Basement Charcuterie
by Rachel Tayse • May 24, 2010 • Local Food, Make it Yourself, Meat • 6 Comments
If you home cure meat, this might be a familiar site:
Five pounds of saucisson sec and a fifteen pound serrano-style salted air-dryed ham hanging in our basement. Both are made from the meat of Red, the hog we slaughtered in April. The saucisson sec will hang for three to four weeks and be taken on our long back country canoe trip in July. The ham will dry until the fall at the earliest.
Curing meat hanging from drop ceiling stringers is just one of the pitfalls of home charcuterie.
If you take up charcuterie like Alex has, you might also find yourself with hundreds of feet of dried hog intestine, i.e. casing, in the fridge, pictured above. You’ll probably have a stash of pink salt, that nitrite containing bacon flavoring good stuff. Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie
Of course you will also have the rewards: spicy delicious chorizo, home cured guanciale (jowl bacon pictured above), salt cod, fresh breakfast sausage and the experience to preserve whatever comes your way.
This is awesome! I love sausage and would probably label that as my favorite kind of “meat”. I’m searching around for a local place that does their own sausages and most specifically I’m looking for kielbasa. But would love other kinds of sausages as well. I know Blues Creek in North Market has some sausage but I only find that to be alright.
.-= Andrea (Off Her Cork)´s last blog ..Tuesday Tip: Pineapple Core Uses =-.
My wife and I visited her family in Italy once. Her grandmother’s nephew had his prosciutto hanging in the cellar just like that. Nearby were his own olive oil and red wine. A wonderful sight!
Local olive oil and wine would indeed be a wonderful thing!
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