Charcuterie At Home
We are big fans of charcuterie in all its forms. Cured meats, sausages, pâtés - we buy them online, seek them out when dining in restaurants, and have had some modest success creating them at home. The picture above is our home-cured pancetta. We covered the process in detail in this post:
Homemade Pancetta
Another fascination of ours is head cheese. We have made testa, the Italian version, twice now.
You can find all the gory details here, along with a few ways to use it:
Coppa di Testa
Warm Testa with Waxy Potatoes
Testa On Toast
Probably the most simple thing you can do to enter the realm of charcuterie is make your own sausage.
Have a look at the following post for details on sausage making and our recipe for a basic Italian sausage.
Making Sausage
Smoked meats is something we are getting more and more interested in. Until recently, we didn't have any dedicated smoking equipment, but we managed to do pretty well on our barbecue. Smoked chicken is one of our favorites.
Technique and recipe can be found here:
Smoked Chicken
Although we had good success smoking on the grill, we stepped things up a bit and got a dedicated smoker - a Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker.
One of the first things we made was Smoked Andouille Sausage:
And a regular staple out of the smoker has been Homemade Bacon:
The weber has also been great for smoking fish. We do Smoked Trout fairly regularly. We love it on crackers for breakfast.
5 comments:
Hey Mike,
Thanks for visiting my blog. Vietnamese head cheese has pig ear's for crunch. And whole black peppercorns. Yum! I'm not sure what else my family puts in it but our version is dark, while some store-bought head cheese is pinkish ham colored.
My dad's a hunter so I get lots of venison. I just prepare it as I would beef actually.
Anyway, I've been checking in sporadically with your road trip. Looks like fun. I went from Oregon to the East Coast when I was 15 and it was an interesting experience. Especially when packed into a bus with a bunch of other teenagers from Idaho and Nebraska. We went the Midwest route, but I think Southern would have been a whole lot more interesting.
Oh, and PS, some banh mi shops offer head cheese with their sandwiches too. :)
Wandering Chopsticks - head cheese and banh mi sounds like a good combo!
Speaking of the Vietnamese angle, a by-product of making testa is that you get a bunch of very gelatinous stock. The flavor profile is kind of like that of Pho' broth, so we've used it to make a non-standard, but quite tasty "Faux Pho'".
Mike I note the very high quality of your pictures. Couple of questions for you a) are you a professional b) what equipment are you using and c) any tips on how to take good pikkies like yours.
By the way i am interested in the food; but I also take pikkies of my efforts as well for my collection.
Grazor, I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that my photography rig is far from sophisticated. My camera is a little Canon Digital Elph.
The key, for me, is using the macro setting for close-in shots (which is most of what I take for the blog), and good lighting. For the latter, I often use a Lowel EGO light.
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