The Inconsequential Charcutier

Pepperoni, as we know it in the US, is an Americanized version of peperone, which is basically just a spicy salami. This version is an all-beef peperone, which gives it a different taste and softer texture. It contains little fat, as it’s made from a lean cut of beef and no added pork fat. There is little similarity between what I’ve made here and the mass produced topping on your favorite ‘za.

All-in-all, it’s a very nice sausage, but I think tweaking the recipe with a little pork and pork fat may be in order. The same day I pulled this out of the drying cabinet, two others were ready, too. Some more chorizo and a duck prosciutto. With the bresaola I have going in soon, I should have quite a variety for holiday parties.

I ran out of space in my curing cabinet last week and I’ve been wanting to expand my production capacity for some time. First step was a new, bigger, nicer curing cabinet. I located a clean, fairly new upright freezer for sale about 15 miles away and snapped it up. I just finished setting it up tonight and transferred all of my product over to it.

That’s four breasts of duck prosciutto in front and some peperone drying behind it. That alone filled my old cabinet. I’ll have three times the capacity with this, which is good since I’ll be adding some Hungarian salami and landjager in there, along with a batch of bresaola or something fun like that.

Temp is set to 60 degrees and humidity is staying right in the 60-70% range. So far, so good!

Next step is to increase my batch size capacity with a dedicated meat mixer to give my poor Kitchen Aid stand mixer a break.

So it’s been a month since Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s Salumi arrived from Amazon and I’m just now getting a chance to sit down and take a good look at it.

One of the first things Salumi does, and it’s important to note here as well, is define the word salumi, at least insomuch as it’s represented in this book. Salumi is, in short, the Italian word for cured meats. Not to be confused with salami, which is a type of salumi. Confused yet? If not, and in case you are wondering, the prefix sal- is derived from the Latin word for  ”salt”, like so many of our favorite words like… salary… and salsa! Long live salt!

In keeping with the name, and unlike Charcuterie, Salumi is heavily focused on curing (dry-curing and otherwise), skipping the fresh sausages, terrines and confits presented in Ruhlman and Polcyn’s previous work. It is also pimarily focused on pork, though so was Charcuterie to a lesser degree.

The book starts off plunging us into the concept of whole hog butchery, as it relates to making salumi. It presents two methods of breaking down the beast, American-style and Italian-style, along with ideas on how to use each part.

The chapters that follow include recipe after recipe for various salumi. It’s a far deeper journey into the art than Charcuterie was, which really only scratched the surface and whetted the appetite (though, technically so does this… it’s just a deeper, more serious scratch). Much to my pleasure, after a pretty extensive collection of salami (with an “a”) recipes, Salumi includes an entire section on whole muscle curing, which I’m particularly fond of. Here there is a bit more variation in meat including beef (bresaola), lamb and goose, in addition to the use of venison in the following chapter on “cooked salumi”.

As with Charcuterie, Salumi offers recipes for numerous accompaniments to the products being made. However, unlike the prior publication, Ruhlman and Polcyn take things a step further by supplying ideas on how to serve them as well, including pizzas, pastas, soups and salads, a dimension previously missing.

All-in-all, I think Salumi represents a fantastic follow-up to Charcuterie. It is still written in the same approachable voice. They are not providing a guidebook to the professional, but an excellent workbook to start learning the art. I’m pretty excited about getting a chance to try some of the salumi in this book. The lamb prosciutto looks particularly fun.

The tomatoes coming out of my dad’s garden this year have been pretty superb. Beautiful richly flavorful, dark red fruit. Which is why it makes little sense to pick them green. But I did. Because I’m just like that.

And there was a recipe in Charcuterie I hadn’t done yet that required them.

Green tomatoes are actually mildly toxic. They are members of the nightshade family and, when unripe, contain the small amounts of the toxic alkaloids tomatine and solanine. Yet people eat them in the form of fried green tomatoes pretty commonly. Granted it takes a pretty large amount to make someone ill, but considering all the attention given to things that may be toxic or might increase the risk of this disease or that condition… it’s a bit surprising that no one seems to give things like green tomatoes any thought.

Doom and gloom, aside, I was only making a relish that would be used in pretty small quantities, so I considered the danger pretty non-existent. And, besides, these were some fine looking green tomatoes!

The recipe was pretty simple. Some juniper, peppercorn and clove in a sachet d’épice, cooked along with the green tomatoes, onion, granny smith apples, garlic, ginger, brown sugar, cider vinegar and chicken stock.

All-in-all, a pretty simple, straight forward relish, but along with it’s alkaloids, green tomatoes have a stronger, harsher flavor than ripe tomatoes, so they’re not really my thing, particularly considering it’s only been the last few years that I’ve enjoyed the flavor of whole pieces of tomato, anyway. It was interesting, but nothing I’ll go through the effort to bother making again. Seems like a waste of future ripe tomatoes to me…