Take these three precautions with all home charcuterie, so you don’t serve up trichinosis with your pancetta.

Keep it cold
Refrigerating the meat, and even the meat grinder and any other utensils used in the recipe, not only helps fend off bacteria but also makes grinding your ingredients easier.

Master the environment
Air-dried sausages need the proper environment to ensure a safe cure. Sixty percent humidity and 60°F ambient temperature are the best possible conditions. Basements and dark cupboards and closets often meet these standards, but check first.

Sync your salt
The right ratio of salt to meat is essential for pulling out moisture, killing bacteria, and improving flavor. Improvise with other flavoring agents (herbs, chili powders, citrus), but don’t mess with the salt. Follow the recipe for once!

The Cure

Master the art of hand-crafted meats

By Matt Goulding, Photos by Kang Kim

Charcuterie is the French (and foodie) word for a humble staple that’s been around for centuries: salted, dried meat. You probably eat some every day, in your ham sandwich or on top of your pepperoni pizza. But those greasy disks are to charcuterie what a Fiat is to a Lamborghini: pedestrian transportation, as opposed to a life-accelerating passion.

Happily, you don’t need to drop 20 bills at a chic bistro to get your fix. Even you, without a drop of Mediterranean blood in your veins, can produce artisanal-quality charcuterie in your own kitchen. “It’s a form of cooking that’s been around for thousands of years,” says Brian Polcyn, chef at Five Lakes Grill in Milford, Michigan, and coauthor of Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing. “And it’s easy enough for the average cook to handle.”

It’s simple: Curing’s two active ingredients—salt and time—work in tandem to extract flavor-diluting moisture from meat, leaving nothing but concentrated flavor and thin streaks of fat that melt on contact with your tongue. Take a few bites and you feel complete satisfaction.

Charcuterie comes in many different forms and flavors, from buttery-soft,
2-day gravlax to spicy, smoky, 7-week Spanish chorizo. Build your confidence (and your appetite) with something easy, and then move on to the kinds of projects guys are more accustomed to executing in their garages than in their kitchens.

Once it lands on your plate, you’ll never want, or need, to eat another mystery-meat frank again. Better still, the intense pleasures of charcuterie are meant to be shared. You could almost call it the cure for loneliness.


LEVEL 1
Duck Prosciutto
Duck prosciutto is like a gateway drug, easy to get your hands on and sure to spawn a need for even bigger and bolder flavors. It’s the easiest way into home charcuterie, taking only about 5 minutes of real effort and a week of patient anticipation. “If I blindfolded you and had you taste it next to a slice of prosciutto di parma, you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference,” says Polcyn. Serve it sliced thin with a chunk of parmigiano reggiano and a glass of full-bodied red wine.


YOU’LL NEED
    2 cups kosher salt
    1 whole boneless duck breast (about 1 lb)
    ½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
    Cheesecloth

HOW TO MAKE IT
[1]  Put 1 cup of the salt in a glass baking pan or dish that will hold the duck breast without allowing it to touch the sides. Nestle the duck breast, skin side up, on top of the salt. Pour enough additional salt over the duck breast to cover it completely. Cover the pan with plastic wrap and re­frigerate the breast for 24 hours.

[2]  Rinse the breast, and pat dry with paper towels. The flesh should feel dense, and its color will have deepened. Dust with pepper on both sides.

[3]  Wrap the breast in cheesecloth and tie with string. Hang it
for about 7 days in a cool, humid place. (About 50° to 60°F is optimal.) The flesh should be stiff but not hard throughout; the color will be a deep, rich red. Still squishy in the center? Hang it for a day or two longer.

[4]  Remove the cheesecloth, wrap the duck in plastic wrap, and refrigerate until you’re ready to eat. Makes 1 cured whole duck breast


LEVEL 2
Fennel-Cured Salmon
You know that tiny portion of sliced salmon you shell out seven bucks for at your local bagel shop? Well, this is the same stuff, but for half the price and with twice the flavor. Hate the anise flavor of fennel? Replace the Pernod, fennel, and seeds with one of these other flavor profiles: a bunch of fresh dill; the zest and juice of two lemons and oranges; an even coating of cracked pepper and ground coriander; or ½ cup fresh grated horseradish.

YOU’LL NEED
    ½     cup sugar
    1    cup packed light brown sugar
    ¾    cup kosher salt
    1    salmon fillet (2 to 3 lb, in one piece, skin on pinbones removed
    ¼     cup Pernod
    1     fennel bulb, with stalks and leaves, thinly sliced
    ½      cup fennel seeds, toasted
    2     Tbsp white pepper-corns, toasted and cracked

HOW TO MAKE IT
[1]  Combine the sugars and salt and sprinkle half of the mix over the bottom of a glass baking dish just large enough to hold the salmon. Pan size is very important, because the fish will release a lot of liquid, forming in effect a highly seasoned brine in which it will cure; you want the brine to cover as much of the fish as possible. Place the salmon on the salt mixture. Sprinkle both sides of the fish with the Pernod, and then cover with the remaining salt mixture. Layer the sliced fennel on top, followed by the ­fennel seeds and white peppercorns. Cover everything with plastic wrap.

[2]  Place a pan on top of the salmon and weigh it down: A few canned goods should do the trick. Refrigerate for 48 hours, redistributing the cure ingredients as necessary over the salmon once, about midway through the curing. The salmon should be firm to the touch at the thickest part when fully cured. If it still feels raw and squishy, cover it and leave it in the cure for 24 hours more.

[3]  When the salmon is fully cured, discard the fennel seeds and spices. Rinse the fish well under cool water, and pat it dry. To store the salmon, wrap it in parchment paper and refrigerate it. The salmon will keep for around 3 weeks in the fridge. Rewrap it in fresh paper if the paper becomes too wet. Makes 2 to 3 pounds of salmon

Read on to learn how to make pancetta and chicken sausage...