For some reason, I got bitten by the bug the other day, giving me an early start on this month’s not-quite-charcutepalooza project. A quick survey of the recipe in Charcuterie showed it to be as simple as other salt-cured, whole-muscle charcuterie projects: a 24-hour salt cure, followed by several hours of drying. Unlike sausage, you don’t have to worry about it breaking if you don’t keep it cold enough, and unlike partially dried items, you don’t have to worry about controlling the ambient humidity to find that sweet spot between case hardening and mold.

Indeed, with jerky, you want the humidity to be as low as possible, since jerky is supposed to be dried all the way through. In Charcuterie, Ruhlman and Polcyn call for the beef to be dried at 90°F/32°C – roughly the temperature of a nice summer day – for 16 to 24 hours. But my dehydrator doesn’t go that low, and its instruction manual says to dry meats at 155°F/68°C. On the assumption that this figure was purposely high for liability reasons, I split the difference and set the dehydrator to 115°F/46°C. Six hours later, the strips were darkened and leathery, so I decided they were done. (I must admit, it wasn’t until I was a couple of hours into the process that I realized that jerky is essentially a raw beef product. But I eat beef tartare with gusto, so it didn’t bother me.)

I’m hedging all my bets by storing the jerky in the fridge, but I don’t think it’s going to last long enough for it to matter! The spicy, salty, chewy beef is a highly addictive, very satisfying snack.  And once again, I find myself marvelling at how, by following a recipe and seeing how straightforward the preparation is, the door opens to so many other possibilities. This batch was seasoned to spec with garlic and onion powder and minced chipotle chillis, but the spicing options are myriad. Teriyaki is a popular flavour in commercial products, and I’d be eager to try something involving smoked paprika, since I currently lack a good smoking setup. And then there’s the question of different kinds of meat…

I haven’t been explicitly participating in Charcutepalooza, but I’ve been impressed by the project. I usually do a charcuterie project about every month or so anyway: in January, I cured several pounds of bacon, with both sweet and savoury cures. And this month, apparently, it was fresh sausage.

I learned how to make sausage from Charcuterie, and it’s a great resource with some great recipes, but for the basics, you need go no further than Ratio. The essentials of sausage are pork, pork fat, and salt; everything beyond that is a variation.

In an effort to render my cassoulet a little more “local,” I drew on Julia Child’s recipe for saucisse de Toulouse, but made variations to the seasoning to give it a Canadian twist, notably through the inclusion of herbes salées and Canadian whisky (in place of the Cognac called for by Child). Although I have a sausage stuffer, I decided to go the rustic route, forming patties instead, and frying them briefly before adding them to the cassoulet.

How to make Canadian whisky sausage with herbes salées

This is an exact transcription of how I made the sausage, working with what I had on hand. It made enough for 16 decent-sized patties, of which I used 4 in my cassoulet. You can scale it up or down as you like. Note that the proportion of salt called for here is lower than is typical for sausage, since the herbes salées are salty. If you can’t find herbes salées, add some fresh herbs and raise the kosher salt to 18 grams.

928 grams pork shoulder, including some fat cap
156 grams pork back fat
13 grams kosher salt
10 grams herbes salées
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1 tablespoon minced fresh garlic
A few grindings of black pepper
50 ml. Canadian whisky, chilled
65 ml. ice water

Before you begin, make sure all your ingredients and equipment are well chilled by putting them in the fridge or freezer. (Don’t freeze the ingredients solid, though!) Dice the pork shoulder and pork fat, and mix well with the salt, herbes salées, nutmeg, garlic and black pepper. Pass the mixture through a meat grinder, using the small plate. If necessary, chill the ground meat in the fridge until it is very cold again. Place it in the bowl of a stand mixer, and mix on medium speed, dribbling in the whisky and ice water, until the mixture is well combined and looks sticky. Using wet hands, form the sausage mixture into patties (or stuff it into casings or keep it as bulk sausage), and cook and serve as desired.

Even before this information came out, sous vide was a popular approach for duck confit, for several reasons. First, an immersion circulator is the perfect way to keep the temperature of your confit stable for a long time. Second, once you’ve already made the capital expenditure on the circulator (which is not inconsiderable), sous vide duck confit is more economical than the traditional method, since it uses substantially less duck fat. And third, a vacuum pouch is a much easier way to store the duck, and you don’t have to dig it out from under a layer of hardened fat.

The approach is fundamentally the same, though: duck legs are cured with a mix of salt and spices, then cooked for a long time at a low temperature. The duck pictured above, made to Modernist Cuisine specs, was cooked at 82°C for 8 hours, before being chilled in an ice bath and refrigerated. The recipe in the book calls for it to be reheated sous vide, then cooked in a frying pan to crisp the skin and served with potatoes also cooked sous vide with duck fat. I skipped those steps and used it in another preparation instead. Either way, this was easily the best duck confit I’ve ever made. The texture was perfect, falling off the bone but succulent. I’m not convinced all the seasonings in the cure came through, but the ones I could taste (especially star anise) were delicious. This is definitely my new standard approach to confit.

Myhrvold observes that, when told there’s no special benefit to cooking duck fully submerged in fat, some traditionalists simply refuse to believe it, despite the evidence.

What do you think: Could you tell sous-vide duck confit from confit cooked the traditional way?

Thanks again to the Society for Culinary Arts and Letters for the preview access to Modernist Cuisine. Come join the discussion!

Is there any kind of fare that Torontans (if that’s a word) call their own, like St Louis BBQ, San Francisco cioppino, or Brooklyn pizza?

The answer on the thread was more or less unanimous: Toronto’s signature dish is, apparently, peameal bacon on a bun. So it seemed like a logical choice for me to serve at my Canada Day party this year.

A word on terminology: Here in Canada, Canadian bacon is rarely called “Canadian bacon,” except when explaining it to foreigners. Locally, we call it either back bacon or peameal bacon. Moreover, what is often called Canadian bacon in the US is more akin to ham than to what you’ll actually find in our grocery stores.

There are three things that make for proper peameal bacon: first, it’s made from the loin, hence the “back bacon” designation. Second, it’s cured in a sweet brine, never dry-cured. Third, it’s rolled in, originally, pea meal (as in crushed dried peas), though cornmeal is much more common nowadays. In my experience, peameal bacon is usually unsmoked, but I’ve come across at least one Canadian reference (in Kate Aitken’s Canadian Cook Book) to it being smoked, so presumably this is a matter of preference. I might even give it a try next time.

After 48 hours in the brine, I removed my pork loin, rinsed it and patted it dry. A quick roll in a bed of cornmeal, and it was ready to slice! This has to be one of the easiest charcuterie items I’ve ever made: it uses a common cut of meat, doesn’t take very long, and requires no special techniques or equipment. The only catch is that you need curing salt, which contains 6.25% sodium nitrite. I order mine from Stuffers, where it’s sold under the name Prague Powder No. 1 for $6 a pound, which is easily enough to cure more than 40 pounds of loin.

Normally, I cook peameal by frying it in slices, though Kate Aitken also recommends roasting it whole or stuffing and baking. In this case, since barbecues are traditional for July 1, I grilled the slices, and nestled them into buns for our hungry guests, serving mustard and chili sauce on the side. I’m still not convinced that “peameal bacon on a bun” is Toronto’s one and only signature dish, but it was definitely well received for our Canada Day lunch!

What’s your favourite way to eat Canadian peameal bacon?