A Guide to Bacon Styles, and How to Make Proper British Rashers

Everyone loves bacon, but it's not always the same thing.

British Bacon vs American bacon

If you've been reading the site lately, you may have been following Nick on his rather strange quest to recreate a full English breakfast from scratch (his first project was the British banger sausage ). Why, I don't know. But when Nick proposed that I take over the homemade bacon portion of the project, I leapt at the opportunity to contribute. Homema...

Our First Year at the James Beard Awards

For those who didn’t catch our incredibly late Sunday post , we were both live bloggers at the 2008 James Beard Foundation Awards.  See those all access passes?  We could essentially go anywhere we wanted to at Lincoln Center.  To check out the trouble we got into, visit the James Beard Live Blogging Site .  There you’ll find a nice recap of us chatting with Nancy Silverton about he...

New Orleans (Faraway, So Close): The Sad Tale of File Gumbo

I can't remember exactly where the conversation began, or why we suddenly started talking about New Orleans, but for about 5 minutes last Friday Night I waxed poetic about the Crescent City.  My interest has been explored before , but apparently my chatter seemed especially interesting that night.  I suppose I could have been because my friend Hal had never been, and I took umbrage. ...

Guanciale, Or How to Hang a Pig Jowl in Your Living Room

The other Italian bacon.

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...

Three Tapas Bars in Madrid

As I mentioned, Madrid is a city easily covered by foot (at least, the city center is--I’m sure the outer boroughs, so to speak, are worth exploring), which leaves a visitor quickly able to see the Prado, Plaza del Sol, and any other major tourist destinations in an afternoon.  What’s left is to submit yourself to the ebb and flow of Madrid’s infectious lifestyle: eating, drinking, and neve...

Madrid With an Insider

Crawling the streets in search of ham and beer

We arrived at the ultra-modern Madrid airport terminal half-asleep, legs in need of a stretch, eager for what we imagined might be a giant, country-wide cocktail party.  The Spanish tradition of tapas awaited (or, as we would later call them in San Sebastian, pintxos , our American tongues unsure how a “t” can be pronounced before an “x," the result a squished noise that sounds l...

The Duck Prosciutto Emerges

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...

The Pickle Butter and Ham Sandwich

Lately I've been making this sandwich over and over again.  I don't know why.  It's nothing that unusual: ham, bread, sometimes cheese.  I've made it with the shrink-wrapped lunchmeat from my corner bodega; I've made it with thinly sliced Bayonne ham from the charcuterie .

The secret is in this invention I've taken to calling pickle butter.  I don't think I invented it; I think I r...

Red Beans and Rice

After four days of intense bonding with my 10 pound ham , the meat stopped magically improving in the fridge, and started instead to develop what could best be described as a funk.  Not necessarily revolting, and I'm sure perfectly edible, the smell was offending enough.  And with something less than a pound left, I didn't feel too bad chucking the slimy, sour-smelling flesh into the...

Croque-Monsieur: The Incriminating Ham Sandwich

I'll have to admit the real reason I bought a 10 pound ham , beyond "I'd never done it before" cop-out, was to have enough meat to make as many ham sandwiches as I could possibly stomach in a week.  Sure, that Boar's Head Black Forest ham can stuff a hero, but thick slabs of real, brown sugar encrusted ham exist on an entirely different plane of pleasure.  And for three days I had enormo...