preserving

Proper beer chutney

Proper beer chutney

Right about now is the best time to start thinking about getting some things together for Christmas, and this chutney is one of those things you’ll be quietly smug that you made way back in November when you spoon some of it onto a plate next to some cheese during that weird, dead week between [...]

Food & drink

Anthony Bourdain’s rillettes

Anthony Bourdain’s rillettes

Rillettes is about as old-school a dish as you can get – and a tragically hard-to-find one. It gets right to the heart of what’s good: pork, pork fat, salt, and pepper. Kick off a meal with rillettes and you don’t have to wipe the plate rims, garnish the entree, or remember to keep your [...]

Food & drink

Beef jerky

How to make beef jerky

People have dried meat to preserve it for thousands of years. The practice seems to have arisen independently in both South America and Africa, with the two traditions cross-pollinating with the Spanish conquests of the Americas. The Native Americans eventually adopted the Spanish word for their dried meat, ‘charque‘, changed the inflection and morphed it [...]

Food & drink

How to make bresaola

How to cure beef to make bresaola

So, it’s January, and it’s very, very cold at the moment. That means that now is the perfect time to cure some meat and hang it out to dry in a shed, outside of a refrigerator, without too much fear of death from botulism. I exaggerate slightly – botulism is very rare, and basic hygiene [...]

Food & drink

Ferment, Pickle, Dry, by Simon Poffley and Gaba Smolinska-Poffley

Ferment, Pickle, Dry, by Simon Poffley and Gaba Smolinska-Poffley

Hipster hamster food? Not exactly. Maybe. OK, yes. No. That’s not fair. This is a book about the Holy Trinity of preserving, namely fermenting, pickling and drying. Three related but very, very different processes. Kool kids love kimchi? Kool kids do indeed love kimchi. And rightly so. Yes, it’s fashionable right now to ferment anything [...]

Books