Duck Rillettes

Duck Rillettes is a delicious meaty, fatty spread. It's perfect on crostini or crackers. It can be served warm or cold, morning or night, and is a great thing to add to your culinary repertoire. If you dislike liver, rillettes are a friendly alternative to pates and some terrines.

The recipe, I copied nearly exactly from my favorite food blogger, Chef John:

I bought my duck from the local Asian market, Ranch 99. It cost under $25, which could be considered a lot, but I also used the liver to make a pate and the carcass to make stock, so all around, I feel like I got my money's worth.

The orange was very nice in this recipe, and I wouldn't consider it optional. I also could have used a cleaver because my duck came with the head and feet attached! Looking an animal that you will be eating in the eyes is strange for westerners, but while it can be a squeamish affair the first time, it will make you respect the origins of your food a lot more. 

Instead of duplicating the ingredients here, follow the link above to learn how to make this. Here are my pictures of the process.

Spanish Chorizo

Spanish Chorizo is known as a dry cured pork sausage. It's prominent flavors are paprika and garlic. It can exist in fresh forms and differently spiced Mexican forms, but to me, thinly sliced rounds of the dried smokey stuff are the most delicious. My inspiration came after having the salumi board at a restaurant in Berkeley called Corso. The meats were served at room temperature and this chorizo in particular had been kissed with some subtle smoke. Once I tried it, and savored its flavors, I began to obsess about how I could recreate it.

Chorizo and the technique of using animal intestines to preserve meat goes back to Roman times. The history is long and the types varied, but I have only one lesson to teach here: cure, ferment, smoke and dry. In that order. The process of fermenting sausages extends to the making of just about every type of salami out there.

For a long time, I've been fascinated by salami, soppresatta and the like. How some unassuming ground meat could be transformed into thin slices of tangy, well spiced deliciousness was akin to sorcery in my book. But, now that I have acquired the requisite tools, I've set out to relearn some of the wisdom known by our ancient ancestors. It doesn't take much to do these projects, in fact, this is my first attempt at a fermented sausage.

My goal was to do this project without purchasing anything off the internet, and I haven't (with the exception of Instacure #2 which I already had). Although I haven't tried the final product yet, I'm pretty confident in saying this was a success.

Here's a little background into how this all works. Similar to pickling, preserving sausages relies on lactic acid to work its preservation magic. In addition to salt, most recipes call for Bactoferm, which is a culture or collection of different types of bacteria including varieties of lactobacillus. These bacteria turn sugars into lactic acid and lower the pH rapidly, causing microorganisms that don't belong there to die off. As the meat sits in the acidic environment and ferments, flavors develop as well as a tangy zing.

For bacteria to work, they need food...sugar, and the most easily digestible of them all is dextrose (glucose). The faster the sugar is digested, the faster the pH drops, and the safer the meat can be without incubating harmful bacteria. I was about to use cane sugar (glucose + fructose) but I realized that the bacteria would have to work harder to digest the fructose, making it less effective. I went to my local beer brewing shop in search of answers and found corn sugar which is the same thing as dextrose, and it was $1. For the culture, I was advised to buy Bactoferm from a reliable source, but I opted instead to use what I had in the fridge which was Greek yogurt, and contained mostly all the same bacteria. I also bought about 20ft worth of hog casings from Whole Foods for $6 instead of buying them online. Overall, this was a pretty inexpensive project.

The ingredients:
3.5lbs Pork Shoulder
36g (2.3%) Salt
4g (0.25%) Instacure #2
6g (0.4%) Dextrose (glucose or corn sugar)
1 big Tbsp Yogurt
43g Smoked Paprika
7g Sweet Paprika
2 or 3 cloves of Garlic
30ml distilled water
30ml red wine
5ft 25mm hog casings

The equipment:
Meat grinder
Sausage stuffer
Cold Smoker (Janky homemade version is totally okay)
Aging Chamber

To get started weigh your meat and calculate your ingredients according to the percentages. Cube up the meat into 3/4" cubes and put in the freezer for 15 minutes. While the meat is chilling, add warm water to the yogurt and dextrose so they can wake up. Make sure the meat grinder and sausage stuffer parts have been chilled in the freezer in advance.

Grind the meat and add the salt, spices, culture and other ingredients. Mix well by hand for a few minutes. Use the sausage stuffer to fill the hog casings and tie them off around every 12 inches.

For the fermentation process, a high humidity and relatively high temperature environment is needed for the bacteria to do their best. The high humidity mostly protects against case hardening. To achieve this, I tied the sausages up to a towel rack in my bathroom, pricked them several times with a sterile pin and ran the shower on its hottest setting for a couple of minutes and kept the door shut. The humidity quickly rose to 90%. It stayed in this warm humid climate for 24 hours.

We cooked off some of the excess meat in the grinder to taste for seasoning. It tasted great, but we realized that the meat was already in its casings and too late to do anything about anyway.

I proceeded to build a cold smoker out of cardboard boxes. All that was needed was a heating element, a fan and a metal dryer duct to make this happen. I constructed a rack for the meat to hang from, and created large round holes in the two boxes for the dryer duct. One box was for generating the smoke and the other was for containing it. For cold smoking, you should keep the temperatures below 70°F at all times if possible.

Of course, smoking wood chips could be fraught with peril, especially if done in a cardboard box. Proceed at your own risk! At one point the wood chips caught flame and we had to reconsider how to perform the whole procedure a little more safely. In the end, we just realized that we had to babysit the setup the whole time while watching movies.

After being smoked for 5 hours, I recorded the initial weights, and placed the meat in the aging chamber with a tray filled with moistened sea salt. The humidity seems to be regulating around 80% with a temperature set to 60°F. In 3 weeks the meat should be ready to slice and taste.

Update 11/24/14: It's been 15 days and the Chorizo is done and looks amazing! I weighed each Chorizo after 1 week and they each had lost about 32% of their weight on average. I decided to crack into one to see if I liked it, or if I wanted to keep drying it. First of all the aroma was smokey and deep, color was brick red and there were discrete morsels of fat just the way I wanted there to be. The flavor was packed with paprika and garlic and smoke. It was delicious. If I was to change anything, next time I would adjust the garlic and smoke ratios. I would decrease the garlic to 1 clove instead of 3 and maybe up the smoke time to 7 hours from 5. Maybe dial back the paprika too, but I think the intent of this cured meat is to be flavor rich. In any case, I found that after only one week, the texture was a little more moist than I cared for so I put them back in the chamber for more drying time. Nine days later, they have lost an average of 43% and I suspect that the flavors will have mellowed out a bit too, but we'll see.