Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing (Revised and Updated) Kindle Edition

The recipes in this book have incorrect quantities of salt, curing salt, and sugar. The fermenting times advised in this book also do not permit adequate fermenting using the culture the author recommends in the recipes. 12 hours to ferment at 85* and not even stating humidity when the manufacture for the culture clearly states a much, much longer fermentation time and required humidity levels of about 90%RH. If you follow the recipes in this book you will be rewarded with a ruined sausage product. My faith in these authors as sausage making experts is not very good...

If you want a beautifully written, lyrical account of one man's journey into sodium nitrite, this book is for you. If you want clear, consistent instructions that you can actually use to cure meat, this book is seriously deficient.I've cured and smoked bacon twice in the past couple of months. The first time, I followed a recipe that I found by Googling and it came out great. Everywhere I looked, though, I saw references to this book, and how great it is, and I figured I should probably break down and spend the money to get "real" instructions for bacon -- along with everything else contained herein.Ruhlman makes a point of providing weights (in grams) for everything, which is great. Hey, precision! So, I got out my scale and mixed up his basic dry cure. I read the instructions that say how much dry cure per how much pork belly, then weighed my two pieces of belly and measured out, to the gram, exactly how much cure I needed for each piece. I applied the cure, put the meat into bags, and put it in the refrigerator to let the salts, kosher and pink, do their thing.The first time I cured bacon, the belly produced a lot of liquid. This time, not so much -- even after a few days. Even though I was aware that every piece of meat is different, and what was happening could be totally normal, I started to worry that I had messed something up. I went back to the recipe, read it carefully, and realized the extent to which Michael Ruhlman is all over the place.It's almost as if he's engaging in providing inconsistent curing instructions as performance art, and fancies himself Marina Abramovic. The first thing that I noticed is that he gives two recipes for dry cure. Both use 450 grams (equivalent to one pound, he says) of kosher salt and 56 grams of pink salt. The difference is that one uses 225 grams (equivalent to 8 ounces, he says) of sugar and the other 425 grams (equivalent to 13 ounces, he says) of dextrose.Let's first take a look at those conversions. It turns out that 450 grams is 15.87 ounces; that's close enough to a pound that I can't imagine that it'll make any difference. So far, so good. The 225 grams / 8 ounces is just this conversion cut in half, so that's fine too. But 425 grams is 14.99 ounces -- which isn't even close to the 13 ounces that he claims. Maybe it's a typo? Maybe it's unbelievably sloppy. The recipe finishes with an estimate of yield: about 725 grams if using sugar (731 using math, so that's okay) and 950 grams if using dextrose (931 using math, which is less okay). The difference between the two recipes is 200 extra grams of dextrose. Why the 225 gram difference in yield?More egregious is that he says to use 56 grams "of this mixture" per 2.25 kilograms of pork. Well, which mixture? If the most important thing is the nitrite/meat ratio, you have to use different weights of the sugar cure and the dextrose cure to achieve the same ratio for a given piece of meat. Does Ruhlman say which mixture? Nope.It actually gets worse from there. In the bacon recipe, he writes that "[i]f your belly weighs between 3 and 5 pounds...it's fine to simplify the method by placing the belly in the Ziploc bag, adding 1/4 cup/30 grams of dry cure [Ed: which one??] along with [spices]" and then in literally the NEXT PARAGRAPH writes: "[o]ne 3- to 5-pound...slab pork belly, skin on, Basic Dry Cure...as necessary for dredging (about 1/4 cup/50 grams)." In the space of one paragraph, a quarter cup transforms from 30 grams to 50 grams. Moreover, it says to use this amount for a belly between 3 and 5 pounds; 5 pounds is 67% heavier than 3 pounds, which is, you know, a pretty significant difference. So on one end of the instructions (30 grams / 5 pounds) he's telling us to use 6 grams per pound, and on the other end (50 grams / 3 pounds) it's about 17 grams per pound. Factor in the lack of reference to which version of the dry cure to use, and you could have someone "following the recipe" who uses 3x more nitrites on a slab of bacon than another person, also "following the recipe."Hey, maybe bacon is really forgiving and it doesn't really matter. But he doesn't actually SAY that anywhere. Instead he gives faux-precise instructions that function as a choose your own bacon adventure. And it does matter, at least according to the FDA. (Why? Because sodium nitrite inhibits botulism, which flourishes in the anaerobic environment found in, say, the smoker you're putting your bacon into.) The recommended level of pink salt is 1 ounce (28.35 grams) per 25 pounds of meat, or 1.134 grams per pound. (Google "how much sodium nitrite per pound of meat".) Ruhlman's sugar cure is 7.66% pink salt by weight and his dextrose cure is 6.02% pink salt by weight. If you use his suggestion of 56 grams of cure (let's go with the sugar cure to be generous) per five pounds of meat, that works out to 0.857 grams of pink salt per pound of meat -- below the FDA's recommendation. With all the other combinations ... forget it, you can figure it out, but trust that they're all messed up.Wanna have your head explode? A small amount of Googling will lead you to a blog post Ruhlman made on his website in 2011, about a slab of bacon he cured, where he says to use cure equal to 5% of the weight of the meat. So, that's 23 grams per pound of meat -- a ratio way greater than any interpretation of what he wrote in his book. And he's explicit about using the sugar cure in the blog post, which means using 1.76 grams of pink salt per pound of meat -- well above the FDA's recommendation. It's absolutely maddening.So, my bacon. After a week in the cure it wasn't looking great. Not much liquid had collected, still, and it hadn't firmed up the way it was supposed to. I threw in some more salt -- not cure -- and left it in the refrigerator for three more days. It was looking better by the time I put it on the smoker, and when I ate some I didn't die of food poisoning. So, that's the best thing I can say about this book: it didn't get me killed. Maybe my expectations were too high, but I have to say that this book has been a massive disappointment. I plan on continuing to go through it and maybe look into making some of the other recipes, but only with a whole lot of verification. And, like I said, it's written in an engaging style -- but if you actually want to learn reliable information and have solid recipes to follow, I can in no way recommend it.

This book "Charcuterie" and the other book "Salumi" written by these guys, IT"S A SET !!! get them both and have it over with !! this book tends to have recipes in it, while the other book tells how to do it, in practical terms. they talk about how to make a fermenting cabinet, and a drying cabinet, and what temps you will need and what humidity. Build up your collection a little at a time, and then you will have a great library of books to get info from and get a well rounded idea of how to do it. the quality of this book is very good, but all of the books, I like gloss paper, like a magazine, and larger print, and page number on every page, in large print for easy use. you can't have everything !! LOL !!

I read through most of this book twice, before my 14 year old son and I took a whole hog butchering class at a local butcher's shop. Two weeks before the class, we used the author's bratwurst recipe to make sausage from store-bought meats for practice. It turned out perfectly. Following our butchering class, my son and I purchased a whole pastured hog from a local farmer and butchered it ourselves. We saved 20 pounds for sausage making. We used the author's recipes to make breakfast sausage, Mexican chorizo, sweet Italian sausage, and smoked andouille. We cooked samples of the sausages before casing them, in order to check the seasonings (as instructed in the recipes). Every one of the recipes produced exceptional flavors that were beyond my original hopes. We spent no small amount of money and a good deal of sweat equity to get our pork. I am glad that I found this book and trusted the recipes within it. We would have been sorely disappointed if all of our work would have ended in mediocre sausage that we could have found at the local grocery store. Instead, we have made something special that everyone with whom we share our labor recognizes as such. I am eager to see how our pancetta turns out!As the author states early in the book, these are not recipes for the person seeking a quick, time-saving meal. It has been my experience, however, that the effort and patient processes laid out in this book result in a finished food that is worth all you put into it.

If you were just buying this book for the sweet Italian sausage recipe it would be worth the money. Recipes and quantities are spot-on. So far, have tried 5 different sausage recipes and I've only been mildly disappointed in one. The other four, I knocked out of the park.Pork went on sale and I ended up making over a hundred pounds of Italian sausage for family and friends. If I would have been willing, I'm sure they would have all doubled their orders.

I love this book. I've made several recipes from here and they've all turned out deliciously. I've gifted maybe 4 or 5 of these to my food-loving friends. I'd also like to point out that Mr. Ruhlman is responsive via his Instagram account so when I had a question about the duck prosciutto he offered feedback. His directions are reassuring for those who may be nervous diving into this corner of the culinary experience.There are some very easy recipes like the prosciutto, bacon, pancetta. And then there are some that are more involved that need very specific environments set up. Perfect for the culinary adventurer in your life.

Wonderful guide to what can be done to meat to turn it into the perfect snack food. Started off making sausages, moved on to pates, am currently working on cured and air dried meats. I will wait for warmer and drier weather to work on the smoked sections.So far everything I have produced had been eagerly consumed. I was surprised at how simple it became after purchasing basic supplies and following the instructions.Next purchase should be 'Viticulture' then I will be complete.

excellent book with good introduction to charcuterie and endless recipes to try. The ones i've tried have to my astonishment worked well.(not a very experienced cook !)

An excellent reference manual which is also an excellent read.. Very good and clear instructions and ingredients which for me as a relatively new enthusiast to this fascinating subject is ideal.

really useful and informative. i'm curing all sorts of goodies quickly simply andcheaply. 800g of wild salmon completely cured in a lovely citrus and fennel/peeper mix costs only £16.....resultHome made bacon from my own rare breed pig is sublime....

a must have for anyone with interest