If you’re a hunter of wild things, there’s a natural habit you get into: you keep going back to the places you know where things grow you like, since you can count on it. If you’re like me, your time is precious, and you want to make the most of it. This year, I didn’t…
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.
Bacon Fat-Turkey Gizzard Confit
Smoked pork fat. Is there anything it can’t make delicious? I don’t think so. Bacon has been on my mind lately, since at the new restaurant we’ll be going through a lot of the stuff. I don’t know how much yet, but it will be a lot. 3-4 whole pork bellies, or more a week…
Classic Pork Headcheese
When I heard that suckling pigs were coming into the kitchen at Heartland, I squealed with joy. I knew that the heads would be leftover since they wouldn’t give up the amount of meat a large pig would for our typical headcheese. I begged the butcher to save the heads for me, so I could…
Pheasant Thigh Confit With Herbs
If you’re from the Midwest, no doubt you’ve enjoyed some pheasant cooked in mushroom soup, or maybe even a plucked, skin-on breast if you have a friend who really knows how to cook them. There are other parts of the bird that are great too, here’s a fun way to treat one of the more…
Ramp Leaf Sausage
A couple years ago, my friend, chef, and mentor Andy told me one of his favorite ways to use ramp bulbs was to put them through the grinder with meat while he makes sausage or grinds burger meat. I thought it sounded awesome and had to try making a version for myself: it was terrible….
Dried Morel-Pheasant Paté Chaud Froid
The culinary possibilities of working with fresh mushrooms are infinite, and dried mushrooms are no different. Cooking with dried shrooms can take some know-how and experience though; it can be heartbreaking when something doesn’t work out since a lot of time went into picking them. There is nothing worse than making a nice dinner with…
Chicken Heart Confit
Here I’ve applied the confit method to chicken hearts, instead of the traditional duck legs.Trimmed, cleaned chicken hearts seasoned and cooked slowly in fat until soft and tender are good in lots of things. Chopped up, gently browned and tossed with buttered noodles, or other pasta based dishes are some of my favorites. They’re also…
Turkey Hunter’s Morel Rillettes
I find that a lot of times, experiences give me ideas of things to make in the kitchen. A couple springs ago, I was hunting morels in Iowa with my friend, we had found plenty of ramps, but left them be to hunt out our real quarry: morels. Eventually we got to a park where…
How To Cook with Caul Fat / Lace Fat
Ever since I discovered what caul was, I’d been dying to cook with it, and it took me a number of years to finally get to work with this stuff. Reading old french cook books has always had me coming across it being used in various ways. The trick is….where to find it? What…