(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...
The recipe comes from Diana Kennedy's "From My Mexican Kitchen". This particular version comes from the Michoacán region. She does give direction on how to stuff the mixture into casings, but I bailed out early. Some day.
As first sausage making experiences go, I'd have to say this was pretty remarkable. I got about 2 pounds of fresh sausage and spent about $12 dollars. Half of it is fro...
If you haven't signed up yet , there may be a few spots left: tomorrow, at the Whole Foods on Bowery at 7pm, I'll be teaching a class about salt preservation and the basics of dry-curing meat. We'll be starting gravlax, bacon, and duck prosciutto projects. The class is an incredible deal, and you'll walk away with two pounds of meat to finish curing in your apartment.
The Daily News d...
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 ridicu...
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...
We've done our fair share of charcuterie projects on this site and enjoyed every minute of it. There have been successes , and there have been failures , but all in all, it's some of the most fun we've ever had making food.
I'm beyond thrilled to report that on July 24th, Whole Foods Bowery in New York City will be offering a class for all interested in learning the...
It took me almost a month and calls to half the butchers in New York before I could get my hands on a pair of pig jowls. Here’s the problem: they want you to order the whole head. And while I had a wonderful time watching pot-roasted pig heads go ferrying by my table at the Spotted Pig , when it was under the tutelage of British chef Fergus Henderson , the thought of lugging a 40...
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 d...
Sometimes you just have to start. I have been wanting to make beef jerky for a while now, but had always stumbled on how I was to actually dry out the meat. I don’t have a smoker, and it didn’t sound like any of the other methods were going to work. But hey, I thought, cowboys did this; I can do this. So I bought some lean beef, sliced it thinly, and coated it with some salt, onion...
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 he...
