Content about Michael Ruhlman
May 19, 2010
It's my opinion that the secret to great biscuits and gravy is that there is no secret
I know that biscuits and gravy together don't make sense. It's meat, thickened with flour and milk, ladled atop a starchy biscuit. There is no balance, no acid, and no spice. Compared to the dynamic Szechuan food I've been making lately, it can seem safe and boring. But that's not how I think of it. Perhaps it's something that needs to be injected to your blood as a child, because I have a fondness for this dish that...
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January 14, 2010
Can steamed duck legs tasted better than ones poached in duck fat?
The question about whether a steamed duck leg tastes as good duck confit has been boggling my mind for months ever since I read this article in the New York Times. Finally, last night, after spending the previous three days hacking up two ducks, rendering loads of fat, and figuring out what to do with the heads (Jonathan Gold actually sent me some interesting options on Twitter), I finally sat down to a blind taste test.
A...
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December 4, 2009
How to transform cheap meat.
This is why beef chuck roast cooked in a 131°F–140°F (55°C–60°C) water bath for 24–48 hours has the texture of filet mignon.
- Douglas Baldwin, A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking
After my experiments with sous-vide chicken resulted in one of the finest birds I'd ever eaten, I immediately set off on a crusade to transform the cheapest cut of beef I could find into filet mignon. I know this...
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December 2, 2009
Throw away those bottle salad dressings.
I've been thinking about salad a lot lately, which is strange, because how inspiring can a salad really be? The salads I grew up with were made of lettuce with a bunch of chopped vegetables--carrots, mushrooms, peppers, whatever--doused with a dressing from the fridge door. Everyone put their favorite dressing on, and that worked pretty well. It was the typical "your-choice-of-dressing" side salad, and it was just a way to...
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June 24, 2009
Insight into perfecting 90 minute, no-soak beans and homemade bratwursts.
It's been a delicious week. I've been doling out my homemade bratwurst to close friends and making batches of 90 Minute, No-Soak beans just because I can. I know some people had some questions about both of these posts, and this week has given me a few more insights to both processes which hopefully will answer some of them. Also, Michael Ruhlman wanted to see my amateurish spreadsheet I created to find a bratwurst...
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June 18, 2009
The ultimate guide to the Midwest's finest encased meat.
My little adventure with bratwurst reached its pinnacle after a tortuous three hour process of grinding, mixing, stuffing, poaching, and charcoal grilling. What I faced, fortunately, looked a lot like the bratwurst of my wildest fantasies. It was perfectly plump, gushing with juice, and absolutely haunted by charcoal smoke. I stuffed that sausage into a huge roll and piled it high with sauerkraut and grainy mustard. ...
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June 11, 2009
How do you make this Wisconsin classic?
I have been thinking about bratwurst for days. What started as an idea for a simple cookout on my little Webber Grill has now completely consumed me because I simply can't find the right recipe. The question eventually led me to walk into Hot Dougs on a recent Wednesday and ask Mr. Doug himself what was in the sausage.
But first, do you know? What is it, exactly, that makes a bratwurst a bratwurst? I know...
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February 23, 2009
Make the perfect topping for your pizza.
For the sausage novices, nothing could be quite so easy as this recipe from Michael Ruhlman's Charcuterie. Because I was using it straight away I had no need to stuff it into casing only break them free a moment a latter. I essentially just mixed everything together, ground it on the small die of my meat grinder, and cooked it. It was about as time consuming as cutting up a bunch of vegetables. And since I...
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October 13, 2008
Well, just look at that! After all my anxiety and the lack of sausage stuffer before I started this adventure, on the third day I ate hot dogs. They looked like hot dogs, smelled like hot dogs, and tasted like that perfect hot dog you always dream about (well, at least I dream about hot dogs). Unbelievably beefy and with a hard snap from the sheep intestine, this was a truly wonderful dog.
Too bad it was such a pain to...
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October 6, 2008
(Scene at the Paulina Meat Market in Chicago)
Butcher: "Number 37!"
Me: "Yeah, that's me."
Butcher: "What can I get for you?"
Me: "Yeah, I'll take 10 feet of sheep casings."
I don't say that often enough in life, and up until this Saturday it had never crossed my mind. But here I was at Paulina Meat Market ordering sheep intestines from butchers that make their own fine sausages. The...
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September 10, 2008
How to make pickles at home without filling your place with the smell of pickles.
But all I did was worry. Why was there no garlic in the dill pickles? Every other jar of dill pickles I had bought contained garlic. And why did the pickling spice smell so sweet? Dill pickles weren't sweet. I worried that Ruhlman's recipe was too refined. I wanted simple dill pickles. I'd have to look elsewhere.
I pulled out Arthur Schwartz's Jewish Home Cooking and found...
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August 5, 2008
Make pulled pork at home.
Apple City Barbecue Pulled Pork Sandwiches
Day 1
1 pork butt (4-6 pounds), preferably with the bone-in
Prick the pork butt all over with a fork.
Magic Dust: AKA the Rub
1/2 cup paprika
1/2 cup kosher salt
1/4 cup sugar
2 tablespoons mustard powder
1/4 cup chili powder
1/4 cup ground cumin
2 tablespoons ground black pepper
1/4 cup granulated garlic
2 tablespoons cayenne
Mix...
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July 2, 2008
How to smoke pork belly at home.
First, I needed to find some pork belly with its skin still firmly on. My previous attempt removed it, along with a lot of precious fat directly underneath. My bacon didn't have nearly enough fat on it to fry up, so instead cooking up beautifully in a pan, it burned. My local butcher wouldn't sell me a piece with the skin on unless I bought 10 pounds, a fact I still find ridiculous. A commenter pointed out...
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June 15, 2008
My most ambitious meat curing project yet recently emerged from an unplugged fridge in my living room. It was a pig cheek from a heritage-breed pig, also known as the jowl, which was salted and seasoned with sugar, black pepper, and thyme leaves, then left in the bottom of my real fridge for a week to release moisture. After that, I hung it to dry in the unplugged fridge for three more. It would become a Roman bacon, called...
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March 10, 2008
Time to play catchup. Blake has been on the forefront of this curing business for awhile now and I just couldn’t stand back while he was slicing off hunks of his own fresh bacon and duck prosciutto. I picked up a duck and a pork belly and got to work.
It might seem a little redundant to document two projects that Blake has already covered, but in all fairness, these are different. I tried to learn from his mistakes...
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February 8, 2008
Make your bacon at home.
The bacon most of us know it is made from pork belly, but there are also variations made from other cuts, notably the cheeks and jowl, which makes guanciale--a porkier tasting, fattier cut that's a staple in properly-made Spaghetti alla Carbonara and Bucatinia alla Amatraciana. Hog jowls are difficult to find, though, especially because a butcher would probably need to order an entire head in order to get them for you--and unless you'...
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February 4, 2008
It didn't look pretty. After two days in the fridge, my fennel-cured salmon looked something like a disaster. A lot of the liquid had somehow seeped out of my protective covering. This worried me because that meant the brine didn't probably coat the fish during the cure. It might not be done. How would I know if it worked?
Ruhlman said to give it a touch. "The salmon should be firm to the touch at the...
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January 30, 2008
Sparked with inspiration by Blake’s duck proscuitto, I procured Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie and dug in. Don’t let anyone fool you; it’s intimidating stuff. Curing food is the exact opposite of the cooking I’ve become used to. I love to take fresh ingredients and then cook them quickly, without much fuss. This process, hopefully, highlights the good quality of ingredients I’ve been...
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January 21, 2008
Quality ranges considerably; the worst come in a brine or packed in oil (often rancid); the best anchovies tend to be packed in salt, are worth seeking out, and can be delicious by themselves.
- Michael Ruhlman, The Elements of Cooking A to Z
On one of my last Brooklyn weekends before the big move to the Mid-West, I spent most of my time dashing in and out of every specialty grocery store in the Carroll Gardens area on a very important...
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November 28, 2007
A results of a simple dry-cured meat project revealed
About ten days after I hung a salt-cured duck breast in the vestibule of my garden apartment, wrapped in cheesecloth and suspended by kitchen string in a little tent of wooden dowel rods, I retrieved it, unwrapped it, and laid it on a cutting board in my kitchen. It was my first attempt at curing, my Duck Prosciutto.
The flesh had taken on a dark red, almost black color on the outside, and the fat had become yellowed. The...
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November 1, 2007
There are two kinds of cookbooks: some I buy and use, and others I buy and admire. I plan for the former, but end up doing the latter. I have cookbooks about offal, bread-making, and curing meat, but I’ve yet to order beef bones to roast. I have a copy of the River Cottage cookbook, which tells you how to deliver a lamb, dig for scallops, grow carrots, make bacon, and butcher a pig. But I don't have a farm, livestock, or a...
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I’ve bought two cookbooks in the last week that teach you how to do funny things with pigs. The first, which I haven’t had nearly enough time to explore, is Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie, co-written with Brian Polcyn, a book about the wonders of salting, smoking, and curing meat, a tradition of which pork is the oinking mascot. Much has been written of this book’s breakthroughs in bringing a craft of great...
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All content copyright Nick Kindelsperger and Blake Royer.
