Pete’s Charcutes: Brown Trout Bottarga

Live from the Acela Boston to NYC route comes this installment of ADB, er, The Pete Is On!  I know I am continuing to struggle with regular posting but I have the meals documented to be doing more gooder.  The issue is mostly just getting old and not having the energy to write these things from 9-12 on a weeknight like I used to.  Plus a slight uptick in work travel lately.  My concern with this one is that the power outlet doesn’t work at my seat and my computer is on its’ last legs for both battery and memory.

A few weeks ago I posted about the hogs head cooked at blog character Dupee’s bachelor party on Webb Lake in Maine.  I also mentioned that some (read: parts) of the fish caught on the trip came home with me, though nothing that Kristi was excited to eat.  Not much logic behind that last point, since multiple whole fish were up for grabs when I left on Sunday, but I felt bad keeping them since I had no perceptible connection to the act of catching them.

A brown trout that was caught late in the day was one of the largest trout I had seen since they were few and far between at the places I’d fished most of my life; Ravine Lake and the Ausable River.  Whipping out the buck knife I carry with me on masculine weekends to offset my fear of bugs, snakes, and loud noises, I volunteered to clean this fish.  Upon opening the brownie, I was surprised by how large and pronounced all of the organs were, particularly the liver, roe sacks and the heart.

I can actually claim negative responsibility for this one since it was caught while trawling shortly after I loudly mocked the idea of trawling for trout.  In the process of cleaning it, I decided to eat the still wriggling heart raw which was questionable, show-offy, disgusting and any other adjective that can be used to describe this blog as a whole

Quick sidenote on fish roe.  In my Fish Cakes and Spaghetti blog I discussed how I was introduced to caviar at a young age and have had a lifelong obsession with it.  As a kid my caviar obsession used to manifest itself by saving the roe sacks from trout in Michigan to be fried in bacon grease at the morning fish fry.  Cooked fish roe is mealy, dry, and not that pleasant to eat, but that never seemed to deter me.  More recently I’ve had a lot of trouble tracking down fish roe and yearn for the Italian Market in Philly where you can buy an anonymous mixed bag of roe sacks for a couple bucks.  But, I digress.

It hadn’t been in my original plans for the weekend, but one of the reasons I’d been looking for fish roe recently was to make bottarga, a salt cured version of fish roe.  Bottarga is one of those mystical Italian items that shows up in the ingredient listing for pastas in fine restaurants.  Most eaters don’t recognize and wouldn’t dare appear unknowledgable enough to ask about.  I’m not judgin’ since I am consistently guilty of this and am fully comfortable BSing when Kristi or others ask me to define and ingredient I am barely familiar with.  Let’s just think of bottarga as magical Italian pixie dust.

Taking a fish roe sack and curing it in salt at room temperature for a week or so is what yields bottagra, a dried, crumbly, and very salty stick of funky fish flavor.  The two large roe sacks joined a smaller pair in a heavy coating of salt on a couple plates in the house.

I think the pinkish color of these is so nice and should be appetizing to more people.  Just like the New Jersey Turnpike is a horrifying representation of the state, the Acela really is not kind to traveler’s impressions of New England.  I think I’ve passed four prisons and the back parking lots of seven strip clubs.  That said, the high speed rail will give you a 1000x better impression of New England than the pit of humanity that is Logan Airport.  That place makes the accents in the Dish Hopper ads seem understated

My plan was to go the full bottarga route with the larger two roe sacks.  This would require keeping them fully covered in salt for seven days, rotating them and drying any excess moisture regularly.  It also required making sure none of my fellow bachelor party attendees threw them out by accident.  I didn’t help my cause on that front by pulling the smaller roe sacks out of the salt cure after a few hours of firming up, rinsed, and offered them around for a taste test.

These look substantially less appetizing than the raw version in my opinion, so I was a little surprised that multiple people were willing to take a bite.  Can’t say it increased their faith that the hogs head cooking in the cabin would be edible

At this point in the curing process, the texture of the roe was gummy, fishy, and, obviously very salty.  Think of a salty and fishy Swedish fish, complete with the sticking to the teeth factor that allowed you to savor the flavor for up to an hour afterwards.  It wasn’t a treat for others but I enjoyed it much more than I should have and ate most of it.

The next morning the larger roe sacks were still leaching water and needed to be re-covered with salt before heading back to Boston.  Back at the homestead, I covered them with another layer of salt, placed on a paper towel, and moved to a cabinet above the sink in the kitchen.  The following 6-7 days were not smooth sailing because those roe sacks got a little stinky and it would sneak up on you while you were doing dishes.  That’s right folks, I discovered a scientific anomaly; fish organs left at room temperature for a week get a little smelly.  These were smellier than I expected, though, and I researched about once a day whether this was a bad thing and if I should throw them out.  I never found the answer, but assumed it was no.

After a little over a week, I had this:

Rock solid and stinky, but finally able to go inside a zip lock bag in the fridge where they would be less offensive.  I expected them to be more rock solid than the crumbly, bumpy sticks I had in front of me

When refrigerated, the bottarga will keep for up to a year, so I had some time to figure out what to do with it.  I’m sure bottarga has lots of uses, but I really only had one in mind which was pasta.  Apparently it is excellent in simple pasta dishes since it give the musty seafood flavor you get from anchovies but in a much more controllable distributed manner.

The opportunity to make said pasta came about a week later with a stay at brother Tim’s house in NJ and Mommy Ryan in attendance as well.  There was a fair amount of questions about what I planned to make, so I decided to make a second pasta as well in case this one turned out, you know, gross.  I got started by boiling a pound of fettuccine al dente, reserving the starchy water and shocking the pasta with cold water to stop the cooking.  Then grated a piece of the bottarga with a microplane.

I expected the product to be a lot more dry and crumbly, but the texture was like damp breadcrumbs or sawdust.  Tim mocked me aggressively for bringing my own microplane, but couldn’t produce a grater when asked if he had anything that could have done the job.  Stupid anti-air conditioning and vegetable-garden-ignoring jerkface Tim, I’ll show him

I ended up grating about 3/4 of the smaller bottarga piece, which seemed like it would be a good amount for 1/3 of the pound of cooked pasta.  Plus the grated zest of about half a lemon as well.

The guy next to me on the train is catching up on season 2 of Girls on his iPad.  Every time a Lena Dunham nude scene comes on (spoiler alert: there are way too many) he does this weird cupping thing with his hands shielding the view of his iPad, almost like he is trying to look into a darkened room through an exterior window.  My advice would be to cover the screen with both hands and come back when the daring, soul-baring honesty is over.  That is, for 30-45 seconds before the next nude scene

Once the bottarga was grated, I seasoned a couple handfuls of kale along with some halved brown mushrooms and tossed them in oil.  The vegetables went onto a baking sheet with a couple Chester Meat Market Italian sausages and into a 450F oven to roast and get some color.

While those cooked, I sautéed garlic in olive oil in the pan for the bottarga pasta, and sautéed some additional chopped kale for the other pasta in a different pan.  Once the sausage and veggies finished roasting, they joined the kale pan along with 2/3s of the cooked pasta, a ladle of the starchy pasta water and a couple spoonfuls of Tims crappy pesto.

Big surprise, Tim and I almost came to blows over how he makes his pesto.  Luckily, he averted disaster by mentioning how Hub Hollow Jill makes her pesto, leading me to considering driving to her home to berate her in person.  Balsamic vinegar in a pesto?!?!  What the hell is wrong with you, Jill???

In the bottarga pan, I added the remaining pasta and a ladle of the starchy pasta water along with the bottarga, zest, and about a cup of pan roasted corn.

Walkers farm stand in Little Compton consistently has the best corn I have ever had in my life, so I needed to make use of the extra from the night before.  Corn and seafood, even very fishy seafood, always go excellently together.  The only thing worse than the lighting in Tim’s house is Tim’s house on a 90 degree day

As the liquid cooked down, the sauce coating the pasta took on an almost creamy texture and the smell of the bottarga was noticeable but not that different from a standard shellfish pasta.  It also looked pretty innocuous, but appetizing.

Really been loading up the captions in this post.  I was trying to stay traditional which is why I went with olive oil over butter, but would likely make it with butter next time around to make it rich and creamier

And with that, I plated up a little for everyone, though Kristi stuck with just the sausage/mushroom/kale combo.  After a bite or two I realized the bottarga pasta would be far better with a little lemon zest grated over the top along with a pinch of salt.

Dueling pasta is a wonderful plate of food in my opinion. I could do four on one plate, I love having different textures and flavors

The sausage, kale, mushroom, and pesto pasta was solid.  Lots of flavor, and the texture from the roasted kale added a nice texture and flavor contrast to the rich mushroom and sausage flavors.  Can’t go wrong with roasted vegetables, sausage, and pesto in a pasta.  The main event for me was the bottarga pasta which, when topped with the extra zest and salt, I found extremely enjoyable.  The flavor from the bottarga was definitely fishy, and slightly musty, though not overpowering and mostly noticeable only when you took a deep breath in while eating.  It reminded me of dishes I had with dried shrimp in them while I was in China.  The sweetness from the corn was a nice addition, as usual.  I can’t wait to cook with it again, possibly pushing the fishiness further with some shellfish as well.

Got some Sunday football meals coming up.  Promise.

Pete’s Charcutes: Salmon Gravlax

I’ve started to frame how I think about food as being most similar to flight patterns when you live near the airport.  For a few months here and there, maybe you’re in the flight pattern and you have to deal with it, then without notice it goes away and you barely recognize that the change has happened.  That’s generally how my interest in cooking food cycles.  This one has been in the thought pattern for awhile now.

Recently I haven’t been as intrigued by cooking offal at home.  I still enjoy eating it (I ate a pile of Burmese pig ears and organs at my desk, courtesy of Dupee, this week) and have a freezer full of it waiting for me.  But, I can’t think of anything to cook with it.  On the other hand, I am back into cured meats and their wealth of possibilities.  Gravlax has been on the brain since the delicious version I had at the Vergennes Laundry last winter.

Hell of a sandwich. I alternated between loving that I brought Janet with me (because she was waving to people and laughing) and disliking it (cuz she ate all my gravlax)

Not sure where I had eaten gravlax before that fateful day in VT, but previously I always thought of the cured salmon dish as a pickled, sweet and vinegary concoction.  It’s much more similar to smoked salmon with the same buttery texture, minus the dried outside, and with the light flavor of smoke replaced by dill.  After the Laundry, I was on board with gravlax and heard it was pretty easy to make at home.  And now, here we are.

After a little research, it started with a nice piece of wild caught salmon.

These white plastic cutting boards and I are going through a slow break up.  I recognized last week that I have put them through hell and they were showing the pain of that treatment, so its time to let them go and have a chance at a second life.  I wish them the best and hope their next owner likes sticky cutting boards that never feel clean

When buying a large portion of salmon (this is about 2 pounds), you gotta go to Costco.  Sure you could throw caution to the wind and buy a $10/pound cut of farmed salmon, but your gravlax will likely end up tasting like liver pellets and mud.  Costco has the wild caught stuff for $13 a pound.

In order to make the filet relatively symmetrical, I trimmed off the belly meat strip and a bit of the end.

I strove for symmetry yet seemingly had no eye for it when taking this picture

I saved the trimmings for the grillfest I was planning for later in the weekend and cut the filet into two roughly equal sized portions.

As I quickly learned, the beauty of gravlax is in its complete simplicity; the only other ingredients consistently recommended were sugar, salt, and dill. Although the recommended proportions of each varied widely.

For starters, I roughly chopped most of a store bought bunch of dill and threw away the stems.

One of Jack Ryan’s favorite stories involved telling someone that they couldn’t give a nun dill bread because it was made with dill dough.  Say it out loud and it will be more clear.  Now you get my sense of humor?

To the dill I added 2/3s of a cup of kosher salt and 1/3 of a cup of white sugar.  This proportion was the subject of much debate (in my mind) since every recipe called for a completely different ratio with many recommending more sugar than salt.  With my memory of crappy sweet pickled salmon from my first gravlax experience, I elected for the greater salt amount.  Also, I zested half a lemon in as well since citrus was recommended in about half of the recipes I saw.  Stirred that up so that all ingredients were well distributed.

Could have used less of the salt/sugar since I left a lot in the bowl, but I definitely don’t mind being wasteful with that stuff for some reason.  On the other hand, I have a sprig of dill in my fridge that is way past its prime that I am hoping to find a Hail Mary use for so I don’t have to throw it out

I placed the two halves of the salmon filet on parchment and pressed/packed the dill curing mixture onto the meat until it was fully covered with a thick layer.

Again, very simple process: press a bunch of stuff onto the salmon.  Definitely had the potential to get out of hand if I had continued to try to fit the entire bowl of dill/salt/sugar on there but I gave up with about a quarter left and decided not to try and fit more on

Then, with all the grace of when you’ve put toppings on both sides of your sandwich bread, I indelicately slapped these two pieces together.  Then, the usual sandwich process of scooping up everything that fell out and attempting to press it in from the sides. Eventually I had a salmon sandwich.

I’ll admit it, I trimmed the salmon end wrong.  It needed to be a mirror image of the other side and I cut the angle opposite.  Made for the one end being mismatched.  If I was a kid and this was the bread used for my grilled cheese, I would have lost my effing mind and believed the sandwich to be inedible (though I would have eaten it eventually because grilled cheese is delicious)

Using the parchment, I wrapped the salmon up burrito-style, folding in the ends as I rolled so I would have a nice compact package.

Not m’best burrito rolling.  On a quality scale of Annas Taqueria to Chipotle in terms of burrito rolling, I would give this a Qdoba.  Meaning it looked about as good as Chipotle, but was inexplicably sh*ttier

Every recipe I saw recommended some extensive plastic wrapping at this point to seal all air out.  Following a brief temper tantrum when I discovered we were out of plastic wrap, I realized that the Food Saver vacuum sealer would do as good a job and definitely have less risk of leakage.  So, I sealed it up and put it in the back of the fridge with a one pound weight (package of ground turkey meat) on top.

Over the next 36 hours I flipped the the package over about once every 8 hours and replaced the weight on top.  The goal was to avoid one side spending too much time sitting in the salty/sugary liquid that formed.  Around breakfast the second day, I removed the package from the fridge.

MMMmmmm, questionable yellow fish juice.  I would have been pretty ripped if this stuff had leaked all over my fridge as was the chief complaint with the plastic wrap method

The meat felt much firmer than it did when it went into the bag and the size was noticeably smaller.  I cut into the package over the sink to minimize fish juice spills and pulled out the salmon sammie.

Much darker than when we started.  I rarely cook meals for the blog in the morning and couldn’t believe that I got natural light everywhere in the kitchen at 9AM.  Who knew?!?!   Also, nice thumb there, Mr. Mutant Baby Thumbs

The pieces came easily apart and I lightly scraped off the dill, zest, and unabsorbed sugar/salt.  Then rinsed each piece lightly under cold water to remove any excess ingredients followed by patting each piece dry with paper towels.  Which left me with this.

These were significantly flatter and not nearly as thick as when the filet was whole.  No comment on how they weren’t really the same size at all despite my earnest attempt and what I claimed earlier

Even with a little help (Conman to the rescue!), I knew I couldn’t consume both of these pieces in one day so I put one into a fresh food saver bag and sealed it up for the following weekend.  The other piece I got to work on with the sharpest, thinnest carving knife I had.

The goal was to cut the pieces as thin as possible, but also to slice on a heavy bias so that each piece had some decent surface area.  Took some practice, and the first couple cuts were subpar, but eventually I got the hang of it.

Dece contrast shot showing how much darker the pieces looked before they were sliced thin.  They looked like salmon jerky in their whole form but sliced up tender and buttery

Once I had a bunch of pieces sliced, I quickly tacked on another round of temper tantruming when I realized I didn’t have the perfect bagel that I was looking to eat this on.  Nothing less than a Bagels-4-You everything would have done the trick at that moment.

I reluctantly accepted my fate and went with a little wheat toast, cream cheese and capers.

There were multiple open faced sandwiches made that morning, this one just happens to be the smallest and makes me look the least gluttonous

The texture of the fish was very soft and, to use it again, buttery.  I don’t say this often but it really did melt in your mouth.  The fishy flavor normally found in lox was very mild and less pronounced than the dill and citrus from the cure.  I think the traditional way to serve this would have been with some aquavit or mustard or creme fraiche or maybe all of them, but nothing beats cream cheese and capers for me.

I would absolutely make this again and can’t wait to. I much preferred it to the inconsistent smoke flavor found in most packaged smoked salmon in stores.  Really really tasty.

Pete’s Charcutes is no longer the most seldom used category on the site!  Uncle Timmy?  You ready to talk about your stupid recipes for jerks?

Weird Crap I Cook: Cow Udder

Yet another post that seems to be a purposeful assault on every loyal reader that enjoys my wacky attempts at new eggplant and bread recipes.  This one is about an item that I can only assume usually ends up in dog food.

This post is a few months in the making at this point.  I feel like I’ve been threatening to write about udder for some time but hadn’t finished everything required to create a (somewhat) well informed post.  So, now here we are, with a whole post about cooking something you can pretty much only obtain in the U.S. if you know someone slaughtering a cow.  However, it’s apparently a common item in a few South American countries at restaurants that grill all parts of the cow, which means I had to try it.

A little refresher on what came in Uncle Billy’s Crazy Cooler of Destiny (working title):

Seeing this photo reminds me of how bummed out I was when I saw the fur and hair still attached to the outside of the udder.  Like that massive-sized chunk of almost pure fat wasn’t enough to make my knees buckle

This 15 pound chunk of udder was divided up into 4 portions and frozen separately so I could slowly make use of all of it.  Lucky me.

The first attempt was relatively straightforward and coincided with the cooking of the Ponce back in May.  It started with trimming the outside edges off of the block to get rid of the random ugly-looking bits I missed originally.

“Oh here, let me make this foul looking piece of sort-of food less gross by trimming off some gross stuff that people would have never noticed because they won’t eat it.” – Me, always

I was working a little haphazardly with the udder on this round since I was completely over-invested in the fate of the ponce.  Not sure it would have mattered, though, since there aren’t many resources on how to cook cow’s udder online and I was pretty much flying blind the whole time.  So, I simply sliced the udder into quarter inch thick slabs and soaked in salted water for a few hours.

Nobody should ever eat anything that looks like a deck of cards made out of fat.  But, if that’s the hand you draw, I guess you gotta go with it.  Puns!  They’ve worked previously!

While the ponce finished cooking in the oven, we fired up the grill to cook kielbasa so I seasoned the udder with salt and pepper and threw the slabs onto the grill.

Everything looks better on a grill.  Cow udder looks like innocuous chicken breast

After a good ten minutes on each side, the udder came off and headed to a cutting board to be sliced up for the hungry masses (me).

Looked kinda like a chicken cutlet but smelled like the fat on the edge of grilled steak.  Even looking at it now it’s hard to believe that is a piece of cow udder.  Cow udder!

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, but it was still not quite what I expected.  First, it tasted like the fat on a good piece of grilled steak; definitely beef-like and fatty in flavor, but almost like I’d covered it with unsalted butter before cooking.  I had assumed the texture would be a melty, soft, fatty texture but I was pretty off-base on that one.  The outside was chewy, like severely overcooked calamari chewy, and borderline crunchy with a soft inside.  Not something you could eat a lot of, but kind of addictive due to the texture and flavor.  I ate more pieces than I should have.

With that experience fresh in my mind, I recognized I still had a lot of udder left in the freezer and wanted to try a new technique the second time around.  During our trip to Italy a couple years ago, I fell in love with the insanely unhealthy and delicious cured lardo at Giostra in Florence.  Usually made with pork fatback, I had never seen a beef equivalent; like a beef bressaola to pork’s prosciutto.  The internets had no info on a beef lardo equivalent or even how to cure beef fat, so of course I was intrigued.  It all started with a block of udder cut into two equal width halves.

This one looked a little different than the last block, possibly due to an extra post-thaw day in the fridge that was a bit of a questionable decision.  Like this whole effing blog entry wasn’t an incredibly questionable decision

With curing something this large, unlike the relatively simple duck prosciutto, there are more concerns about creepy bacteria and, particularly, botulism.  Pink salt, a nice term for salt mixed with sodium nitrite and a little nitrate, has to be used in order to ensure that the end product is safe to eat.  Nitrites/nitrates are pretty villainized but a reality of most charcuterie.  I mixed a cup of salt with a couple tablespoons of pink salt, garlic powder, dried thyme, dried sage, and lots of black pepper.

I let Janet consume reasonable amounts of dirt and grass (you really can’t help it) and don’t mind her crawling around in public places, but I was acting like an insane parent with how I handled the pink stuff.  That stuff is no good for babies, probably bad for adults too but at least we get to enjoy its delicious riches

I lined the bottom of a glass pyrex with the salt mixture, then placed the udder pieces into the dish and covered all sides completely with the salt making sure no parts of the meat were left exposed.

It was a snug fit but better than being in a much larger dish and needing more salt.  The coating also did a solid job of hiding the oddness underneath it.  Salt, is there anything you can’t do?

I wrapped the dish tightly in two or three layers of plastic wrap and then placed my special cooking brick (we found it in the garden and wrapped it in tin foil) on top of the udder.  The idea is that while it cures in the salt, the weight would press out excess bacteria-risky liquid.  The whole kit and kaboodle (how have I not used that expression here before) went into the fridge for 30ish days.

The fridge light makes this look both creepy and sh*tty-filter-that-everyone-uses-on-Instagram-y.  I would describe myself as generally irritated by Instagram.  I would also describe myself as generally irritated about everything

Over the next 30 days, I pulled the dish out every five days or so to flip the udder pieces, pack in the same salt mixture, re-cover, and weight.  Over time, the salt got progressively wetter and there was liquid collecting in the dish.  I wasn’t sticking to any specific timetable, I was winging this one and lardo usually comes out after seven days, but eventually I decided it was time to remove it from the salt.

That was some viscous liquid collecting around the sides, but it was nice to see that something had changed and looked different.  I was putting way too much effort into this thing to have no progress

Each piece was removed from the mud-like salt and given a quick rinse in water and then white wine.  The white wine was a bit odd in retrospect, but lardo and proscutto recipes call for a fortified wine rinse, and I didn’t care to figure out what “fortified wine” meant, so I broke out the ollllld Chuck Shaw.

You know we’ve switched to the good camera when the water looks like this.  We’ve also reached the portion of the program when Kristi agreed to participate.  Also, the dark spots are pieces of dried herb that stuck around throughout the process

Subpar action shots on this one.  Kristi and I aren’t on speaking terms because of this

With the bottom half of the wine fridge lined in light-blocking cardboard from the inside (as discussed in previous posts) I had a 54 degree location that was perfect for curing.  I poked a hole in each slab with a bamboo skewer, pressed a string through it, then tied it to the bottom side of one of the wine racks to hang.

Ended up having to redo this so that they were both on the same string and wouldn’t swing into each other.  In hindsight it was a pretty stupid concern, it’s not like the fridge was going to be in the hold of ship

And that was pretty much the last I saw of the udder for the next 60-ish days.  The rack slid back into the wine fridge and the udder cured in 54 degree temperatures in what I came to know as “the curing box”.  Kristi still calls it the wine fridge.

After a couple months of curing and some general food boredom post-St. Anthony’s feast in the north end of Boston, I pulled the udder out of the wine fridge.

A lot smaller than when I started.  Totally not something you can see from a scale-less photo

After a few minutes of staring, smelling, poking and general stalling, I finally started cutting off some slices from the block.

Just a big old block of cured beef fat.  The discovery of foods like this is rarely done by people of smaller dimensions than mine.  Let’s just say I don’t think this is the type of food Giada De Laurentiis is making at home.  Before looking her up just now I was unaware she spelled her last name with two “i”s and now I am pretty sure that’s not her real name.  Another thing I am generally annoyed by

The key with any lardo is to slice very, almost transparently, thin.  After tasting a tiny piece raw, I decided this was definitely the type of food that would taste better with some heat applied to it.  Toasting pieces of baguette and letting the lardo melt onto them seemed like the best course, but I didn’t have any good bread in the house so I fried up a batch like bacon.

Thought I had a good shot of the thin slices on the cutting board but apparently not.  Has the transition back and forth from the good camera to the iPhone been jarring?  I find it jarring

While the slices cooked the smell was somewhere between pan cooked steak and a natural tallow candle.  It definitely was a reminder that what I was about to eat ends up as something other than people food 99.9999% of the time in America.  Not that I think that’s wrong; udder isn’t exactly the next head cheese coming to the menus of trendy gastro-pubs nationwide.

It looked/smelled reasonably appetizing at this point.  Not sure you can go wrong frying something fatty and cured like you would bacon, seems to always work.  Again, not the type of conversation you’re going to hear around the starting line at a 10k

Cured cow udder isn’t for everyone, but it was actually kind of good.  The most shocking thing is how sweet the cured udder is.  Not like how I would describe shellfish as sweet, this was very sugar-like.  It legitimately tastes like bacon that has been baked with brown sugar on it, almost a candied flavor.  I racked my brain to try to remember if I had put sugar in the cure but realized the sweetness was coming from the udder.  Likely the last remnants of the milk which is gross or cool depending on how you look at it.

Obviously I was working with just the fat here, so there wasn’t a lot of texture aside from the crispiness, but it really tasted like beef-flavored crispy bacon fat.  I am actually looking forward to frying this up again and seeing what I could pair it with.  Will likely experiment with it some more in LBI this weekend.

I am just happy it was edible, I really thought I would be throwing it out after 90 days of (minimal) effort.  Hopefully I’ll do a post everyone can enjoy next week.

Pete’s Charcutes’: Duck Prosciutto

A new blog category after a couple-week break for some summer travels and general busyness.  You would think posting once a week would be relatively easy, but at least five times a year I hit a case of writers block despite a bunch of meals to blog about.  The break was really for the best, though, since charcuterie takes some time to cure properly.

About two months ago I started the process of curing something that will either end up being an interesting new food discovery for me or a tremendous time consuming failure never to be spoken of again.  In order to do so, I had to clear out a few shelves in our wine fridge to give a cool, appropriately humid curing environment in the midst of a hot summer.

This friggin kid, gets into pretty much everything she isn’t supposed to play with.  She’s also already figured out how to give me a look that takes away any frustration with what she is about to do just before she does it.  I am screwed

Just behind the mischevious child pictured above is the dual zone wine fridge that Kristi has graciously allowed me to conduct my experiments in.  The bottom half has thick cardboard on the inside to block any sunlight from the inside since light makes fat rancid apparently.  Makes sense.  Definitely explains the progressively worse BO I’ve developed over the years when exposed to direct summer sunlight.

Anyhoo, I had minimal space remaining with the other project already in the wine fridge, and I was hoping to make something with a relatively short curing time.  After some consideration of a sopressata or liver sausage, I ended up going with the item that seemed like the easiest home cured charcutes’ to make by far; duck breast prosciutto.

After extensively researching the method laid out by Michael Ruhlman, I started with a couple surprisingly difficult to find duck breasts.

The good camera is back but Kristi wasn’t wielding it right away, so expect subpar results until she takes over.  In other news, duck breasts always look like all fat and skin.  Way too soon for another joke about my appearance

These duck breasts were purchased from a Shaws in downtown Boston after we struck out at multiple specialty stores looking for Magret duck breasts.  Magret breasts are far meatier and larger since they are from ducks fattened for foie gras.  Apparently Boston’s gourmet food stores are hiding from the recent controversy on these ducks.  I really want to launch into a poorly informed 3,000 word rant covering hundreds of topics related to this issue but persuading on none of them.  So, lets just move on.

I scored the skins of the breasts a bit and laid them on a thick bed of kosher salt in a Pyrex dish before covering with a solid top layer of additional kosher salt.

$18 worth of duck breasts and I get stingy with the $.85 worth of kosher salt I used.  I acknowledge that I am extremely illogical when it comes to cooking, but luckily I am completely logical at all other times

I covered the Pyrex tightly then placed it in the fridge for what I planned to be 24 hours but it ended up being 36 hours due to needing bed more than late night meat prep when 24 hours came up.  Never a good idea to start a 24 hour curing cycle at 10PM on a weeknight.  Put that in the notes app on your iPhone and make it your wallpaper.  Thx.

The next morning Kristi and I got up and spread out some cheesecloth for wrapping the duck breasts when they came out of the salt.

Kristi resumes control of the camera and all is right in the world.  Janet is crawling around there somewhere, probably playing that game where she seeks out tiny dangerous items to ingest before we can sprint towards her and remove it from her grasp.  Her parents are winning, but she’s started to throw some Ray Rice moves our way recently

With the cheese cloth setup, the duck breasts come out of the salt one at a time.

I was amazed at how different and deflated the breasts looked after 36 hours.  Always good to get some encouragement that things are going in the right direction early in the process

I rinsed the breasts under cold tap water to remove all excess salt because by this point the salty flavor should have been (and was) well infused into the meat.

I know I scored the skin a little too deeply, and it led to the salt penetrating more than I had hoped, but give me a break since it was my first try and I have no idea what I am doing ever.  Way to make me feel self conscious!  Jerks!

The rinsed breasts went onto some paper towels to dry, at which point I could see how much the fat and skin had deflated and become more balanced with the meat.

This was around the time I recognized that a bigger breast would definitely be better.  Sigh.  Stupid family-friendly blog that I can’t build out with stupid puns and double entendres related to the previous statement.  Once again, let’s move on

I placed the duck in the cheese cloth and wrapped it so that it was covered with a few layers of the thin cheese cloth on all sides.

I was talking a HUGE game at this point about how the hardest part was yet to come and there was no way either of us were going to be able to tie up the wrapped breasts correctly.  Which led to…

…Kristi eagerly accepting the challenge of tying them.  Look, I’m not a conniving genius or anything, but tasks like tying these up properly are not my cup of tea and Bill Cosby’s Parenthood-era reverse psychology tends to work remarkably well with my rather competitive wife.  All it takes is some acknowledgement of defeat at the end, and she’s ready for the next challenge to be issued

With the salt cured breasts fully wrapped they headed to the wine fridge (set to 54 degrees) to hang for 7-10 days.

Ignore the background, nothing to see there, move along

About a week later I started to check the hanging duck breasts to see if they had firmed up a bit.  The idea is that the duck breasts should lose a third of their weight and be firm though not overly stiff.  It was really just guesswork, but I knew that a week should be enough to completely cure the meat.  I gave it some extra time since I prefer a dryer prosciutto and figured this was a learning experience.

After 10 days, I unwrapped the first breast to find this.

Had all the color I was looking for and smelled/looked like the duck prosciutto I had in the past and enjoyed.  All that said, cutting into it and eating the first bite was surprisingly scary

My first bite was a little tough; A) it came from the thinnest, most dried out end and B) I wasn’t slicing it thinly enough or on a proper bias at first.  Also, the thin breasts and longer time than planned in the salt made it much saltier than expected.  At the same time, the cured flavor and overall texture were great.

After a little practice I started to figure out how to slice thinly enough to make the fat ore translucent.

The slivers at this point were a little small, but I wasn’t working with a full sized pork leg that had to cure for 12 months, just an easy ten days to this point.  And this looks as good now as it did then

As I dug in a bit further I realized that the over-salty flavor wasn’t going to subside completely based on the thickness of the meat.  Yet, I could not stop eating it.  As I got towards the center and continued slicing on a greater angle making the slices thinner and larger I was able to appreciate the texture and flavor more.

Although it was definitely one of the saltiest prosciuttos I have tasted, the cured flavor and texture were exactly what I hope for when I buy charcuterie.  Plus, it looked nice on a cheese plate.

I was tempted to yell, “Hey!  See this prosciutto!?  Over here on this side of the platter!?  No this one!  Yeah, I made that!  No, like I cured it myself!  OK, have a nice evening.” to every person who walked by our Long Beach Island cocktail hour, but was able to restrain myself

If I had to do it again, and I will be doing it again soon, I would stick closely to the 24 hours recommended for the initial salt cure and also look for bigger duck breasts.  Both of the ones I used were about .4-.5 pounds, but I think the Magret-sized 3/4 pound breast would be better for this execution.  I think a goose breast would be a good experiment to execute since they are usually a bit meatier and might be a cheap/easy replacement for increasingly expensive duck breasts.  Hint, hint hunter friends.

I am home the next three weekends (I think).  Feel free to bombard me with taunts and occasional compliments if I haven’t posted by next Wednesday.