Back to the meat. The final challenge is to show off all of the skills we have learnt in the past year. For the apprentice challenge, create something that includes 3 charcuterie skills and for the charcuterie challenge create something that demonstrates 4 or more skills. So where do you start? I’ve learnt so much that I wanted to create something that demonstrated all of my new skills. The first idea that popped into my head was canapés. I love making platters of bite sized goodies and don’t need too much persuasion to cook up a storm. I didn’t manage to include all of the skills from the past twelve months but I gave it a red hot crack.

The most amazing discovery this year has been the smoking. I’ve never smoked before in my life so all the twitter spam I received trying to persuade me to stop was hilarious. If only they knew what I was really up to.

I enjoyed the smoked bacon, but my real triumphs were the smoked duck ham and whole smoked trout. This was the third time I have smoked a duck breast this year and each time it has got just a little bit better. I smoke things using my barbecue which is by no means an exact science resulting in slightly dry meat the first time. But practice makes perfect, and even if I do say so myself, I think I have perfected it.

The duck ham was served as part of a charcuterie platter but also wrapped around a cube of Gorgonzola.

The smoked trout was combined with a small amount of creme fraiche and horseradish sauce and served on a savoury shortbread biscuit. For recipe see below.

Brining. Check.

Smoking. Check.

I don’t think a month has gone by this year without the fridge containing a bag of bacon. I now refuse to buy it. The dishes that the bacon finds its way into are too numerous to name but in the name of showing off this had to be something special. As I was flicking through my cook books this dish caught my eye. A Caesar salad canapé with a bread ‘cup’ that acts as the crouton, holding all the usual elements of a Caesar salad. Don’t be fooled by the egg, these really were bite sized thanks to the mini muffin tray and the quails eggs that grace the top.

Dry cure. Check.

Another item I have made on more than one occasion is the duck prosciutto. I love duck and salting and hanging a breast turns something I love into something I adore! This was also the best batch to date. Over the year I have found that it does take a little bit of practice to get things right and this last batch of duck prosciutto was the perfect texture. Not too dry and just cured enough. In fact this batch was so good I got the seal of approval from an Italian friend who suggested I sold it to the Italian community in Sydney!

I served the duck as part of a charcuterie plate and wrapped around a small piece of dried fig.  The left over end that was too small to slice was chopped up and combined with spring onion, fried and served in a lettuce cup with sour cherry and fresh mint.

This year has also given me a freezer full of wonderful leftovers so to finish off the spread I dug out some leftover sausage meat and turned them into sausage rolls by wrapping it in puff pastry, sprinkling with sesame seeds and baking for 25 minutes in a hot oven.

What a year and what a great way to wrap it up by sharing all my new skills with my friends. One thing’s for sure I will definitely continue with home charcuterie and next year I might also add home cheese making to my repertoire. Watch this space.

Here is the recipe for the savoury shortbread and the smoked trout pâté:

For the trout:

1 whole rainbow trout
125g rock salt
50g brown sugar
Fennel tops
Parsley stalks
Creme fraiche
Horseradish cream
Lemon juice
Seasoning to taste
Tarragon leaves to garnish

For the shortbread:

125g plain flour
100g grated Parmesan
1 tablespoon finely chopped rosemary
Tiny pinch of cayenne pepper
Pinch of salt
100g butter
1 egg yolk

To smoke the trout combine the salt and sugar and place half of the mixture in the bottom of a non reactive dish. Stuff the trout with the fennel tops and parsley stalks and place some around the trout. Put the whole trout on top of the salt and sugar mixture and cover with the remaining mixture. Cover the dish with cling film and refrigerate for twelve hours.

After twelve hours remove the trout from the salt and rinse off any excess salt. Return to the fridge, uncovered to dry out for about six hours.

To smoke, soak some hickory chips in water before putting in the smoking tin. Prepare the barbecue for indirect cooking and preheat to 100 degrees centigrade. Put the tin with the soaked hickory chips over the heat and the trout on a cooling rack on the other side of the barbecue. Close the barbecue lid and maintain the heat at 100 degrees until the trout is cooked. This usually takes about an hour and a half. Be careful not to over cook the trout as it becomes dry.

Once cooked allow the trout to cool and carefully remove from the bones. Flake the trout into a bowl and combine with some creme fraiche, horseradish cream, salt, pepper and lemon juice to taste. Add just enough creme fraiche to bind the trout into the pate but be careful not to add too much or the mixture will become sloppy. Set aside while you make the shortbread.

To make the shortbread combine the flour, Parmesan, cayenne pepper, rosemary and salt in a mini food processor. Once combined add the cubed butter and continue to mix until it resembles breadcrumbs. Add the egg yolk until the mixture comes together t form a dough. Tip out onto a clean surface and form into a ball. Wrap in cling film and put in the fridge to rest for at least an hour.

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Once the dough has rested, roll it out until it is about 2mm thick and carefully cut out the biscuits using a 4cm cookie cutter.  This mixture should make about 40 biscuits, but if you don’t need 40 freeze the remaining dough for another day.

Place the biscuits on a baking tray lined with grease proof paper and bake in the preheated oven for 10-12 minutes or until lightly browned and cooked through.

Once cool, place a spoonful of the trout pate on top of each shortbread and top with a tarragon leaf.

As you can imagine that has put me off curing expensive cuts of meat for a little while, but the one thing I really did want to make this year was cured chorizo. I have made a couple of varieties of fresh chorizo this year (Spanish and Mexican) but I have been desperate to try the real deal, and this was my chance. As I was prepping all the ingredients for the curing challenge I went to the cupboard to get the sweet paprika out of the cupboard when I discovered the tin was practically empty.

This was a disaster.

In the last twelve months I have used the entire contents of the superior quality, sweet paprika that dad smuggled through Australian customs last year for Christmas! (thanks dad, I’ve really enjoyed it!). No time to source some more high quality Spanish paprika so I rifled through the book and found a recipe for Tuscan Salami. I would substitute the paprika with fennel and there you have it, a salami ready to be hung.

It was quite a palaver trying to get hold of the Australian equivalent of Bactoferm, so once my work colleagues took delivery of the goods and they were safely stored in the work freezer I really had to make the most of it. So alongside the Tuscan salami I also made some Hungarian Salami. This also involved Paprika, but it was Paprika of the Hungarian variety which I had plenty of in the cupboard for some reason.

I stuffed most of the salami mixture into natural casings, but I had a synthetic case that I thought I would try out and also a net, so the curing fridge was well and truly stuffed with a range of home cured goods.

The natural casings were ready first – when I say ready, I mean they had lost 30% of their original weight. So what do you do with home cured meat? Well the obvious answer is just eat it. Once I was over eating salami, I decided the Hungarian salami would make the perfect pea and broad bean salad, and the Tuscan variety would make the perfect topping for pizza.

I love pizza at the best of times, but there is something very special about using your own home cured Salami. When I was making the mixtures for the two different salami, it was difficult to believe how distinctive they would taste.

Here is my recipe for the broad bean salad, adapted from a Jamie Oliver recipe to suit the flavours of the Hungarian Salami. It’s difficult to quantify the ingredients for this recipe as it is very much a bit of this and a bit of that to suit your taste. You can’t really get a salad wrong.

Broad Beans
Peas (twice as many as the broad beans)
Hungarian Salami
Mint
Basil
Parmesan
Pine Nuts (toasting optional)
Olive Oil
Lemon juice
Salt and Pepper

Start by blanching the broad beans and peeling them to remove the outer tough skin and set aside. Chop the salami into small cubes and fry until crisp and set aside.

To make the dressing, blanch the peas and put half of them in a food processor and puree, adding enough olive oil to loosen to a thick dressing.

Season the dressing with a handful of grated Parmesan, salt pepper and lemon juice to taste. Chop the mint and basil and add to the dressing.

To assemble put the rest of the peas and broad beans into a bowl with the Hungarian Salami and pine nuts and stir through the dressing.

This salad is a great accompaniment to barbecued lamb.

I have made potted duck successfully before, and tried to make rabbit confit, but the rabbit didn’t work, so not to be defeated I decided this month was the month for potted rabbit. I’ve had a few bad experiences with rabbit in the past, but I really feel like it is something I should like so over the years I have persisted.  The first bad experience was not entirely my fault, I think the rabbit was off, and it was the only meal I have cooked in eleven years that neither myself or my husband could eat.  Thankfully that was many years ago, and once the memories had faded I was willing to give it a go again, this time time to make confit for pasta. This time the rabbit tasted good, but it was too salty to be enjoyable. So this challenge has given be a chance to redeem myself, third time lucky.

As with much of my cooking I read a few rabbit and confit recipes to come up with something that I thought would work.  Some confit recipes suggest you should salt the meat before it is cooked, but I think this is why my last rabbit confit was so salty, so I skipped this phase and reduced the salt in the recipe to one tablespoon.

Making the potted rabbit was a two day process, but the wait was worth it.  I achieved the tender rabbit that I wanted after 6 hours in a low oven.  Once the meat was combined with some acidic flavours that cut through the fat, it was delicious, moist spread for toast, or served with a bitter witlof salad.

And this recipe certainly fulfilled the “stretching” brief.  It’s amazing how much meat you can get from one small rabbit when it is cooked to the point that it falls off the bone. I have five generous ramekins of potted rabbit to keep me going for a few weeks.

Here is my recipe for Potted Rabbit:

For the confit:
1 rabbit
600ml duck fat
4 bay leaves
small handful of thyme
small handful of tarragon
1tsp peppercorns
1tbsp sea salt

To finish:
40g grain mustard
6ml white wine vinegar (or to taste)
1/2 tsp caster sugar (or to taste)
salt and pepper to taste

This recipe as taken me two days to complete. If you are more organised than me you could do it in a day, but I had to go on a mission to find duck fat as my pot of home rendered fat was all out. Start by making the confit. Pre-heat the oven to 100C. Joint the rabbit by taking off the shoulders and legs then chopping the saddle in half. I followed this helpful video I found on Jamie Oliver’s website, except my rabbit was smaller so I cut the saddle into two pieces so all pieces of rabbit were a fairly even size.

Gently heat the duck fat until it has turned into a liquid. Put the rabbit, bay leaves, thyme and tarragon sprigs, salt and peppercorns into an oven proof dish that will fit all ingredients snugly. Pour the duck fat over the rabbit until it is all covered, you may need slightly more/less than the 600ml depending on the size of your dish, the most important bit is that everything is submerged in the fat. Put a lid or foil on the dish and place in the pre-heated oven and cook gently for 4-6 hours, occasionally checking  that the meat is all still submerged. I also had to move the rabbit pieces around part way through as they was starting to stick to the base of the dish. You will know when the rabbit is ready as it will start to fall away from the bone when you try and pick it up.

When the rabbit is ready remove the dish from the oven and allow to cool slightly before removing the rabbit meat from the bone. At this point I allowed the rabbit to cool completely in the fat and kept it in the fridge over night as it was too late to start picking meat from the bone. The following day I gently reheated the fat in the oven so I could remove the rabbit pieces easily.

Once you have removed the rabbit pieces from the fat, strain the fat through a fine sieve into a pan and put to one side. Pull all of the meat from the the rabbit bones and shred finely into a bowl, making sure all of the bones, sinew and gristle are removed.

Pour about 50ml of the reserved duck fat into the shredded rabbit meat, add the mustard, and white wine vinegar and stir to combine. At this point taste the rabbit mixture to check the seasoning. I have made confit’s before that have been way too salty so didn’t need to add any more salt, but with 1 table spoon of sat in the confit this was just about right. I added a sprinkle of salt, pepper to taste and about half a teaspoon of caster sugar.

When the rabbit mixture is seasoned to your liking, spoon into 4-5 small ramekins and pack down with the back of a spoon. Pour a thin layer of the duck fat on top of the rabbit mixture to seal then refrigerate until the fat is set.

There are many ways to serve the potted rabbit. It was great served simply on toast, but to create something a little more special, serve with a side salad of witlof/chicory/endive (insert appropriate terminology from the country of your residence) drizzled with a grain mustard and olive oil dressing.

The Melton Mowbray pork pie is a bit of of a British institution, but it’s kind of the lesser known cousin to the Cornish pasty. The Melton Mowbray pork pie was given the Protected Geographical Status in 2008 by the European union meaning that only pork pies, baked in the traditional method, in and around the town of Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire can be called a Melton Mowbray Pork Pie. This means that despite my best efforts at following the traditional method to make my pork pie, I cannot call it a Melton Mowbray pork pie as I now reside 17000 or so kilometres from there, but I did my best and I was pretty chuffed with the results.

What makes a pork pie a Melton Mowbray pork pie, I hear you ask? Well apart from the obvious (where it’s made) it’s also about how it’s made. The meat in a Melton Mowbray pork pie is grey, this is becasue it does not contain any cured meat, like bacon, or any pink salt. It is also all about the shape. The Melton Mowbray pork pie has a distinctive bulge, because they are hand formed around a pie dolly, rather than baked in a tin.  Sadly I don’t have a pie dolly, so mine was hand formed around a jam jar, but it did the same job.

But making a pork pie doesn’t really give you Leicestershire on a plate. There are other great foods the can thank Leicestershire for their existence; the second of these are crisps (potato chips to my Australian and American readers). Ok, so this one isn’t such a large claim, crisps were not invented in Leicestershire, or even the UK, but for many years Leicester has been home to one of the most popular brands of crisps, Walkers.  And while I am on the trivia theme, Walkers actually started out life (and still is) as a butchers shop, but after World War 2, when meat was scarce and expensive they diversified and started making crisps.

I made homemade crisps from Gordon Ramsay’s Great British Pub Food.  They were much easier than I thought to make, and surprisingly authentic. For some reason I thought crisps were one of those foods that taste good because they are mass produced and processed. But I hand cut them, and hand fried them and sprinkled them with sea salt and rosemary, and they were the real deal. Golden, crisp, salty perfection.

With pork pie and crisps I was starting to build up a Ploughman’s type lunch so to complete the set it has to be served with a slice of Stilton Cheese.  Another EU protected product, this smelly blue cheese can only be called Stilton if it is made in a small corner of Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire or Derbyshire. There are only six dairies that have the licence to make the cheese and three of them are in or around, yes you’ve guessed it, Melton Mowbray. Blue cheese, especially Stilton can be an aquired taste, and it’s one I aquired many years ago. I like it with garlic mushrooms and steak; in a quiche with bacon; after dinner with port; or served with a slice of bread and butter and a chunk of pork pie.

I’m not sure how I’m going to top this challenge and I’m looking forward to making more pork pie, but I’m sure Mrs. Wheelbarrow will come up with something good for the October Challenge – nine down three to go. So here is my pork pie recipe, formulated from reading Charcuterie by Ruhlman, The Hairy Bikers Food Tour of Britain, Gordon Ramsay’s Great British Pub Food and the Dickinson and Morris pork pie website.

My Pork Pie (makes 2)

For the Pork Jelly:
2 pigs trotters
500g pork bones (I used the ribs from my last pork belly)
2 carrots chopped
1 onion roughly chopped
2 sticks of celery roughly chopped
2 bay leaves
2 sprigs of rosemary
1 tsp black peppercorns

For the Pastry:
75g lard
25ml milk
25ml water
225g plain flour plus extra for dusting
salt and pepper
1 egg

For the filling:
400g pork neck
100g pork belly mince
1/2 tsp ground allspice
1/2 tsp ground mace
1 tsp salt
2 anchovy fillets finely chopped
small handful chopped fresh sage leaves
pepper to taste
1 egg, hard boiled

Start with the jelly. Put all the ingredients in a large pan, cover with water and bring to the boil. Simmer for 4 hours, remove the meat and veg and boil to reduce to about 500ml. I saved the meat from the trotters and ribs and combines with the leftover jelly to make brawn, a Charcutepalooza added bonus. Set aside to cool completely. This can be done the day before.

For the pastry, heat the lard, milk and water in a pan until the lard has just melted.  Put the flour, salt and pepper into a bowl, make a well in the centre and p0ur in the warm lard, milk and water. Combine to make a pastry. Wrap in clingfilm and allow to rest in the fridge while you make the filling.

For the filling, finely chop the pork neck by hand then combine with the pork belly mince. To this, add the chopped sage, allspice, mace, chopped anchovies salt and pepper. Mix well by hand, then divide into two balls and chill until needed.

Pre-heat the oven to 180C. To assemble the pies, divide the pastry into two portions one for each pie. Reserve a quarter of each ball of pastry for the lid then roll out the remaining pastry to form the pie shell.  Place your flour dusted pie dolly, or equivalent (I used a jam jar) in the centre of the pastry circle and form the pie crust around it. Remove the pie dolly and place the slightly flattened ball of filling in the centre of the pie crust. Roll out the remaining quarter of pastry into a circle for the lid.  Brush around the edge of the pastry case and seal the top, crimping the edges to ensure they are stuck, but also make it look nice. Repeat with the rest of the ingredients to make the second pie.

At this stage, for a twist on a regular pork pie, you can add in a boiled egg to make a gala pie.  Mold the pork mixture around the peeled, boiled egg before placing in the pastry case.

Brush the pie in beaten egg and cook in a pre-heated oven for 45 minutes to an hour until the pastry is golden brown and the meat is cooked through. To finish off, cut a hole in the top of the pie and fill with the pork jelly. You might need to warm the jelly so it can be poured.  This was the hardest part and I didn’t manage to get as much in the pie as I would have liked. Allow to cool completely, before cutting and serving.

Despite my love of terrine, my repertoire is pretty small, so I was very excited at the thought of trying a new terrine recipe.  I eagerly read the chapter on terrine’s and pate and had to stop myself from making the pork pie (a classic British dish, originally made in the county I was born and bred). I didn’t think the pork pie quite fit the bill for this challenge, but I will be making it some time soon.  Not long after I bought Charcuterie I also bought Jane Grigson’s Charcuterie and French Pork Cook Cookery. It’s been thumbed but not cooked from, until now.  I took the expertise from Ruhlman combined with the ingredients from a Grigson duck terrine and came up with this.

I marinated the duck breast slices in Port and orange juice over night. The following morning I minced the duck leg, pork and veal, combined it with the egg, parsley, thyme and some of the marinating liquid (port and orange) and seasoned to taste. This was then layered with the duck meat and the duck liver.

It was baked in the oven for a couple of hours and allowed to cool in the terrine dish.  Once it was cool, I served it with some homemade bread and cornichons.  I have struggled with homemade bread over the years. Trying to bake it from time to time, but always being disappointed by the results.  This time I thought I would follow one of Ruhlman’s recipes from his Baking App. It worked. For the first time, in the ten years since I first tried to make homemade bread, I made a loaf that wasn’t doughy and tasted just as good the day after as it did when it first came out of the oven.

I made a baguette . The recipe was meant to make one French stick, but my baking tray (and oven) were not big enough for one, so I cut it in half and made two perfectly formed  half loaves. Sliced, with butter, they were an excellent accompaniment to my terrine.  So that’s another, unexpected new skill I can add to my year of meat, I can can now make bread too!

As you can imagine I was a little disheartened when I read this months challenge (sorry Mrs. Wheelbarrow). I was mulling it over for a few days, I even  got a few tweets from fellow Charcutepaloozers asking whether I was OK with it.  Then I realised the only way forward was to make the one thing I thought I never would – hot dogs.  This challenge is about meat, it’s about charcuterie, but for me it’s also about trying things I wouldn’t normally do. With that settled it had to be hot dogs.

Hot dogs differ from regular sausages because of the way they are made.  An emulsion is made from the fat giving them their distinctive texture.  I was a little stunned, to say the least, by the manufacturing process of the hot dogs. I say manufacturing because it didn’t feel very home made.  The beef was minced and partially frozen twice, before finally putting the mixture through the food processor. Now I know where the term ‘processed’ food comes from.  I was left with a paste that I wasn’t convinced contained any meat, even though I’d chopped it and minced it myself.  I was relieved to see that the mixture contain mustard powder, spices and garlic, a lot of garlic, so there was some hope that it was going to have some flavour.

This challenge is not only about making the product, it’s also about what you do with the finished item.  This month I’m about as far removed from the last challenge as I could possibly get.  Last month I took on the Michelin Stars, and produced a six course tasting menu, this month I’m taking on the junk food. If you’re going to do junk food, you have to embrace it. How better to do it than take a view of junk from around the world. Charcutepalooza spans the miles, so I thought I would do hot dogs from the Poms, Aussies and Yanks.

For the Poms: I started with the motherland, the easiest and most obvious to me.  Unfortunately, this is exactly why I didn’t want to make hot dogs. My childhood memory of hot dogs, are sausages that came out of a can and were boiled in a pan. If you were really lucky, you’d get hot dogs in a can with beans.  It’s something that reminds me of Bonfire Night. It’s the kind of food you eat on a cold Autumn night while you’re standing outside watching the fireworks, desperately trying to keep warm.  The perfect accompaniment to to the beans and sausage is a baked potato.  I want to say a baked potato that has been wrapped in foil and baked on the bonfire but I think that is one of those fond memories that has been embellished over the years and probably never really happened. That’s the funny thing about memories, they can be created and changed over the years but still thought of as fond.

I didn’t smoke the hot dogs as suggested in the recipe because winter is upon us here and I didn’t fancy going in the garden. I have also run out of smoking chips and it was all just a little bit too much effort.  Instead I boiled them as I used to do with the canned variety.  They were then stirred through the home made baked beans, and served with a baked potato.

The beans were probably the highlight of the dish.  It was a three day event to make them, but absolutely worth it.  I soaked the dried borlotti beans over night on the Sunday. Boiled them with garlic, potato and tomato for about an hour on Monday, then baked them in the oven with bacon, rosemary, tomato and a dash of Worcestershire Sauce for about three hours.  They were then reheated on Tuesday and served with the hot dogs.

For the Aussies: It had to be the Dagwood Dog. I say this like I’m an expert, but the Dagwood Dog is a new dish in my culinary vocabulary.  I was introduced to the Dagwood Dog at my first Sydney Royal Easter show last April.  The Easter Show is an annual event in the Sydney calender celebrating all things vaguely agricultural with a hint of fairground fun thrown in. I have a good friend who is a loyal Easter show attendee. She has been trying to get me to go along since we met 4 1/2 years ago, and this year I finally caved.  Unfortunately I didn’t quite get the full show experience because I didn’t sample a Dagwood Dog or go on any fairground rides. I did however pat a goat and purchase the obligatory show bag.

So what is a Dagwood Dog? It’s a battered hot dog sausage on a stick served with a dollop of tomato sauce.  Not my idea of a tasty treat but sadly this dish forms many of my Australian friends childhood memories.  Apparently you haven’t had a real Easter show experience without one.  I think I tried to dress mine up too much. I made a tempura style beer batter, but it was so light it didn’t really stick to the sausage very well.  I think I still managed to capture the the spirit of an Aussie hot dog, but I decline to comment how it tasted…

For the Yanks: From the home of the hot dog it had to be the classic hot dog, served in a bun with a fried onions, mustard and ketchup.  Again I didn’t smoke the sausage but poached it in water for a few minutes.  I have to say I was a little disturbed by the finished product.  It was a worryingly accurate representation of the the hot dogs I remember from the can.  The processing and blending turns the sausage from something that once represented meat into a smooth, spongy sausage that can be eaten without teeth if necessary.  I don’t like to be negative, but the reason I started making my own sausage was to get away from the exact thing I spent the best part of a Saturday making in my kitchen. Yes, it probably had a little more flavour than the ones I remember, and I can guarantee the meat that went in was best quality beef with a good proportion of real beef fat; not bits that were scraped off the butchers floor, but the end result was something I’d happily put back on the shelf of the local supermarket.

I did complete my challenge and turn product into dish. I made myself a hot dog sausage in a bun, with onions, ketchup and mustard on my impromptu day off work.  But I have to confess, I didn’t really enjoy it and I made my husband eat the rest of them in his sandwiches for lunch.

I am disappointed that I didn’t enjoy this challenge more.  Normally all things home made taste infinitely better than anything shop bought but this recipe is just to accurate when it comes to recreating processed food.  And to rub salt in the wound these took three times longer to make than regular sausages. I certainly won’t be making them again, but I may make some regular beef sausages with the same seasoning as I did like the idea of the paprika, mustard and garlic. You win some you lose some and it all adds to life’s rich tapestry.

A number of months or maybe even years later I realised that the little piece of heaven on my plate at Whitley Ridge was in fact a boudin blanc, a fancy French sausage. Unfortunately, as I went to the website to get a link to for the blog, I discovered that the Whitley Ridge I have such fond memories of, that started my love of fine dining, is no longer there, so I will never be able to go back and sample the boudin blanc again.

I love to recreate dishes that I’ve eaten in restaurants, but until now, this one has been way out of my reaches. This months Charcutepalooza challenge is to stuff a sausage. I over achieved last month, and stuffed where it wasn’t necessary so this month I had to challenge myself further. The other part of the challenge was to stuff either an Italian sausage or poultry sausage. So here it was, handed to me on a plate, my opportunity to recreate the all hallowed boudin blanc from Whitley Ridge.

The other thing I’ve been wanting to do for a while is Sous-Vide cooking, or boil in the bag to you, mum, if you’re reading. With all this charcuterie making I treated myself to a food saver, so that I could store my meats without having to freeze, but the vac packed food is also the perfect set up for slow cooking in a water bath. I can’t quite stretch to a professional water bath but there are ways of improvising at home. For items that only require short cooking times it is quite easy to monitor the temperature of a pan of water on the hob.

So the centre piece of my Michelin inspired meal was the boudin blanc. I followed the recipe in the book, but instead of using chicken I used pheasant. This was to accompany the pheasant breast that was also to be cooked Sous Vide, so the meat in the sausage was primarily leg, with any other trimmings I could find on the carcass and from the breasts. Two pheasants yielded just enough meat for the full recipe.

Boudin blanc has the weirdest consistency of any sausage I have made to date. When I recreate recipes from a restaurant I usually have a pretty accurate guess as to what the dish contains but there is no way in the world I’d have guessed this one.

With the majority of the stuffing being milk and eggs it was incredibly sloppy. I can usually stuff sausages solo and often do it while Graham is out on his motorbike on a Saturday morning, but this was definitely a two man job.

The twisting of the links was also really tricky because the sausage was so slippery they just kept unwinding. In the end I had to give up and tie each one with string. A little more laborious than usual, but having fried off a dollop of mixture to check the seasoning I knew it would be worth it.

Onto dinner. I decided to follow the Michelin star theme, and combine it with Charcutepalooza, to create a six course degustation dinner and invited two friends over to share the experience. I love cooking and eating but somehow sharing it with friends makes it even better. There is one teeny, tiny problem though, since I started throwing Charcutepalooza dinner parties I now have a queue of friends lining up to be chief testers, I’m going to have to start doing twice monthly dinners to share the love fairly.

We started with an amuse bouche of salmon ceviche. Although not strictly cured in the same way I have been doing, it was salted briefly to draw out some of the moisture then ‘cooked’ in lime juice. This was then served with some finely diced chilli and fennel. A great start to a meal, the small spoon may look a little stingy, but it is quite a rich dish so actually much more than this and you wouldn’t be able to manage it and, there is another five courses to sample, so I wouldn’t want to fill up my guests with the first course.

The entrée was duck three ways. There was some smoked duck ham, served with a blue cheese cream (ricotta and Stilton, beaten together); a duck liver parfait; a portion of potted duck (duck confit stripped from the bone, combined with chopped pistachios and a little duck fat, compressed and chilled). This was an excellent way to show off my new found charcuterie skills. I think this dish will become a regular in our house, watch out for a post with the recipe for this one soon. The duck ham has a subtle smoked flavour, and for duck breast is incredibly moist, as per Rhulman’s suggestion it is also the perfect match for some blue cheese I found the blue cheese a little over powering when I served it straight, but mixed with Ricotta was just right. The potted duck is a great way to use up the duck legs that were the by product of the duck ham.

As I was preparing the evenings feast I realised it was a little heavy on meat so I threw in a winter salad of roasted carrots and parsnips with a beetroot dressing. However, I still couldn’t resist roasting the veg in duck fat. Considering this salad consisted of roasted vegetables, it was actually fairly light, and made me feel like I was cancelling out some of the duck fat contained in the rest of the meal.

Following the salad was the centre piece for the evening. The boudin blanc were cooked in the vac pack in a pan of water at 63 degrees centigrade for one hour. The pheasant breasts were bagged with juniper berries, thyme, garlic, crumbled bay leaf, port and olive oil. Weighing in at a mere 70g they only took 15-20 minutes in the water bath, and you could actually see the meat change colour as it was cooking, so there was no doubt when that was cooked. The boudin blanc was then gently pan fried in butter to brown the skin and was served with the pheasant breast, bread sauce, slow cooked cabbage, and a reduction of pheasant stock and port. Another satisfying dish that used all of the bird (well, apart from the head that I had to chop off and bin before I could reconstruct the rest of it, I’m not normally squeamish, but even I have limits!)

To take us through to dessert we had a shot of tomato sorbet, a palette cleanser to move from the savoury to the sweet dishes. I just couldn’t quite squeeze in the Charcutepalooza theme here, but I felt the meal would not be complete without it, especially if it was going to satisfy Michelin Star standards.

And finally, we finished up with a chicken cake pop to celebrate this months poultry theme. Now I ummed and aahed about putting a photo of my chicken online. I’m new to desserts and even newer to cake decorating, so wasn’t overwhelmingly pleased with the result (think 5 year old art class) but then I decided I needed to mark the occasion so that I can look back in years to come and see how much I’ve hopefully improved. And that is it, my six course Michelin inspired dinner was complete.

So how did it turn out? What was the best bit? Well, the sausage was exactly how I imagined it would be. Much lighter than your average sausage, due to the high milk and egg content, and exceptionally moist. It would be interesting to do a taste test, comparing the regular poached boudin blanc versus the sous-vide version. I’m sure I will give this a go in the next few weeks as I eat the leftovers. I think I will have the leftovers in the freezer for some time as they are pretty rich so you don’t want to eat more than one at a time. This means if you come over for dinner in the next few weeks expect to eat boudin blanc!

Grinding

This months challenge was grinding.  I have to say I was mildly disappointed because the year of meat was about challenging myself and cooking out of my comfort zone and it was actually sausages that started all this off.  I’ve been grinding my own meat and making my own sausages for more than a year now so there wasn’t as much motivation for this challenge as there was for the salting, brining and smoking.

But I signed up for a years worth of challenges, so I wasn’t going to not do this one because I’ve done it before.  The first thing to do was think about how I could add an element of challenge to the task. The obvious way for me was to make sausages with natural casings. All of my sausages to date have been made with man made, collagen casings as that was what my local butcher sells.  So off I went on my quest to find natural casings.  This mission was also part of my pursuit to find a butcher that can regularly supply me with good quality, happy meat, so I tried another butcher in a different suburb and finally I found a butcher who didn’t think I was crazy for wanting to make my own sausages. Hudson Meats have a philosophy of ‘paddock to plate’ meat, so that they know where all of their meat comes from and it is all from a sustainable, well treated source.  Hudson Meats were able to sell me two different widths of natural sausage casings and also the lamb and pork trimmings to go in to the sausages.

So my challenge this month was to make sausages with natural casing as opposed to the man-made casings I have used up until now.  I decided on the Mexican Chorizo because I made a batch of fresh, Spanish Chorizo recently and I thought it would be good to compare the two.

Mexican Chorizo

The natural casings were much easier to handle than I thought, and the results were exceptional. I cannot believe it took more than a year to give it a go, and there is no looking back – it’s natural casings all the way from here on in.  I loved the Spanish Chorizo, and the Mexican was different, but equally as good. With a kilo of Mexican Chorizo Sausages and the leftover meat that never quite goes through the machine, I had to work out what to do with them.

Help yourself Friday

My initial thoughts on Mexican food is not an overly positive one. It’s never been in the forefront of my cooking experience and I blame my high school cookery teacher for that. In year 7 we had to choose a country to write a project about which culminated in cooking a dish from the country of origin.  I chose Mexico for the brightly coloured travel agent brochures and a dream of one day visiting.  My final dish was tacos and as I was cooking up the minced meat (not hand ground in 1991) Mrs. Jelly (yes that was really the name of my cookery teacher) came around to my station, stirred my beef and said it was too dry, so she tipped a cup full of water into it.  On marking my taco dish, she marked me down because “Your minced beef is too sloppy Nichola”. Aged 11 I was devastated but I wasn’t brave enough to tell Mrs. Jelly it was her that had added the water and determined the sloppiness of my dish.  I never liked cooking for the 3 years it was compulsory and dropped the subject the minute I had the choice.

So as you can see, when it came to what to do with Mexican sausage, I wasn’t immediately sure what to do, but I thought “Sod it, it doesn’t have to be anything fancy.” So on Friday night we had chicken and Chorizo fajitas.

I made some guacamole from an avocado; a handful of cherry tomatoes quartered and deseeded; some finely chopped red onion and chilli; a handful of chopped, fresh coriander; some lime juice to taste. This was spread on the tortillas with some sour cream and accompanied with some sliced, fried onion, chicken and chorizo and some roasted red pepper. Simple Friday night cooking, but done well, from scratch,much tastier than you can imagine. So, Mrs. Jelly, despite your best efforts, I am now a good cook, and I don’t need your advice to ‘improve’ my dish! And as for the sausage casings, it’s natural ALL the way.

Nic's Fajita

Canadian Bacon

April’s challenge is smoking. I’m not usually a huge fan of smoked foods, I like it, but not too much and not too often and it’s probably not something I would choose on a restaurant menu. However, because smoking is an official Charcutepalooza challenge I had to give it a go, as I’m not one to shirk on a challenge, especially when it comes to cooking! There were three options this month, Smoked Salmon, Tasso Ham and Canadian Bacon. With the success of my first batch of bacon I was keen to try the Canadian Bacon and compare the difference between the loin and the belly and smoked versus non-smoked.This month also marks our second official trip back to the UK since we arrived in Australia in 2006. It’s a little concerning when you are packing your bags for a holiday and the first thing you think is not “Have I got my passport?” but “Will I be able to complete my April Charcutepalooza challenge?” By the end of this year I think I might be in rehab with my meat addiction…

Slicing the finished product

With the UK trip fast approaching I had to act on this pretty quickly. As I wasn’t sure whether I would like the smoked food, I didn’t want to rush out and buy a smoker (despite my love of kitchen gadgets) so we had to rig up a system on our trusty barbeque. We found a smoking box and hickory chips in the trusty Australian hardware store. The setup: smoking box and hickory chips on one side of the barbeque, over direct heat; meat on other side over unlit burner.

It was a complete success! Four months into the Charcutepalooza, I should know by now not to doubt the recipes, but yet again, the results were infinitely better than I could ever imagine. The tastiness of the bacon was also increased by the excitement of borrowing a proper slicer from a friends parents. Proper slicers increase the taste sensation ten fold. I was hooked again; desperate to smoke whatever I could get my hands on. Flicking through the book (if you haven’t worked it out by now it’s Charcuterie by Ruhlman and Polcyn) the recipe that really caught my eye was smoked duck ham. Even though I enjoyed the Canadian Bacon, bacon for me really needs some fat to crisp it up, so the other thing I really wanted to do was smoke some pork belly.

Sliced Canadian Bacon

This month’s trip to the UK has been on the calendar for a good 18 month so I could hardly disappoint my Mother-in-Law in the name of meat. This meant there was only one thing for it, my curing salts had to come for a holiday too! This was a tiny bit concerning as I’ve watched all the reality TV shows and I know what they do to people who carry bags of white powder in their bags, but I was willing to take the risk, what’s the worst they could do for a bag of salt? I was a little bit concerned as I crossed through the green gate with ‘nothing to declare’ but I made it, with no internal examinations to my name!

The English Country Smoking Setup

This meant that my week in Lancashire with the parents turned into a week of brining and smoking rather than relaxing.  I had a moment of excitement in the local supermarket when I managed to find a local crown of Goosnargh Duck and some rare breed pork belly. Actually I was torn between excitement and a moment of jealousy and almost homesickness (but not quite!).

With Dad’s help (I’m trying to inspire him to take up curing as a retirement hobby) I rigged up a smoking barbeque. It wasn’t quite as good as the home setup but the backdrop of the English countryside made up for that. Speaking of English countryside, I had a moment of inspiration one morning when I saw a pheasant walking down the garden path, but unfortunately I wasn’t quick enough to turn him into pheasant ham.

A quintessential English garden

With smoked duck ham and pork belly bacon, I had to find a suitable way to serve it.  The only way to eat the duck ham is as it is; it was served for lunch with a cheese platter, and as Ruhlman and Polcyn say, the smoked duck ham works perfectly with blue cheese.

Duck Ham

The bacon was also served as is as part of a full English breakfast, but with the leftovers I made a fitting tribute to my homeland: Smokey bacon, broccoli and Stilton tart.  A memory of my homeland because quiche was a very popular dish served at every buffet in the 1980′s and Stilton being one of the cheeses originating in my home county of Leicestershire. If you can’t find Stilton, any other blue cheese will probably do.

Smoky Bacon, Broccoli and Blue Cheese Tart

225g plain flour
½ tsp salt
50g chilled butter, cubed
50g chilled lard, cubed
1.5-2 tablespoons water
3 thick slices Canadian bacon/smoked streaky bacon
½ small head broccoli
75g blue cheese (I used Stilton)
4 eggs, 1 separated
275 ml double cream
Salt and pepper to taste

Make the pastry:
Combine the butter, lard and flour in a food processor until it  forms the consistency of breadcrumbs then gradually add the water until it sticks together into a pastry.  Remove from the food processor and knead gently until it is all mixed and the consistency of pastry. Leave to rest in the fridge for half an hour.

Roll out pastry and line a 25cm loose bottom flan tray with the pastry. Prick the bottom and leave to rest in the fridge for another 30 minutes.

Pre-heat oven to 200 degrees centigrade. Line the pastry with baking paper, put the baking beans or rice on top of the baking paper and bake the pastry case blind for 15 minutes. Remove baking paper and beads and brush with egg white and return to oven for 2 minutes or until the egg white is set and the pastry is lightly golden.

Meanwhile, as the pastry is baking, prepare ingredients for the filling. Chop the broccoli into small florets, half or quarter the larger ones if necessary. Chop the bacon into 5mm cubes. Break the cheese into small pieces a similar size to the bacon. Evenly distribute the bacon, cheese and broccoli over the pastry base.

Lightly whisk the eggs and additional egg yolk and combine with the cream in a bowl and season with pepper and a little bit of salt. Be careful not to put too much salt in though as the blue cheese and bacon will be salty.  Pour the egg and cream mixture over the ingredients in the tart case and shake gently so the filling is evenly distributed.

Bake in the pre-heated oven for about 35-45 minutes or until firm and lightly brown on top.

The tart can be served warm from the oven, or chilled the next day.

I love my friends because they all humour me and my crazy ideas. 

So when I had to think of what to do with my corned beef for the March Charcutepalooza challenge, I knew my friends would come to the rescue. Three days before the beef went into the brine I called an EMERGENCY Experimental Sunday.  Experimental Sunday is basically a dinner party we have all been taking it in turns to host over the last few years.  The rules for Experimental Sunday are this:

1. You have to cook something you have never cooked before.
2. You are absolutely not allowed to practice before the day.
3. All guests have to bring enough money for take-out pizza (just in case).

We hadn’t had an Experimental Sunday in a while so corned beef seemed to fit the bill perfectly and to my great joy all of the friends invited were super keen to be part of the Charcutepalooza Experimental Sunday! This untried recipe involved a little more effort than usual.  The first challenge was to source the meat (the recipe calls for brisket), but every butcher I went to sold ready corned silverside. Apart from the odd comment of “Why not just buy the ready corned beef, love?”, I also had the problem that brisket is sold here but not in 2.25kg pieces, they seem to be sold in individual serving sized chunks.  I’m becoming a bit of a butcher whore and I’ve been searching high and low for a good, local butcher that sells good quality, humanely raised, organic beef.  I have tried many different butchers now and the problem I am finding is that Australian butchers seem to have a love affair with pre-cutting all of their meat into cuts they think the customer would like…

Eventually I found a butcher with a whole side of brisket out the back; it also had a bone in, so I politely asked if I could have a 2.25kg piece without the bone.  This proved a little too taxing for my butcher and I ended up with four pieces of meat - two chunks with bones and two chunks without. The largest piece weighed in at just over a kilo, so I figured that would be OK but I really did want to do a large piece of meat so I ended up visiting another butcher and bowing to peer pressure bought a 1.2kg piece of silverside. Again, not quite as large as I’d hoped, but now I had two bits to play with. This also meant that Experimental Sunday was now a taste-test of brisket versus silverside – which cut of meat would be the winner?!

On Tuesday I made the brine. The toasting of the herb and spice mix filled the house with beautiful aromas, this mix was then added to the water, salt, sugar and cure #1 and allowed to cool – brine ready.

On Wednesday the brisket and silverside were submerged in the brine, weighted down with ramekins and transferred to the fridge. My poor husband lost his beer fridge to meat for a second time (the other still has meat hanging at 15 degrees, and although he’s a Brit too, contrary to popular belief he doesn’t like warm beer!).

That was all I had to do until Sunday, when the meat was removed from the brine, rinsed, and simmered slowly in order to cook it.  I was a little concerned that the beef might be very salty, so I soaked it in fresh water for a couple of hours before cooking. I also brought it to the boil in fresh water and discarded before simmering the meat, in a third pot of fresh water, with the rest of the pickling spice.

The beef was served as I remember other cured meats being served as a child, with boiled veg and a comforting parsley sauce.

The verdict: both the brisket and the silverside, according to my husband, tasted exactly like the beef in the tin, (he actually enjoys it on his sandwiches), only ten times better! Phew, it was worth the effort. On the taste front, I had to take his word for it, as I have never managed to eat the tinned stuff as even the idea of it repulses me. However, the flavour and texture of this beef was actually pretty satisfying.

For everyone else, corned silverside was a familiar childhood memory, but apparently Australian corned silverside is renowned for being a bit dry. According to the judges mine was much more tender, but the winner, by a country mile was the brisket. The brisket fell apart, and was incredibly juicy and tender, with a fabulous herby/spicy flavour. Even my friend, who would be a vegetarian if she could, went back for seconds and possibly thirds of the brisket!

Such was the awe of the homemade corned beef it led to conversations about how to make such dishes from scratch. So out came the charcuterie bible which, once they had recovered from the lack of photographs, was followed by many gasps of “ooh” and “aah” and “when are you having the next dinner party?”

In amongst all of the excitement the biggest revelation of the evening was allspice. Pre- homemade corned beef we had all thought that allspice was a secret combination of spices that someone had ground up and put in a jar, but every day’s a school day and out of the cupboard came the whole allspice berries that had been a key ingredient in the pickling spice.

There wasn’t any left over brisket, but the silverside made very nice salads and sandwiches for the rest of the week. Following the success of the corned beef I have promised my dad I will take some pickling spice and cure back to the UK for my next visit so he too can share in the new found joy that is REAL corned beef – he too is also a fan of the canned variety but I’m convinced I can convert him.

And of course I have to say a huge thank you to my lovely friends for giving up their Sunday evening to eat meat!