Well, it is payday again, and that means that I will be reviewing another cookbook: Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. Folks, if there was a book that I wished I had back in the day when I was an apprentice, this is it.
Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing
On the outside, the book seems unassuming. Flip open the cover, and you will notice that this book misses all the food porn that we have come to love. Heck, inside there are nothing more than pencil drawings. Well, instead of being a censored black-dot-sporting Hustler magazine, (not that I know what that means!), the porniness comes from reading actual words, descriptions of the product inside.
The introduction weighs in at almost 30 pages, but written in Ruhlman’s trademark style. Don’t skip the first part of the book, it lays the foundation for the next parts.
Of particular note – pg. 50 goes into the process of curing salmon. I believe this a skill that every chef, foodie, culinary student, and apprentice should know and do at least once. Once you realize how easy it is to preserve salmon, you will never buy the junk pre-packaged again.
For those willing to delve a bit deeper, there are many sausage recipes to be had as well: Pg. 128 has a wonderful recipe for a Mexican chorizo, and the page opposite that has a nice merguez. The book even gets downright gourmet and gives you a recipe for fois gras and sweetbread sausage. (Pg. 149) I have no idea whether I would actually make that sausage, but it is nice to get the culinary juices flowing.
In short, if you are serious about what you do, this book is a must-read. Kept on your shelf, it is a great inspirational tool for those times when you may feel like you are stuck in a rut.
