Do you like bacon? Pancakes? Crispy, browned things cooked on a griddle? Maple syrup? Of course you do, so fasten your seatbelt and come aboard Alan’s organ train, because we’re traveling to scrapple country. If you like offal, or even if you don’t partake in the finer parts of animals and you’ve never had scrapple,…
Charcuterie
Charcuterie is the art and craft of curing meats, and it's a passion of mine. I've cured thousands of pounds of meat for all kinds of projects over the course of my career, and my skill working with various odds and ends is something I pride myself on.
Here you'll find recipes for things to make out of trim and scrap, as well as intensive, show-stopping projects like headcheese, homemade sausages, fancy French terrines, and simpler things like venison bacon.
Elk or Venison Backstrap Bresaola
If you like making charcuterie, or are charcuterie curious, bresaola is a great place to start. Bresaola is a traditional Italian charcuterie, and it’s a lot easier to make than other types of cured meats as it’s a whole-muscle cure. With whole muscle cures, all you have to do is season a piece of meat,…
Wild Fennel Seed Venison Chorizo
I’ve been making a lot of charcuterie using UMAi DRY casings lately, and, after a month, my first one is done: a Spanish chorizo-style salami recipe made from ground elk and pork flavored with wild fennel seeds. If you’re not familiar, this is a dry cured sausage that’s very different from lump Mexican chorizo beef…
How to Make Venison Biltong at Home
Biltong is a great piece of South African beef charcuterie. If you like making charcuterie at home, or just like a good bag of jerky you’ll love it. Just think beef jerky, but softer, more tender. If you’re not familiar, biltong is made by cutting meat into slabs about an inch thick, seasoning, with black…
Smoked Venison Tasso Ham
A venison tasso recipe may not exactly be a traditional piece of charcuterie, but, if you like spicy smoked ham, you’ll love it. If you’re not familiar (it’s kind of an obscure ham) tasso is a smoked Creole ham that typically has a spicy rub of paprika and cayenne, among a bunch of other things….
Venison Liver Pate
Looking for a good pate recipe for venison liver (or any liver for that matter?) here you go, this is my go-to. This is basically the same recipe I was taught by one of my old chefs, who learned it from a master butcher from Rome (Chef Fillipo Caffari). Mostly we would make it with…
Venison Nduja with Bear Fat
I’m a charcuterie freak: if it’s cured, salted, smoked, aged, potentially strange and delicious, I’m on board. Nduja, a little known spreadable salami from Calabria that’s been a chef secret for years now checks a lot of those boxes. Today, I’ll run you through the process I used to make a venison nduja recipe. I…
Creole Blood Sausage Cake
Blood Sausage Cake is one of the more appetizing names I’ve typed into this website. All jokes aside, I can guarantee you that if you have access to fresh animal blood, and enjoy offal, it’s definitely for you. It tastes great, too, and if you have ancestors from Scandinavia, like I do, they’ll applaud you…
