Origins

Welcome to Bread and Salt and Beer!  Here, I'll be documenting my experimentation with charcuterie/salumi, with bread and baking, and (a bit) with modern brewing.  (My other blog - Misha's Brewing - covers the same things mostly, but with an emphasis on the historical aspects.  Since I spend much more time in the present-day lately, I hope to be able to keep this version going more consistently!

Where am I in the whole process?  Well, I'm a serious brewer (20 years or so of homebrewing; all-grain, hopefully soon moving to 10-gallon batches and an electric brewhouse; I'm in the process of growing my own grain, and hope to have enough hops to use in a batch next year).  I greatly enjoy bread and baking (and food and cooking, generally); I've got a nice sourdough culture that I "caught" from my homestead (a 130-year-old farm), and I hope to build a wood-fired oven in the next year or two, the better to 'play' more with all aspects of that.  And perhaps the driving aspect for starting this, charcuterie--I'm an almost complete novice, with a number of duck prosciuttos and a few slabs of bacon under my belt (literally, at least in part.)  I'm working on some more advanced stuff, and (as I will do) have voraciously read everything I can find on the subject.

Going right now, I have a pair of eye-of-round roasts (beef), which have been salted and pressed (about 2 weeks on the salt, one week under weights), and are currently hanging in my makeshift "bacon box" (a 2'x2'x2' 4" cube of 2" rigid foam insulation).  In about 2 weeks, if they haven't grown any sort of fuzz, I'll mix up some chaman paste (fenugreek, garlic, and paprika, mostly--I'll post my recipe when I get to that point) and cover the meat, then let it hang for another two weeks or so.  This is a mediterranean/middle-eastern cured meat called "basturma" or "pastirma," and it's an ancestor to pastrami, both linguistically and stylistically.  Photos will be forthcoming.

Upcoming other curing experiments: lountza (Cypriot/Greek cured pork loin, marinated in wine and smoked) and Bak Kwa (a type of Chinese pork jerky).  Also more duck prosciutto.  Time and space permitting, I'd like to do more bacon, and maybe a pancetta.  I'm also salivating to do a capocollo (pork shoulder), and I'd like to do an actual ham prosciutto, but that may wait until next winter.  Sausages and salumi will hopefully be forthcoming, as well.

So, that's where we're starting.  At present, aside from my "bacon box," I don't have anything built for any of this.  I hope you'll stick around for the adventures!