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So for the past few months, I’ve been working with food writer Michael Ruhlman on the Android adaptation of his cookbook “Ratio”. Well pop some bubbly, cause the app is now live in the Android Market! Search for it on the Android Market or scan this barcode:

So a few weeks ago, I went to The Meat Hook to pick up a beef roast for Christmas dinner. Brent helped me pick out a nice 8 lb. roast (which he then layered with fat and tied nicely — something I don’t think I quite fully appreciated until the roast came out of the oven), and then we got down to business. I’ve been following The Meat Hook on Twitter for a while now, and these guys aren’t just dealing with your ordinary bits. They’re cranking out stuff like chorizo-stuffed duck hearts, goose rillettes, lamb belly and bahn mi dogs. That’s right, they took a Vietnamese sandwich and turned it into a sausage. HOT.

Compared to these guys, I’m clearly Mr. Amateur Newbie, so I gave Brent my 10 second charcuterie resume, and asked him to surprise me with whatever he’s got in the meat locker. He came out first with some pig’s skin, rolled it up, wrapped it up and handed it to me. I thought that might be all, but then he went back in the locker and emerged with a pig’s head.

Yup, a whole head. They had already taken the cheeks out to make guanciale, but there was still plenty of meat left, so I headed for the checkout with a beef roast in one hand and a pig’s head in the other. It was going to be an interesting weekend.

I’d never cooked a pig’s head before, so I figured I’d play it safe and start with the basics, namely head cheese, which isn’t really cheese at all, more like a meat jelly terrine. I used the recipe in my copy of Fergus Henderson’s The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating. And since it’s not every day that you get a whole pig’s head, I also decided to make the Crispy Pig Ear salad from the book. Both the head cheese and the crispy ears turned out pretty good considering it was my first attempt making them, but what really turned out amazing was the recipe I made with the roll of pig’s skin.

Brent told me how you could slow cook thin ribbons of pig skin in a tomato sauce and after a few hours just before the skin completely falls apart, you end up with the most delicious porky ragu you could ever want. So I gave that a shot, and it turned out awesome. Here’s a pic of the final three dishes, and below is the recipe I hacked together for the ragu.

Pigskin Ragu with handmade pappardelle, alongside Crispy Pig Ears and Head Cheese.

Pigskin Ragu (if the name weirds you out, you can also call it Football Ragu)

Ingredients

• 1 fennel bulb
• 2-3 medium sized leeks
• 1 large can (28 oz.) of whole, peeled tomatoes
• 1 roll of pigskin (about 1/2 lb.)
• olive oil
• salt, pepper and whatever other fresh green italian herbs you have on hand (e.g. parsley, thyme, rosemary)

Directions

Thinly slice the pig’s skin into strips about 1/8″ wide and 1″ long. Saute in a pan with a little olive oil over medium heat for a few minutes just to heat them through and to brown the outside a little. Now open the can of tomatoes and strain off all of the tomato juice into the pan with the pig’s skin. Add a little bit more water if the pigskin isn’t fully covered. Turn the heat down to low and let this simmer for about an hour.

Meanwhile, thinly slice the fennel bulb and leeks. Saute in a stock pot with a little bit of olive oil on medium heat for about 5 minutes until they’ve sweated some. Coarsely chop the canned tomatoes, and then add them to the pot. Turn the heat down to very low and let simmer. You don’t want the pigskin or the tomato mixture to boil, so just keep them low and slow for the next hour.

After an hour of simmering, pour the pigskin/tomato juice mixture into the pot with the leeks, fennel and tomato. Add whatever fresh herbs you want and stir everything together. Continue to simmer for another hour, tasting and seasoning as you like, just be careful that if you simmer the sauce much longer the pig skin will start to completely melt. Personally, I stopped cooking the ragu just before this melting point so that there was still some texture to the finished ragu. But if you don’t like that, just keep simmering and the texture will melt away, but the flavor will remain.

Once the ragu is done, serve with your favorite pasta. In my case, I just threw together some handmade pappardelle using the 3:2 Pasta Dough from the Ratio iPhone App. Delicious.

Not that you care (and don’t think I’m starting a microblogging trend), but I really, really like Gnu Bars.

If I had to pick a favorite it would be Banana Walnut, but the new Peanut Butter one is good too.

Making up a recipe can be a frightening experience. You pull a few ingredients from the refrigerator, the pantry, even the garden, and you start turning an idea in your mind into a meal on your plate. Sometimes it works phenomenally well, sometimes it goes up in flames, but unless you’re a real pro at it, most of the time it turns out only OK.

Most of my experience making up recipes involves making dinner at home. It’s a fun way to experiment in the kitchen, but I don’t normally feel too much pressure because we’re only talking about one meal. If it goes horribly awry then you just wash it down with a glass of wine, and go to bed knowing that you won’t make the same mistake again.

Making up your own sausage recipe though, is a completely different experience. Talk about pressure… First, you’re dealing with pounds of pounds of meat, and having to throw that away if something goes wrong is enough to make any grown man cry. Second, sausage making is a time consuming activity and it’s just depressing to feel like I’ve spent hours working on something and have nothing to show for it. It’s a daunting task, so you can imagine my hesitance to give it a shot.

But after Sausage Fest 2007, I’ve made a few more batches and think I have a handle on the basics, so I wanted to branch out and try something of my own. The idea was to make a sausage that used Chinotto Italian soda. I first had Chinotto at Bar Toto, an Italian restaurant in the neighborhood and it was amazing. It’s both bitter and sweet, with herbal overtones and a mellow citrus aftertaste. It’s not your typical cloying sweet soda, and the fact that it’s made with sugar instead of corn syrup gives it a cleaner, fresher feel. Chinotto is apparently extremely common in Italy, which explains why the only place I’ve seen it in my neighborhood is at the local Italian market. Some people might think it’s anathema to cook with soda, much less add it to sausage. But I grew up in Texas where there’s a long tradition of cooking with soda (specifically Dr. Pepper) so I don’t have any hangups.

Anyway, here’s the recipe I came up with. I call this Version 1.0 because while the flavor of the sausage turned out exactly as I had hoped, the sausage doesn’t hold well together so I need to tweak it a bit to get the texture right. Anytime I try cooking it, the sausage just crumbles into little pieces. It tastes awesome though and goes great on top of pizza or roasted with brussels sprouts, but I probably need to tweak one or two things before it’s final.

Chinotto Ginger Sausage v1.0

Ingredients:
3 pounds pork shoulder butt
1/2 pound pork back fat
1 1/2 tbsp. kosher salt
4 scallions finely minced (white parts only)
2 tbsp. fresh grated ginger
1 tbsp. fresh grated orange zest.
4 oz. San Pelligrino Chinotto (about 2/3 of a small bottle)
medium hog casings (38mm, 1 1/2″)

Directions:
- Cut the pork shoulder and back fat into small cubes
- Toss the cubes with the salt, minced scallions, grated ginger, and orange zest
- Place mixture in the freezer for 30-60 minutes to firm up
- Put mixture through the meat grinder at a large grind setting (I use the large grinder that comes with the KitchenAid grinder)
- Put the ground meat in a Kitchen Aid mixer with the paddle attachment. Turn on medium speed, and slowly pour in the 4 oz. of Chinotto. Mix for around 30-60 seconds until the meat is uniformly mixed
- Fry up a small piece of the meat to taste.
- If all looks good, stuff the meat into the casings.
- You can cook this right away, but I prefer to let it sit in the refrigerator overnight to let the flavors develop.
- Roast in the oven or over a low flame on your grill until an internal temperature of 150 degrees has been reached.

These directions assume you’ve made fresh sausage before, so if you’re looking for a step-by-step guide to that process, I’d recommend picking up one of many books on the topic. And if you can’t find Chinotto in your local area, you can buy it from Amazon.com as well.

My co-worker went to Mitsuwa in New Jersey this weekend and brought back some treats for the office. I got a can of Meiji Yan Yan Choco Cream Snacks. The snacks come in a small can filled with shortbread sticks which you’re supposed to dip in chocolate. The chocolate is in a reservoir also in the can, so the package is like the Japanese offspring of Pringles and Cheese-N-Crackers minus the plastic red stick used to spread the cheese…

Anyway, the best part of these snacks are the messages on each of the sticks. The first part is a little cartoon and the name of an animal (Whale! Seal! Mouse!) followed by a little known fact about that animal. Who knew that the Whale is the biggesy mammal or that seals love to sun tan? They’re all pretty good except for the blatantly lame Star+Fish. Would it have been so difficult to just say “Regrows Limbs”?

Holiday season is coming up and with all of the hosting that typically happens around then, it seemed like a good time as any to make a giant batch of sausage. I’ll save the full description of the sausage making process for a later post, but today I received about 30 lbs. of meat (pork, lamb, beef) from Niman Ranch and when I got home from work, I started cranking out some links.

I made three batches tonight, and will make the remaining two batches this weekend. The three that I made tonight are from the book Home Sausage Making. Here’s a picture of what they looked like before they went into the freezer.

In the foreground of the image is Loukanika, a Greek sausage made with lamb, pork and a coriander/orange flavor. The darker sausage on the right is the Mustardy Beef sausage, and the lighter one in the back is the Pork & Apple sausage.

The remaining two batches I’ll make this weekend are Spicy Italian Sausage and Smoked Chicken and Garlic Sausage both from the book Charcuterie
by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn.

Of the two books, I definitely prefer the Charcuterie book, as it provides with the basic knowledge and tools to do just about anything related to cured meats. The Home Sausage Making book has a lot of good recipes, but lacks somewhat in fundamentals and in-depth knowledge.

On the tech side of things, I will be participating this Saturday at MobileCampNYC2 which I am really looking forward to. There will be around 200 people there, and I’ll be hanging out and showing off some cool things to do with bar codes and mobile phones. Stay tuned for more samples and things.

The bresaola has gone bad.

And this isn’t a case of it-might-be-bad-but-I’m-not-sure, oh no, it’s a finalist in the FDA’s yearly competition for “foods that will kill you”. Here’s a final pic of the bresaola minutes before it was hermetically sealed and sent to the outside garbage.

Now the gritty looky white specks all over the bresaola is supposed to be a good thing. The white mold is “good mold”, similar to what you see covering a whole salami in the store. It acts as a protective barrier to keep away the bad mold and in the process add a little flavor to things. At least I think that’s good mold. It might also be salt, which means that the bresaola was drying too quickly and thus was stored at an improper temperature/humidity. I’m certainly not doing a taste test to figure it out, so if someone has in-depth experience with this, I’d appreciate the feedback…

Regardless, it’s the fuzzy green stuff that is REALLY BAD and when you see that, it’s over. We’ll chalk this one up to a lesson learned and try again in a few months when the weather is cooler and I can set up a more controlled environment to monitor things. In the meantime, I’ll just stick to the fresh and smoked sausages.

I’ve spent the past few weeks working my way through the recipes in Michael Ruhlman & Brian Polcyn’s Charcuterie. To date, I’ve made the following items:

• Fresh Bacon (sweet, smoked over maple)
• Fresh Bacon (savory, smoked over pecan)
• Beef Jerky
• Breakfast Sausage with Garlic
• Breakfast Sausage with Ginger and Sage
• Mexican Chorizo
• Smoked Andouille
• Smoked Chicken and Roasted Garlic Sausage

When picking which recipe to try next I’m always trying to improve not just my skills, but also the flavor and texture of the final product. I’ve moved up from basic fresh ground things, to fully stuffed smoked sausages. I’m in love with the last thing I made, the Smoken Chicken sausage, not just because it tastes soooo good, but it’s a sign that I’m getting better at this and the whole learning process hasn’t been one giant waste of time.

The current recipe I’m making is bresaola, or air-dried beef. You cure a 3 pound eye of round roast in a salt/spice mixture for a week. Repeat for another week. Then hang it up to dry for three weeks. That’s it. I’m scared by the idea of hanging up a piece of raw meat in my basement for three weeks, but I figure people have done this for a few hundred years, and they probably know better than me. Here’s a picture of the bresaola now, after it has been curing for 12 days.

This weekend, I’ll take it out, rinse it off, wrap it in twine, and then hang it up to dry. Wish me luck. If all goes well, maybe I’ll try sopressata next (though I can’t do that until I get a new sausage stuffer. The one with the KitchenAid mixer completely sucks and is useless, so I’m currently looking at the 3lb. cast iron or stainless steel ones at Cabela’s).

Once it’s ready, we’ll have a tasting, so sign up now if you want to come. Hopefully, we’ll have our first garden tomatoes by then too.