holy crap. tonight cavin and i discovered the joys of our first homemade charcuterie! but before i get into it, let me first tell you how we started down this road.

about a year and a half ago, while we were living in dc, we decided to press our luck by ordering a half hog from a butcher leigh knew. since the first year turned out quite well, we decided to go for it again in 2007. needless to say, we haven't used up all the pork yet, and it was taking up a lot of room in my parents' new freezer. after reading through jacques' complete techniques, we thought, 'what the hell?' and decided to dry cure a ham.

i'm a little pissed at myself for not documenting the process more, but basically we took a ~5 lb. ham (organic), salted it for about 2 weeks, draining the liquid every so often, removed all the salt, rubbed it with garlic and cracked peppercorns, wrapped it with cheesecloth, and hung it the garage. we're supposed to let it sit for 6 months or longer. we did this march 13, so if we waited the obligatory amount of time, it would be ready for my birthday.

fast forward one month later. i was reading ruhlman's blog on curing and i had this hankering to buy his (and brian polcyn's) charcuterie book. as we were driving home from work, we took a mini detour and stopped by the bookstore to pick up a copy.

ruhlman says, 'Duck breast is one of the easiest dry-cured items to prepare at home. Duck breasts are widely available, and their size is perfectly manageable. Even a frozen store-bought breast of duck will provide results that will surprise you, especially if you've never cured your own meats, yielding a rich prosciutto-like flavor.' [p.54, charcuterie]

as soon as we read this, cavin and i immediately got to steppin'!

we couldn't find duck breast, but we did find a whole duck, which i ended up butchering myself, in the hopes to maybe confit the legs (but we didn't have enough rendered duck fat so we'll try again once we've save up enough fat).

anyway, we basically did the same thing we did for the ham: we salted the duck breasts for 2 days in the fridge, removed the salt, dusted with white pepper, wrapped each breast in cheesecloth, and hung it next to our friend (the ham) in the garage for 1 week. so guess what today was?!?

here's a picture of the two duck breasts after drying for one week. i have to admit that the breasts were thin to begin with, but since this was our first attempt, we continued on, wanting to see how it would turn out. the breast at the top of the picture is skin side down; the white stuff is the white pepper that we sprinkled on it. the bottom breast is skin side up.

this is a picture of one of the breasts after i thinly shaved pieces off. you can see that the breast is a deep red color (which is how it's supposed to look), and you can see that there is a lot of fat on the breast (cavin and i haven't been eating the fat, though, it's perfectly acceptable, as you would if you were eating a traditional piece of thinly sliced prosciutto.

it tastes a bit salty - we could have probably adjusted the salting period, based on the thickness of the breasts. ah, maybe next time. but anyway, prosciutto is supposed to be salty!

but the fact that we ate a piece of duck that we never really cooked, and am still alive to write about it makes this, in my book, a successful attempt. we're taking this as a sign of good things to come in the fall/winter when we uncover our dry-cure ham project. i can't freaking wait!

Labels: cooking