too much additional equipment, to get an idea of how all of this works. The authors of Charcuterie say that store bought bacon stinks on a lot of different axes, so I suspect I'll be using that as a measure of the utility of this book.