michael_g

I'm not sure how it will affect the brine, but I feel like the salt box method is pretty foolproof. You might just have to cure a little longer. Do tell how it goes! I had a similar idea: instead of cognac, why not calvados? I just put a batch of pancetta and bacon in to cure, but maybe I'll try it out on the next bacon.

The recipe in the book gives listings for both table sugar and dextrose versions. I seem to recall the author's preference for dextrose. I'm still not clear why it matters which sugar you use: dextrose tastes less sweet, but you use more of it! Is the sugar there to increase the osmotic pressure in the meat, or to just counterbalance the salts, or what?

This weekend I started two bacons: one from a small cut of pork belly (1lb, or so) as an experiment, and another from a 2.2lb piece of lamb belly, both with meat from Cappuccio's in the Italian Market. I can't remember the spices on the pork -- it may have been just the basic cure and some black pepper and garlic. The lamb's cure is the basic cure, plus rosemary, lemon zest, garlic, black pepper, and honey. The lamb, which the kind old gentleman called "breast" rather than belly, had ribs still attached. Since I intend to smoke it, I figure I can pull those out after hot-smoking. Will leaving the bones in interfere with the curing process? Also, any thoughts on the smoking of the lamb? I was thinking of smoking it with rosemary leaves...or will that be too resinous? For pork belly I may switch to D'Angelo's, who charge an extra buck a pound but sell farm-raised Berkshire bellies. Cappuccio's belly (the pork, not the old man) seemed a little lean.

Vegetarians, eh? Well, how would they know what meat is like in New York? I find the whole thing suspicious. And leave it to vegetarians to like lean meat. From that quote alone, I find it impossible to determine exactly which locale has the steak with the "fat and stuff." I actually understood it differently from you...that the meat they get in NYC has been more closely trimmed to please the upmarket crowd, whereas the meat closer to the source is more, um, rustic. ← It really depends on how you break up the quote, you're right. The truly pressing question is: what is "stuff"? Gristle? Bone? Sauce?

The honeydew may be less dense because melons (and kiwis, and a few other fruits) have enzymes that break gelatin and pectin gels. Harold McGee says they're tough to use in a couple of things, but I can't remember if ice cream/sorbet was one. In any case, yours looks fantastic! I missed the market this week, but the Cuisinart will come out next week for some hot (?) fruit sorbet action. In the mean time...star anise perhaps?

Vegetarians, eh? Well, how would they know what meat is like in New York? I find the whole thing suspicious. And leave it to vegetarians to like lean meat.

Definitely not overkill -- using duck stock to finish duck is just good "completion". I'd try searing the breasts, cooking down some onions in the leftover fat, and then deglazing with the stock, some wine or brandy, and a little bit of ancho chilli puree. I've tried that without the stock; it was good, but the stock will add a lot of body.

I had two whole ducks sitting around a few weeks ago. After using the breasts and legs, I rendered out the fat and made stock. (By the by, kosher duck is the most aggravating experience. The breasts were covered in left over bits of feathers, and one of them had a huge chunk of fat missing! With a tear in my eye, I cut off the crispy, delicious-looking skin.) Duck fat is great to have around for confiting and potatoes. I've never heard of the water rendering, though it sounds like good temperature control. I just used low heat, and got a cup or two out of two small birds. You'd probably have to do a few of them (or one or two really fatty ones) to get enough for a confit. The stock came out nicely, though it smelled more of celery than of duck and had the color of chicken stock. I didn't roast the bones, though, which will definitely happen next time. I also like the idea of onion, peppercorns, garlic, and lemon -- confit spices are good fit. Why not go whole hog (duck?) and throw in some thyme?

Kosher sheep casings would be great, but we couldn't find anyone supplying them around us (Essex and Bergen Counties, NJ). I'll be stuffing in hog casings once I move to Philly, but for now we've got another 12 feet to go through. Such a tough life, right? I didn't notice a difference in definition between the lamb (small die) and the beef (medium die). From the outside you can see that there are bigger chunks of fat within the sausage, but they seemed similar once cooked. I wasn't checking, though. In any case, I'm making some merguez tomorrow night, so I'll cook up one of the boerewors alongside it to compare. I haven't tried using the KA, but isn't the Northern Tool grinder great? We went through all of the diced meat in two minutes!

Did you do anything special to make this palatable, or do you just like the stuff? No offense, of course, I've just never been able to enjoy it.

Well, here's the duck breast ham. A couple of people have done duck proscuitto in that thread, but I can't remember any duck breast bacon. My advice to you: weigh the breasts, convert the bacon recipe, and try it! What could go wrong?

Ah...that explains why it didn't work! I'm glad to hear it's them and not me. I'd never heard of a hog ring clip before. Frankly, I'm surprised they're not called "sausage staplers".

The confit issue ended up being moot -- I hot-smoked the legs and served them with a (vaguely) Thai-ish dipping sauce. Now I've got a cup or two of duck fat for next time. The stuffer and grinder came last weekend, but I had to wait until this weekend to use them. Today we made boerewors (strange that this traditional South African sausage hasn't been mentioned here yet: 4lb beef, 1lb beef fat, 40g salt, 40g ground toasted coriander seed, 15g black pepper) and mergeuz out of the book (subbing in plain-old sweet paprika, crappy pre-minced garlic, and kosher wine that smells like it was made from Manischewitz; I also left out the water by accident). We stuffed the whole lot in kosher collagen casings ($1 a foot -- outrageous!). Edit: I used 1/4 lamb fat and 3/4 beef fat in the merguez -- it's a nice mix, and I think balances the lamb flavor pretty nicely. I love lamb, though, so that could go either way. Sadly, there are no pictures of the process. I see three problems with the process. First, I didn't account for the cashering (salting and draining) of the beef and lamb, so everything came out a little bit oversalted. It's not too bad, but it's definitely on the salty side. (Leaving the water out of the mergeuz definitely didn't help.) Second, I wasn't particularly rigorous when cutting out the sinew and connective tissue from the beef (we used "cholent meat", I have no idea what cut, maybe shin), so there are (sparse) bits of gristle in the boerewors. I also ground it on the medium die, so maybe the smaller die would have helped. The other problem was linking. Bits of meat get squeezed into the parts I twist. When I cut off a link to test it (purely scientific, no personal investment or anything), the twist didn't "set" and the sausage cooked with loose ends. I've seen kosher sausage do this before, so it may be a collagen thing. Anyone else have any experience with collagen casings, or general linking tips? All in all, it was a great experience. My father tried sausage for the first time and, surprise surprise, he likes it. (Well, at least the first time he'll admit. He may have been harboring an illicit longing for sausage ever since he started keeping kosher.) Kashrut has me at the end of my rope: twenty days and counting until I can start making bacon!

Using the scientific method (read: Google), it seems that "istara" is the type of cheese (see, for example, this cheese shop) and Chistou is the brand. Sounds good, I'll have to try some. Have you tried it outside of a cheese plate?

The knife arrived yesterday, and I used it last night to break down two ducks. The knife is sharp, feels good in my hand, and it was much easier to get the skin and fat off than with my chef's knife. One thing I noticed, however, is that the tip of the blade was less sharp then the middle and base, so it was hard to maneuver around bone in the really tight spots. I also need to use a bit more force at the start of cuts to get past the tip. Did I just get a dull tip, scrape too much on the bone early on, or am I missing something?

You'll probably profit from the thread here on "Charcuterie" by Ruhlman & Polcyn. The book itself is a good resource, with a number of creative sausages and lots of pictures showing how to make them.

I have to agree that distance is really important there. My girlfriend is an excellent cook, but for the first three months I wouldn't let her do much other than prep work. One day she insisted that she would make the whole dinner; since then, we've been (tentative) equals. If she hadn't forced me to back off, she'd stll be chopping onions. Resentfully. I think it's a mistake to make the more inexperienced person the sous chef. In the best case, they get really good at prep work. In the worst case, their poor prep makes you kick them out of the kitchen or watch them like a hawk. I think it's best to have each person own a part of the process from start to finish. It can be small, especially if your boyfriend is just learning. My girlfriend almost always covers dessert; more often than not I'll take the main. When we enter each other's culinary territory, it can get a little tense if we're not careful to let the other do their thing. I think it's particularly true what Octaveman said, that the cooking should be fun before it's good. Good will probably come naturally, particularly as you learn each other's styles. I remember the this Times article -- hopefully you won't be as tense as Yolanda and Matthew!

I just ordered the honesuki, since I don't have a boning knife. I'm quite excited! I almost got the 10" gyuto, but my 8" Global chef's knife is almost as long and in pretty good shape. After seeing someone slice a whole slab of bacon with a 12" chef's in the Charcuterie thread, I was particularly jealous. I suppose I'm doomed to somewhat scraggly bacon.

Rice I eyeball. For short-grain, with the right diameter sauce-pan, you can use a trick a friend told me was Japanese: put your hand flat on top of the rinsed rice, pouring water just past the base of your middle finger. For long-grained rice, I boil in too much water and pour off the excess, to keep a nice grain. I try measure for mayonnaise -- if I don't the flavors often come out a little skewed. Hollandaise and other complicated sauces also get measurements. Crepe batter I do rough measurements on. With new recipes I'll often measure, particularly when there are a lot of spices or I haven't had the dish before. I think the key difference is that many savory dishes can be tasted as you go, so you can adjust the flavor continuously. In baking, it's hard to tell how things will turn out without a lot of experience. You need at least more experience than I have!

Someone was able to purchase it in Providence, RI: brewing at my place one night, someone brought it along. I like it, but couldn't exactly place the fruit until reading the bottle. As far as the American fruit-infused beers go, I do like it much more than Magic Hat #9. Then again, I'd almost always take a glass of cidre bouche over either of them.

I feel like I just finished a marathon -- 84 pages! Wow. Watching you guys learn to cure, smoke, and age is an education in itself. So: my girlfriend got me Charcuterie as a graduation present, and I read it immediately. I'm not entirely sure how I've lived without it for so long! I've made gravlax twice, using aquavit, dill, and white and black peppers. I overcured it the first time, when I was experimenting on a 300g tip of a side. The second time I cured about a thick, 1.2kg section of a side and it came out perfectly with about 55 hours of cure. Slicing thinly with a $10 Sabatier 8" carving knife, I suitably impressed my discerning and demanding Jewish family. I also made a corned beef from a 2.75kg brisket, following the book's recipe strictly. I ended up curing it for 8 days rather than 5. I could have sworn the book said to cure for 7 days, and my schedule demanded that I wait an extra day to poach. It was delicious nonetheless: we had it hot on Friday night (with some potatoes in the broth, but the onions and carrots I put in got quite spicy) and cold on Saturday. The funny thing is that the center of the thickest part (~7cm) wasn't fully cured, with a centimeter or so of brown meat. Should I have injected the brine, or perhaps stabbed the meat strategically? I have pictures of this, which I can post if anyone is curious or thinks it might be something else (overcured?). In any case, I have a few things planned for the near future. Chris's two pictures of duck ham have blown my mind, and it seems like the easiest way to introduce my rabbi grandfather to "ham". I have two ducks in the freezer, so I anticipate using two breasts for prosciutto and two for ham; the legs will all be confited, though the kosher butcher my grandmother uses can't get duck fat. Any ideas? Olive oil, schmaltz? I think it'd be a real waste to do ducks in chicken fat. My father (who also keeps kosher -- oy!) is getting me the Northern Tool grinder and the Grizzly stuffer. Merguez, beef peperone, and some chicken sausages are definitely on the docket, but I'm at a bit of a loss in terms of fat. If pork is out, should I use suet? Lamb fat? I've never been more excited to move, though: come September, I'll be on my own again, free to cook pork in my own kitchen. Home-made bacon, here I come.

I arrive in Israel without my luggage. Air France has given me a pair of underwear so big I could wear it as a shirt, and a (dubious) promise to deliver my bags within a week or so. The next day I head to the supermarket (a mile and half trek, uphill) to look for food, and see -- underwear! I throw it in the basket. Checking out, the large disgruntled Russian says to me in accented Hebrew, "This is a strange place to buy underwear." Broken and sheepish, I admit, "Yes, it is." When I got home, I discovered that they didn't have a flap. Or, months later, I go to the fish store to by a carp for matelote, having just read The Physiology of Taste. They pull one out of the tank, slaughter it, and give it to me. The surly clerk says to me, "You do the bones yourself." In my excitement I don't really understand what he says, and say, with a big grin on my face, "Great!!! Thank you so much!"

Well, the simple answer is that you can also make pates and terrines. But what non-meat stuff is it good for? I saw in another thread that someone made falafel with theirs. Using the fine die, you can get a raw paste from a lot of hard vegetables: carrots, beans, potatoes.

I've made quite a few buckwheat crepes (and drank quite a bit of cidre bouche) since reading the Saveur article. My crepes look rather like yours, and I wasn't worried for a moment. If you are going for the truly authentic look, I think that thinness can't be overesteemed. I use a carbon steel crepe pan over medium-high gas heat, but lack the wooden dowel thingy (that's the Breton name for it). Spreading them out a little with the back of a spatula, they're acceptably thin and quite tasty with a sprinkling of butter and sea salt, but they don't have the paper thin texture of the buckwheat crepes I ate in Paris and see in those pictures. The reason I think they'd have the holes if they were thinner is that when I first spread the batter and it starts to cook, I can see the little holes form around the edge, but then extra batter from the center spills outward and fills them in. If that extra batter were spread out earlier on, the holes might stay. Good luck figuring out how to do it! The road to success is paved with delicious pancakes.

I went to Rai Rai Ken for the first time last weekend and loved the noodles -- they had a really nice bite, and the broth was good, but I'm no expert. You're definitely right about the bargain -- $8.95 or so for a big bowl. Would you say that Setagaya is better than Rai Rai Ken, or just different?