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By Jason Horn, on December 5th, 2011 
Charcutepalooza is a yearlong project I’m participating in to make recipes from Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing. For more information, see my introductory post.
So this is it. The end of a year of meat. A lot of pig parts have passed through my messy kitchen on my journey from pancetta to peperone, and I feel like a much better cook for it.
I’ve always been into DIY, and I’d even done some charcuterie before this challenge got started, but it had always been a huge production, taking days of preparation and far too much expense for specialized equipment and obscure cuts of meat. And that’s so not the point.
Charcuterie is about preservation, whether that’s a poor farmer making the hog he slaughters in the fall last through the whole year or a high-end chef pickling some summer vegetables so she can use them in the winter.
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By Jason Horn, on December 3rd, 2011 The best part of being a food writer/blogger is that sometimes you get a free box of local meat.
In October, a couple friends of mine launched Freshfully, an online grocery store for local food in Birmingham. It’s a fantastic idea: Farmers, ranchers, beekeepers, dairies, and other producers offer their stuff online, and you get to buy it without being limited to a once-a-week farmers’ market. (Each vendor sets up pick-up or delivery on their own.)
The site’s picking up new vendors at a solid pace. It recently added Johnson Farm, which raises grass-fed beef, Berkshire pork, Katahdin lamb, and chicken in Elba, Ala., and the Freshfully folks offered me a box of lamb from the farm’s first Birmingham delivery to “review” on the blog.
Besides going home with ground lamb, lamb steaks, a lamb roast, and a couple beautiful rib chops, I also got to meet farm owner Drexel Johnson, a cowboy-hatted, pick-up-truck-driving, grizzled rancher who fits the part perfectly. (He also tells a hilarious story.)
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By Jason Horn, on November 22nd, 2011  Charcutepalooza is a yearlong project I’m participating in to make recipes from Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing. For more information, see my introductory post.
Making fermented foods at home is kind of like taking a trust-fall.
There’s something deeply terrifying about leaving some perfectly good food out for days or weeks to, essentially, spoil, and then eating the results. Sauerkraut or yogurt is unnerving enough, but fermenting raw meat is something altogether different.
That’s probably why dry-curing ended up as the second-to-last Charcutepalooza challenge.
This time, I went with peperone. No, that’s not a typo; that’s the original Italian ancestor of the preservative-ridden junk we put on pizzas called pepperoni. In reality, the name difference is probably a good thing, as the two couldn’t be more different.
Real peperone has a lovely tanginess with a slight sweet-spicy backbone. It’s like some kind of magical cross between pork and a half-sour pickle. (Plus, you get to use something called Bactoferm F-RM-52, which sounds like the bacteriological agent that brings on the zombie plague in a sci-fi movie.)
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By Jason Horn, on November 11th, 2011 
So Nadria’s been on a vegan kick lately. I’m always game for a challenge, so we’ve been experimenting with lots of animal-product-free recipes. (Discoveries: 1. Soy cheese is pretty terrible. 2. Soy cream cheese is actually pretty tasty. 3. Vegan butter is the most horrible abomination ever created by mankind.)
During this same time period, the good people at Lark sent me a copy of their new book Cake Ladies: Celebrating a Southern Tradition by Jodi Rhoden. The book profiles 16, well, cake ladies—a unique Southern phenomenon of women who aren’t professional bakers exactly but who are locally famous for their cakes and bring them to every wedding, funeral, and any other occasion—with recipes from each, of course.
Two of those cake ladies are the Cupcake Fairies, a pair of New Orleans women who opened a home-based cupcake business after Hurricane Katrina that tries to offer healthier option. Their recipe in the book is vegan red velvet cupcakes, colored with beets instead of food coloring and topped with vegan-cream-cheese icing.
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By Jason Horn, on October 15th, 2011 
Charcutepalooza is a yearlong project I’m participating in to make recipes from Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing. For more information, see my introductory post.
So it’s finally arrived. The Charcutepalooza challenge I knew was coming and dreaded above all. Galantine. It’s simple enough: a rich chicken pâté, flavored with warm fall spices like cinnamon and clove. But here’s the tricky part: The whole thing is rolled up in the skin of the chicken. Which means you have to remove a whole chicken’s skin in one piece.
I’m not sure why this terrified me so much. I mean, I’ve slaughtered and butchered a whole pig; this should not be a big deal. Maybe it’s the precision required. One poke of the knife and the thing is ruined. After all, I’m The Messy Epicure, great supporter of imperfection in the kitchen!
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