The New Charcuterie Cookbook: Exceptional Cured Meats to Make and Serve at Home

Great book, lots f good recipes and great pictures

I bought this book a few months ago and have been slowly working my way through it. I was intimidated by the skill level, but Bissonnette's recipes are detailed and the instructions are clear. Don't be scared by the unfamiliar ingredients - just man up, go to your local Armenian butcher (I live in East Hollywood) and get those pig hooves or whatever you need to get it done.Also, the cauliflower kimchi recipe is spot-on. I show it off at cocktail parties and it always kills.

I’m ready to call for a halt to “new charcuterie” cookbooks being turned out by famous chefs who don’t really understand what they’re doing and don’t take the time or trouble to put together a decent book. Jamie may well be a great chef, a great guy, and all that, but he laid an egg with this one.Paul Taylor’s one-star review already catalogues many of the book’s faults and weaknesses: Bissonnette tells his readers to measure ingredients by weight in order to be precise, and then he gives very imprecise conversions for imperial weights into metric (why convert 4oz to precisely 113g and then round off 4lbs to 1.5kg, when it’s actually 1.8?); the photographs often have little or nothing to do with the recipes they’re supposed to illustrate; the same instructions are simply cut and paste into recipe after recipe, even when they don’t make sense there…Long as Paul’s list is (and it’s VERY long), there are still lots of errors he missed or simply didn’t have room to mention.Beginning at the beginning and citing just the biggest lapses:His first recipe (page 18), for lemongrass and green curry sausages, calls for an ounce of fresh ginger root, which he has you mix with the meat the day before grinding and cooking it, apparently unaware that fresh ginger root contains an enzyme that attacks meat proteins and turns it to mush.Second recipe (22), for banana leaf-wrapped porchetta, calls for an ounce of pink curing salt, which is applied one day and washed off the next, apparently unaware that it takes salt a week to penetrate just an inch, so this is doing nothing for you except turning the very surface of the meat pink.Third recipe (23), for Lebanese lamb sausages, calls for you to dry the sausages in the refrigerator for 1 to 12 hours, saying “the longer, the better.” He cuts and pastes this instruction into most of his sausage recipes, even though the only reason to dry a sausage is to help smoke stick to it. If you’re grilling or poaching it, as he calls for here, drying the sausage is completely unnecessary.In the introduction to his fourth recipe (25), for habanero and maple breakfast sausages, he writes that “marinating the meat with the maple, spices and salt cures the meat so that when it cooks it doesn’t give off so much fat.” Salt may help “cure” a sausage mix (the maple syrup and spices are irrelevant) by de-activating some harmful pathogens, but curing has nothing to do with fat retention when cooking.His fifth recipe (26), for goat merguez, is accompanied by a photograph of a badly burnt and sadly dessicated sausage. Anyone working in a professional kitchen who cooked a sausage to death like this should be fired on the spot.Seventh recipe (31), has you make a brine and then tells you to “put it in turkey breast.” Presumably he meant put the turkey breast into the brine. This is the kind of mistake that gets by when you rely on spellcheck and no one actually proofreads.Recipe after recipe is flawed by similar errors.His most egregious mistakes concern the use of curing salts. In the sausage section, his recipe for Mexican chorizo (48) calls for 16 grams of curing salt no. 2. In chapter 3 (which is dedicated to "cured items [that] do not get cooked") he has a recipe for chorizo fresca (101) that also calls for curing salt #2 even though it's a "fresh" sausage that you cook. (To be fair, this is probably not two separate errors but just one, since the chorizo fresca recipe is the same as the Mexican chorizo one, merely doubling the quantities. Maybe that's why it's hiding out in a different part of the book, where it doesn't belong.)But both should be using curing salt #1 instead of #2. Curing salt # 2 is used for meat products that will be hung to dry and cure for a long time, as it also contains sodium nitrate, which will slowly convert into sodium nitrite, the active curing agent. It is never used for a meat product that will be cooked right away, as these are supposed to be.On the other hand, in the section on slow-cured meats, he has a recipe for rosso di pepe (81) that specifies curing salt #1, even though you're supposed to hang it for 200 days. This is a recipe for contamination and rot.And, in general, his terminology for curing salts is very loose, imprecise, and confusing, referring to them sometimes by the brand names Insta Cure #1 and #2, sometimes generically as curing salt #1 and #2, sometimes as TCM or Prague powder (which I guess you're supposed to know stands for Tinted Curing Mix) and sometimes simply as “pink salt,” apparently unaware that sometimes cure #1 is pink, while sometimes cure #2 is, depending on the supplier.Someone who actually knows what they're doing with charcuterie might be able to avoid killing people and make some good food, as long as they know enough to avoid the mistakes that mar nearly every recipe. But that's no excuse for throwing together this book in such a careless and shoddy manner.So if there are any other chefs out there, famous or not, who have cured their own bacon and think that this qualifies them to write a “new charcuterie cookbook,” please, please, stop!

Warning: this is long and ugly.I’ve had this book less than a week and it’s already coming apart but, that’s not the issue. This book is fraught with so many typos, errors, and misleading statements that it is rendered almost useless. The most egregious errors are over reliance on the computer word processor and lack of serious proofreading and editing.In the front matter (pg. 15) Chef Bissonnette states that most of his recipes use ounces instead of cups, tablespoons and teaspoons and recommends weighing the ingredients for better accuracy. In reality most of the recipes use cups and tablespoons with metric units inserted in parenthesis not ounces and the use of a scale or weighing ingredients is not mentioned again anywhere in the book. If you use universal search and add in your word processor to insert 15grams everywhere one tablespoon appears, you alter the recipe because a tablespoon of salt does not weigh the same as a tablespoon of parsley. If you follow his instructions and weigh you ingredients you will not end up with the intended results. As an example, in the “Country Pate for My Dad” recipe on pg. 33, he converts 1.5 Cups of bread crumbs to 360gms which is actually about 4 cups of bread crumbs. This affects nearly every recipe in the book. In addition his conversion from pounds to kilograms in many of the sausage recipes in flawed where he uses 3 lb. (1kg). This probably due to rounding errors but it’s off by 36%. This means that the ratio of meat to fat is different depending on which units you use. This can be seen in the first recipe on pg. 18 where using English units you get a 4:1 meat to fat ratio but using metric units it’s 3.3:1. Forgivable if this was the only place it occurred but, it’s not.The use of “cut and paste” can save time and effort if you know what you’re doing. In the “Goat Merguez” recipe pg. 26, Chef Bissonnette gives a detail two paragraph description of how to use a sausage stuffer to get the sausage into the casing. Then he “cut and pasted” these instruction into every recipe that use casing except for two. For the “Rabbit Mortadella” recipe pg. 40, with about 2 lbs. of sausage being stuffed into a large beef middle casing, instructions still say: “extrude one full coil, about 48 inches…” and then “twist the casing one way , then the other…”, it won’t work. 2 lbs. stuffed in a large middle casing would yield about 6 inches and the twisting part makes no sense. One recipe where he didn’t paste these instructions is in the “Blood Sausage for Beginners” pg. 64, which simply instructs the beginner to “Case the sausage”. However in the “Boudin Noir (Blood Sausage for Ninjas)” recipe he pasted the same detail instructions. But I don’t think it works in this case. With the ratio of liquid to solid this will be a very loose, pourable filling. If you follow the instructions and don’t tie the casing until you start extruding, the filling will run out the funnel and make a big mess. So the beginner gets no instructions and the Ninja gets instruction that don’t work. Again the same instructions appear in the Bologna recipe on pg. 106. If you could find a 48 inch beef bung it would take close to 80 lbs. of bologna to fill it. That’s a lot of bologna. The chef would be better off giving no instructions than to blindly repeat instructions that are so blatantly flawed.I should stop here but, I can’t. I’m obsessed or maybe possessed. There are so many things wrong with this book; I can’t believe that anyone could give it 5 stars. Am I the only one who has actually read it? It brings into question Amazon’s Vine program where free books are pushed to subscribers in exchange for positive reviews. A good way to jump start sales for a new book.More “cut and paste”: I couldn’t understand why so much liquid was used to prepare a half pound of tripe in the “Chitterling and tripe Sausages” recipe pg. 58 until I read the “Tripe A’ la Collinsville” recipe on pg. 122 from which he lifted the same ingredients and instructions for preparing 10 lbs. of tripe. What a waste. The “Head Cheese” pg. 71 recipe is repeated nearly verbatim under the name “Coppa Di Testa” on pg. 117. The ‘Whipped Pork Butter with Truffle and Honey” on pg. 59 is repeated on pg. 100 as one of three versions of pork butter which he incorrectly defines as Lardo. Why does it need its own page?Pictures that tell a different story: In the introduction to Chapter one Chef Bissonnette cautions to always wear glove when handling raw meat. There are 70 photos of the chef and his tattooed hand in this book, many handling raw meat but only two wearing gloves. “Habanero and maple Breakfast Sausages” pg. 25 says form into patties or put in the bottom of cupcake pan. Clever; but the picture shows a link sausage cut in half. Page 28 showed Chef Bissonnette with a sausage casing held to his mouth. The caption says: keep the casing wet while you work with it. Is that what he’s doing? If this is the Easiest Chicken Liver Mousse recipe on pg. 54, why does it need a two page spread of pictures to detail the steps? The recipe says add the warm livers a food processor with unsalted butter but the photo caption says add the butter a little at a time. Smoked Tongue Bocadillo on pg. 66 has a photo the facing page that something else. And why waste a page with three lines on how to make a sandwich? Photo of Head Cheese on pg. 70 is not from the recipe. The rosy pink color comes from nitrites which are not in the recipe. Liver, Heart and Kidney Tacos pg. 130 has photo showing avocado and graded cheese on a taco; looks good but that’s not this recipe. Also, good luck finding chicken kidneys. Then there are the nine pages of photos of Chef Bissonnette in the back of the book with no captions which are, I assume there for ballast. There are many more examples of useless filler and misleading photos but I’m keeping an eye on my word count lest Amazon rejects my post.Ok, it’s true; I have not cooked anything from this book. So, what do I know?I know that 4tbs of pink salt and 15 cloves of garlic for a 5lb slab of bacon is about 10 times too much. I know that cold smoking bacon for one hour in a hotel pan is near impossible and a waste of time. If you’re going to cook it anyway, why not give the home cook a break and hot smoke? I know that it takes more time and effort to clean chitterlings than tripe. I know that cooking chitterlings requires several hours and just “blanching” for 15 min will result in very stinky and chewy Andouille. I know the difference between jacquard and a Jaccard meat tenderizer. I know the difference marinate and marinade. I know that soaking a pigs head for 8 hours in water at room temperature (defined in this book as 70 to 80 deg.F) is not safe. I know that a “traditional Korean Kimchee recipe” that has no salt, Chilean chili flakes (whatever that is) and 2cups of fish sauce for one head of Cauliflower is not traditional or Korean. I know that a skein, sack or pouch of tuna roe weighs several pounds and you can’t make bottarga with an 8 oz. package of tuna roe. I know the difference between a hank and a casing.I am only half way through my notes but if you’ve read this far and still want to buy the book then I can’t help you. I’m sure Chef Bissonnette tried to scale many of these recipes from restaurant quantities for the home cook but the execution was frankly pathetic. He should have used his James Beard award money to hire a ghostwriter and proofreader or at least tested and photographed his own recipes. The poor quality of this book is a discredit to all whose name appears in it.Reading back over my review I’m thinking Ouch! Am I being too critical or nit-picking? So I went back to one of my recent purchases, Sean Brock’s “Heritage”. (If Jamie Bissonnette put on a ball cap he could be Sean Brock’s twin brother). I looked for similar errors but they are few, the difference is night and day, though both are printed in china. Can’t blame the printer, maybe the publisher and no co-author is listed, so all my comments stick and they stick on Chef Jamie Bissonnette.

This book as clever and interesting recipes. I think this book is easy enough for a beginner and diverse enough for intermediate to advanced cooks. beginners make also want to get a book with abit more theory, I found it refreshing to have a book that doesn't labour explaining the basics. I am itching to try the "blood sausage" for ninjas and rabbit mortadella.I hope you enjoy it as I did

Great little book. My first attempt at sausissons sec turned out great, thanks to the easy to follow instructions.

as described. thanks.

Excellent

Great book