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 Dill Pi...
Apple City Barbecue Pulled Pork Sandwiches
Day 1
Prick the pork butt all over with a fork.
Magic Dust: AKA the Rub
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...
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...
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...
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 fir...
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 i...
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 ](Paupered Chef - Salt-Packed Anchovies )
On one of my last Brooklyn weekends before the big move to the Mid-West, I spent most of my time...
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...
