Here’s a fun way to use meat, and dried mushroom powder, specifically puffballs. In charcuterie and sausage making, milk powder is often used, especially in finely ground emulsions like bologna and hot dogs to achieve a nice, bouncy texture. Here, instead of using milk powder in the sausages, I use toasted, dried puffball powder, which…
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.
Smoked Heart Sausage
A while ago I was planning the menu for a dinner revolving around lamb, which was going to take the shape of 3 separate courses dedicated to the animal. The first course in a menu like that I usually like to include offal, to convey the importance of whole animal butchery and how creative you…
Turkey Terrine with Venison Bacon, Lobster Mushrooms and Wild Caraway
One of the best, and oldest uses charcuterie can provide is how it helps use up odds and ends in the kitchen, especially meat scraps. Sometimes I have a little of something left from one project, or two, and I’ll vacuum seal some of the meat away in a larger container made from scraps, just…
Venison Breakfast Sausage with Wild Blueberries
Looking in the freezer I had sausage on my mind. Seeing a couple bags of wild blueberries I remembered a moment of fear I had one day picking berries in a remote spot, and seeing a picture one of my friends posted about bears being seen harvesting berries in the area I was in. I…
Wild Fennel Seed Salami
Salami, cured meat with a couple crackers, a slice of cheese and a cold drink, there’s just about nothing I’d rather snack on while making dinner. With the dizzying variety of high quality salami brands available, it’s easy to go to the store, buy some and call it a day, and most of the time…
Pickled Lamb Tongues
My first time cooking with tongue was at Heartland, along with most of the other organs I learned how to cook. Usually I remember us cooking them and serving them as a small plate, tossed in a salad, or maybe warm mixed with a little pasta. I learned about pickled tongues when Lenny had us…
Bergamot Italian Sausage
I try to remember to dry as much stuff as I can to use during the Winter, which if you live in the Midwest you know can mean a lot of time in doors fighting cabin fever and looking for things to do. Inevitably I usually have plenty of bergamot (Monarda fistulosa) every year since…
Corned Venison Heart
At Thanksgiving this year, I was wandering around my girlfriend’s family farm in Wisconsin. I went outside to check on someone when I spotted something sitting on the grill outside (it’s cold enough at thanksgiving to refrigerate things outdoors, as most people who’ve brined a turkey in the Midwest know). Sitting on the grill was…
Winter Greens With Lentils, Chicken Heart Confit and Hedgehog Mushrooms
As the head of purchasing for the restaurant I have plenty of local purveyors I buy food from but there’s one that stands out from the others. He isn’t technically local, but he might as well be. His name is George Weppler, and in the Twin Cities there’s plenty of restaurants that would like to…
Peacock Thigh Confit, With Chanterelles and Leeks
As I was dreaming up how to make a 4 year old peacock taste good, I knew right away some of it would be made into confit. There’s a transformation that happens with meat with bones in it or ribbons of fat after it’s been seasoned and poached slowly in lard at a low temperature…
Peacock Neck Sausage
American culture has a predilection for looking at exotic food from safe distances. We want to watch shows about eating bugs and snakes, but the majority of us would balk if someone tried to feed them to us. We’re fascinated by foods we deem strange, but that fascination is strictly for the value of the…
Spruce Ham
A while ago I was having fun working with my old boss Andy, now executive chef of Oxcart Ale House in St. Paul while he did recipe development in my kitchen before opening the restaurant. He started out with the most difficult stuff: dialing in the from-scratch charcuterie program, which is similar to what I…
Goose Confit with Blackcap Raspberries
In my search for interesting and funky fruit, sometimes I forget about the things I’ve known about all along. Even if you don’t pick wild berries, you probably know the black cap. They’re easy to find, and most people don’t need a field guide to know what a raspberry looks like. That being said, there’s…