Charcuterie, or preserved meat products, is everywhere these days. Trendy restaurants feature house-cured prosciutto, famous chefs have walked away from high-end restaurants to devote themselves to handcrafted salumi, and even regular people (like yours truly!) are rigging up curing chambers in their basements and crossing their fingers in the hopes that they don’t poison their loved ones with their meaty experiments.
Not for those with delicate sensibilities, this is hardcore cooking at its best: using up all the naughty bits of an animal, elevating fat to a position of highest honor, and celebrating the process of decomposition. And it dovetails nicely with the current trends towards eating locally and sustainably. Purchase a whole locally raised pig, and you can use the haunches for prosciutto, the jowl for guanciale, and the shoulders for coppa. Even the more challenging parts—liver, kidneys, and the like—provide opportunities for gastronomic delight: patés, terrines, even headcheese.
Being a sucker for any cooking that involves extensive gadgetry, multiple steps, and a serious time commitment, I leapt at the chance to participate in a series of charcuterie classes at a nearby cooking school. Using Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing as our textbook, we began with a study in fresh sausages—simply meat, fat and spices ground together and stuffed into casings. With the right equipment, making fresh sausage, I quickly discovered, is no more complicated than, say, baking a cake from scratch. Charcuterie: Sausages, Pates, Accompaniments , by master chef Fritz Sonnenschmidt (who Ruhlman and Polcyn refer to as “a kind of godfather of charcuterie in this country”) provides a comprehensive virtual course in sausage-making—along with dozens of compelling recipes—for those keen on exploring this craft at home.
But it was the second class—on refrigerator cures—that was the real draw for me. I anticipated my first foray into the world of homemade bacon with both fear and excitement. Would I poison my family or please them with a tasty treat? As it turns out, making fresh (unsmoked) bacon at home is as easy baking a cake from a mix, and nearly as unintimidating. My classmates and I lovingly coated slabs of gleaming fatty pork belly with our dry cure—a mixture of sugar, kosher salt, pink salt (salt combined with nitrite intended to kill bacteria, such as the type that causes botulism poisoning), and spices—and swaddled them in Ziploc bags like newborns in swaddling blankets. I toted mine home in a cloth shopping bag and tenderly placed it in the back of the refrigerator. Each day, I poked and prodded the slab, flipping it now and then. For a week I watched and waited until it felt firm all the way through. Rinsed, dried and roasted in a 200-degree oven for 2 hours (to an internal temperature of 150 degrees), the slab of raw pork was transformed into succulent, sweet and savory, simple and porky bacon—some of the best I’ve ever tasted. Best of all, I didn’t make my family sick. Instead, I treated them to several satisfying meals: a classic frisée salad with lardons and poached egg; spaghetti alla carobonara; and bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches on toasted white bread with homemade mayonnaise.
Salumi (air-cured sausages) is the subject of the next class. Hanging raw meat in one’s basement for weeks, even months, on end and watching it ferment? Now that is hardcore.
Robin Donovan is a San Francisco-based food writer and the author of Campfire Cuisine: Gourmet Recipes for the Great Outdoors. Her writing has appeared in the pages of Cooking Light, Fitness, San Jose Mercury News, and many others.
