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Charcutepalooza December: Thank You

by David Dadekian December 6, 2011

written by David Dadekian

Charcuterie Board (see lower photo for descriptions)

And so it goes. Our year of meat has come to a close. For the final Charcutepalooza challenge we were told to show what we learned all year. In Cathy’s own words, do some “showing off” with a celebration. Personally, I think a lot of the Charcutepalooza participants have been showing off all year long—and I mean that in a very positive way. I’ve had an immense amount of fun, a little frustration and a minor failure, but mostly huge fun.

The final challenge for me involved my family and the weekend after Thanksgiving, a leisurely weekend of chopping down a Christmas tree and putting up lights and decorations, all while enjoying the meats and cheeses you see on the big board above. The bresaola I had made for the previous challenge, all the rest of the charcuterie I slowly assembled over the month of November in preparation for the bittersweet end.

As I said, it was the weekend after Thanksgiving. My parents were visiting us from their home in Florida. My wife had four days off from work. My daughters were constantly excited from all the grandparent attention and all these Christmas decorations coming out—there’s a tree in the house! I knew I wasn’t going to want to cook too much after the multi-day extravaganza that is Thanksgiving, but I knew we’d want to eat something else besides leftovers so thought, what’s better than a spread of charcuterie that we can pick at as we work and play?

I made all these photographs and then we proceeded to clear the board over the weekend, cooking up the sausage and some of the lamb bacon, steaming the pastrami until it was moist and tender. My mother loved the pâté, something she doesn’t get that often, and I avoided mentioning to her that using Jacques Pépin’s very classical recipe calls for half a pound of livers with 3/8 of a pound of butter as the base. As much as I would love to see my girls eat everything on the board, they’re not there yet, though Brigid did sample all the Farmstead cheeses at the Wintertime Farmers’ Market and helped pick out two of them.

When I was making the pâté the day before I had taken out a bottle of Armenian “cognac.” I use quotes because it’s obviously not made in the French region of Cognac, but that’s what Armenian brandies have been called for many years. Supposedly Armenian cognac was Winston Churchill’s drink of choice. My dad hadn’t seen a bottle in years and wanted to try it so my wife, in perhaps a bit of whimsy, took out a couple of shot glasses with shamrocks on them for us to have a drink. The bottle from Armenia alongside the Irish shot glass kind of summed up our whole family so I made a photo, but this being a Charcutepalooza feast I had to stick the pâté in the photo too.

So with that memory and image of all my now eaten charcuterie (there’s a little lamb bacon left, but won’t be for long) I close my year of meat. But I certainly can’t end without a huge thank you to Cathy Barrow and Kim Foster for coming up with all this fun. I’ve been making charcuterie for years, but never as regularly or as focused as I did for the last year. Also, for me, the best part was expanding how I would photograph these things. I started with some different ways with the duck prosciutto, became really happy with my style as I got to the pancetta and the last three months of meat pie, galantine and bresaola have been very satisfying for me. I appreciate all the kind comments and Kim’s choosing a few of my photos for her monthly wrap-ups. I can’t thank her and especially Cathy’s inspiring challenges and tweets enough.

Special thanks also to Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn, authors of our manual for the year Charcuterie. I eagerly await their salumi book. Finally, I can’t possibly think of a way to say thank you enough to all the wonderful Charcutepalooza participants. I can’t say enough about the joy of “conversing” with all of you on Twitter. If I begin to try and list everyone’s Twitter name I know I’ll miss someone, so check out this great archive of every tweet with the #charcutepalooza tag and follow them all.

Thank you again, Cathy @MrsWheelbarrow and Kim @KimFosterNYC!

Turkey & chicken liver pâté with Armenian brandy ("cognac")

Charcuterie Board

Turkey & Chicken Liver Pâté

Bresaola

Lamb Bacon

Pastrami

December 6, 2011 0 comments

cooking

Charcutepalooza October: Stretching: Galantine

by David Dadekian October 15, 2011

written by David Dadekian

Galantine

Another month has passed and we’re sadly that much closer to the end of The Year of Meat. There’s no way I’m going to stop making any of these Charcutepalooza treats, but I don’t think I’ll be documenting them in quite as much detail. Usually when I’m cooking there’s fourteen other things (or just two little girls) vying for my attention and I don’t get a chance to make notes or pick up my camera—or make sure when I do pick up my camera I’m not getting schmaltz on it. However, this month’s challenge, as complicated as it was, was a huge amount of fun and I found myself constantly washing my hands (or pulling off the non-latex gloves) and taking a photo. I would go so far as to say, while I’ve enjoyed mostly all of the Charcutepalooza challenges, this one ranks up there as one of my favorites.

While many of the challenges are easily recognizable to the non-meat-obsessed, I’m willing to bet the photo above and even the caption “galantine” may not be as commonly known as say bacon, corned beef or even terrine. What you’re looking at there and in the many photos below is, from the center out, a boneless, skinless chicken breast encased within a chicken thigh & liver forcemeat (remember blended ground meat and fat), wrapped in chicken skin, poached in chicken stock and then chilled.

Now, you may be thinking, as I did, I love chicken skin and all, but I like it nicely roasted or fried crispy, not poached and then served cold. But trust me, the galantine is a thing of beauty. The key is to make very thin slices when cutting the final product. Don’t just take my word for it, here’s the conversation I had with my brother Andy when I unwrapped and served the galantine last week.

Andy: What is this you’re serving?

Me: A galantine. It’s chicken breast inside ground chicken meat wrapped in chicken skin.

Andy: What?

Me: Trust me.

Andy: What the heck is this? (eyes the slice, picks it up and pops it in his mouth) Oh wow, this is goooooooood.

So there you have it, third party proof. And if there’s anyone who likes to give another person trouble and not let them think they did something right, you know it’s a little brother.

One of the reasons galantines may not be as common as a terrine or pate is because it is a bit of complex, time-consuming process to create. First you have to take the skin off a whole chicken, intact in one piece, something I had done several times in the past (did I mention I liked fried crispy chicken skin?). It’s not super difficult once you learn how to do it, it’s more a matter of time and patience. It was a plus having this challenge in October because some of the more gruesome horror movies can come to mind when doing it (Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs anyone?). Then you have to freeze the skin, scrape off the fat from the skin, butcher the chicken, sear the breasts, make the forcemeat (which is a whole Charcutepalooza challenge in itself), roll the whole thing up and tie off the ends, wrap it in cheesecloth and tie that, poach it in the stock to the proper temperature and chill it. On second thought, did I really mean this was one of my favorite challenges?

Truly it was, plus I had a good amount of forcemeat leftover that I put a delicious terrine together too. Before I close with the many photos of this process a mention should be given to Blackbird Farm (one of the many places I work with). We’ve begun raising chickens at Blackbird Farm. They’re Cornish Rocks, raised on pasture and supplemented with organic feed if they so desire. The birds are really beautiful to butcher and I couldn’t be happier cooking with them. So thank you Blackbird Farm for the chickens to do things with them that the folks at the farm never heard of, and, as usual, thank you to Cathy Barrow a.k.a. Mrs. Wheelbarrow and Kim Foster a.k.a.not The Yummy Mummy anymore for all the #charcutepalooza fun.

Skin removed from a whole chicken in one piece

Skinless bird

Searing the breast meat

Chicken fond, shallots, garlic & Madeira—wonderfully fragrant

Skin with seared breast meat inside forcemeat

Wrapped and tied galantine

Wrapped in cheesecloth and poaching in chicken stock (floating in photo, but submerged to poach)

First slices of galantine

Galantine (thick slice for photo purposes only)

Galantine slice 1

Galantine slice 2

October 15, 2011 0 comments

cooking

Charcutepalooza June: Stuffing: sausage links

by David Dadekian June 15, 2011

written by David Dadekian

I have to confess something upfront about this month’s Charcutepalooza challenge: I don’t like stuffing sausage. I’ve done it before, more times than I really want to think about. I’m sure I’ll do it again. My problem is pretty simple. I’m not a particularly coordinated person. I don’t say that proudly by any means, but I accept the reality that I can barely walk around my bedroom without bumping into a piece of furniture, furniture which has been in the same place for seven years now. I may be understating things when I say my kitchen turns into a small disaster zone when it comes to my taking ground meat, feeding it back into a KitchenAid mixer, having that fill slippery pork casing (intestinal lining) and twisting that into links. Don’t even think I can make any photos while doing these dexterity-requiring moves. My one photo this month is the above “beauty” shot of my finished Italian sausage. I could use four hands for stuffing tasks, even more if I really wanted to photograph it, but my wife doesn’t love playing with ground meat and my daughters aren’t old enough—yet (just you wait girls, just you wait).

So yes, last month’s Charcutepalooza challenge is my preferred way of making sausage at home—formed patties (or sometimes other shapes). But we’re halfway into this Year of Meat and I’m not about to quit now, so I broke out the casing and got to stuffing. First up, the poultry sausage, where I once again decided to try something different and ground some duck confit I had made and stored back in January. The less said about this the better, not because it wasn’t any good, but simply because it didn’t do anything different than the confit non-in-sausage-form. I only made six small links and ate it all by simply lightly grilling it. After making the sausage I thought about doing it again but adding some ground liver or maybe even grinding in some foie gras. That could be really interesting. I didn’t take any photos of the duck links because they were kind of an unappealing brown color, and the last time I posted a photo of a dark brown length of sausage—a photo I thought looked really beautiful—the number of crap jokes made was pretty annoying. Ah the great communicative power of the Internet.

My duck sausage complete, I could’ve thrown in the towel. But I really wanted to make at least one photo and, having grown up in Rhode Island there are few things more Rhode “Italy” as my friend Rich would call it, than Italian sausage. Prior to a recent renaissance of meat in a casing, it was almost always assumed that any sausage you bought in Rhode Island was an Italian sausage, only really clarified further by deciding if you wanted hot or sweet. There’s also our proximity to Fenway Park where sausage and peppers has been a pre-game meal ritual for my family and friends (and millions of others) since I can remember going there. So I wanted to make Italian sausage (my preference has always been hot) and then make sausage and peppers for my huge-sports-fan wife.

I can’t talk about my recipe. I was asked not to. It’s an old Italian mother’s recipe and truth be told, now that I’ve read a whole bunch of hot Italian sausage recipes online, it’s not really that unique. I also don’t want to say who’s recipe it is because I made one small change (I split the total amount of paprika between regular Hungarian paprika and smoked paprika). I’m sure there’s some blasphemy in making that change, but that’s never stopped me before. The sausage came out great, not perfectly formed—you may be able to make out the right end is split in the photo above—but I managed to make about sixteen sausages without swearing too much. The clean-up honestly took me over an hour and included a vacuum cleaner and wet mop. When eating the whole links on a roll, with lots of peppers and onions, I thought the pork casing I used had a bit too much snap. But when I browned the links and cut them into one inch slices for putting in a gravy (there’s a Rhode Island line for you) it was like eating at my friend’s Italian mother’s house twenty-five years ago. That made it all worth it.

Recipe: Sausage and Peppers (and Onions, can anyone tell me why this sandwich is always just referred to as Sausage and Peppers?)

This is about as basic as it gets, so no typical recipe format. Brown some sausage links, using a tiny bit of olive oil if you need it, your sausage may render out enough fat without the additional oil. Put the sausage aside. If you want, put the sausage straight into buns and wrap loosely in aluminum foil so the sausage steams the bun. Into the browning pan goes much more sliced onion and green peppers than you think you need (along with salt and pepper, a little oregano and some sliced garlic for me). Add olive oil if necessary to saute. You’re going to saute the heck out of the peppers and onions, so it reduces quite a bit. If you want a little sweetness, caramelize the onions a bit, otherwise, take it off the heat when everything’s nice and mushy. Top the sausage-in-the-bun with a ridiculous amount of the peppers and onions so that when you take a bite it falls all over the place. Mangia!

June 15, 2011 0 comments

cooking

Charcutepalooza May: Grinding: merguez and Mexican chorizo

by David Dadekian May 15, 2011

written by David Dadekian

Sometimes, as the poet Burns wrote, “the best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry.” That isn’t to say I didn’t grind meat for this month’s Charcutepalooza challenge. Nor is it to say the final product wasn’t very tasty. It’s that, well, things went awry. Which is why there are only two “before” photos of my sausage making and none of the sometimes-food-porn that I make of the final product (see February’s “The Salt Cure: bacon & pancetta” for glistening pork love).

I love making sausage. I’ve been making it for years. Even when I lived in a studio apartment and only had a tiny kitchenette, I kept a food processor on what ridiculously little counter space I had and would pulse up all kinds of sausage patties. Since then I’ve graduated to a KitchenAid mixer and the very first attachment I bought was the sausage making kit. Which isn’t perfect, I know, but unless you’re going to buy me this beautiful beast, I don’t want to hear it. So when I saw that May’s Charcutepalooza challenge was grinding, I wanted to come up with something that was an additional challenge for me.

Usually I would play with recipes, experiment with different flavors and try something different in the mix. Something that would set me off on a new path. However, having made both merguez and chorizo in the past from Ruhlman & Polcyn’s Charcuterie recipes, I knew that for me they are two of the most bulletproof recipes in the book. I really like them both the way they are (though in typical I-must-do-things-in-the-kitchen-my-way fashion I’ll admit to doubling the red wine and nixing the chilled water in the merguez recipe). So I headed downstairs to the freezer and perused our inventory whiteboard attached to the door to see if it would spark some improvisation.

I knew it would be goofy to share that I have a whiteboard attached to our standalone freezer listing the contents of the freezer, but I didn’t realize how weird it would be describing it.

In the freezer we have a lot of lamb. I love lamb. My grandmother used to make us rib chops all the time and ground lamb is very common in many Armenian dishes. I really love lamb fat too, and we had a few pounds in the freezer, so I decided to use it instead of any pork fat this time out. Then I saw on the whiteboard that there was still some lamb offal left from the lamb I got for Christmas, and since there are very few ways I could sneak half a lamb heart and a liver into my family’s meals, they seemed perfect for sausage. I took from the freezer the lamb fat, heart and liver, along with some pork shoulder and liver, and a bag of corn cobs. Then I meticulously removed the items from the inventory whiteboard of course.

I left the meat items on the counter so they would thaw just a little bit, but not entirely as I wanted them firm to grind. I put the corn cobs into a pot of simmering water to make broth as I had this spring dinner vision in my head. I also stuck the KitchenAid grinder attachment and bowl in the freezer to chill. A couple of hours later I had this bowl of meat, fat and offal.

Clockwise from top: lamb liver, pork liver, pork shoulder, lamb fat, half a lamb heart

The corn broth had developed nicely so I added a couple of pounds of diced potatoes and some salt and went back to my sausage making. First up, merguez with the lamb heart, liver and fat. I had about 500 grams of heart and liver so I created a quick ratio to the amount of meat called for in the Charcuterie recipe and figured out the amount of fat and other ingredients I needed. Then I began grinding. Here’s where I first realized this might not be the best idea I’ve ever had. Everything ground up fine, I mixed in all the herbs, spices and wine and it certainly smelled like the same merguez I’ve made before. But it didn’t look right. The liver and heart were just too soft and I shouldn’t have thought to treat them like meat. As I tweeted to my friend Janis, the end result looked like an “unattractive meat slurry.”

Not to be deterred I heated up a saute pan, sprayed on a little non-stick cooking spray, took out a #20 disher and dropped two scoops of the liquid sausage into the pan. Kind of like meat pancakes. I cooked them for a few minutes on each side, and while the end result still looked kind of unappealing, it tasted exactly like good, spicy lamb sausage. I made the rest of my merguez-cakes before moving on to the chorizo. The pork ground up much tighter and behaved more like ground meat because of the shoulder. Also the pork liver was a lot more dense and meatier than the lamb liver. I added in the rest of the lamb fat too for texture.

Grinding away, the blurred shapes are arm movement during the long exposure

So maybe things had gone awry, but I was back on track and having fun grinding. It was then that I realized how much time had passed, dinner wasn’t ready yet, my wife Brenda was hungry and also a little curious about the amount of blood and meaty substance that now covered a lot of our kitchen counter. She was also a tiny bit concerned about the fact that I had prepared sausage for dinner out of a bowl that looked like it had meat batter in it. So instead of taking the time to stuff the chorizo into casings, I whipped in the herbs, spices and liquid, turned the whole thing out onto a huge sheet of parchment paper, rolled it up tight into a 4″ diameter tube, placed it on a sheet pan and stuck it in the freezer. The next day I quickly sliced the chorizo tube into 1/2″ rounds and put those into bags in the freezer, keeping one out to fry up and make sure it tasted like chorizo, which it did.

So I completed the May challenge with two sausages that tasted great. The chorizo I’ll use in all kinds of dishes, maybe even frying up a slice for a quick snack or putting a round on the grill during the summer. The merguez? That went into our late dinner which was: Corn Broth with Potatoes and Freshly Sliced Schartner Farm Asparagus, Accompanied by Floating Rounds of Merguez.

Lawyer-poet John Godfrey Saxe said, “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.” I’m sure there are hundreds of Charcutepalooza posts out today that disprove that quote. Thanks again to Cathy Barrow and Kim Foster. This month you inspired and challenged me.

May 15, 2011 0 comments

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