The June Charcutepalooza challenge was poultry sausage. This was a great for me. I’ve consumed a whole lot of sausage—you can’t live around Cincinnati and not eat a fair amount of sausage. I’ve made a decent amount of sausage, both in cooking school and afterward. But I’ve never been a fan of chicken sausage. So I thought I’d use this challenge to force me to make something I’d likely never make. Sure, I could have used this challenge to make some really cool duck sausage or something like that, but I’ve done that before. And where is the challenge in using premium ingredients? I’ve got nothing against premium ingredients. Please don’t get me wrong. But if you look at the history of garde manger, which is the broader discipline that charcuterie descends from, it is about elevating scraps and leftovers. For me, the poultry sausage challenge was all about elevating something simple, something humble, like chicken thighs and using only chicken skin and fat, leaving that all that lovely pork fatback in my freezer.

Chicken thigh, boning knife...I believe you've met before.

I started with some really nice and fresh Amish chicken thighs that came from Cincinnati’s Findlay Market. I skinned them and trimmed them of fat, then removed the bones. But what to do next? I free-formed this challenge, meaning I did not use a recipe. As long as you start with the proper of meat to fat ratio, who needs a recipe? I walked into the pantry and just started looking at my spice rack. The mix of spices I ended up picking isn’t the most revolutionary. It is somewhat reminiscent of Italian sausage. I added some sun dried tomato and pine nuts to the mix and I felt I had something good. I had to take a few more sample runs in the skillet than I would have using a recipe, but it was fun to have the recipe evolve.

The resulting sausage was really nice. I served it both with a pasta sauce and some penne and also on a bun with sausage and peppers. Both would have made nice pictures had I taken some. Forgetting to take pictures when it comes time to eat has always been a problem for me.

More than a few times, I have had lengthy conversations (usually after a number of glasses of wine) concerning whether one could determine the quality of wine by the label. I’ve had a dear friend shamefacedly confess that the label may the sole determiner for purchasing a bottle of wine. And let’s be honest here: even the most stalwart of vinophiles would, if they were being honest, admit that at times the label has tipped the scale when two unknown wines were up for consideration.

But can you really tell that much about a bottle of wine simply by the bottle design? Matthew Latkiewicz does yeoman’s work at devising a taxonomy for decrypting wine bottle labels in this piece over at Grub Street. Really funny stuff, including an awesome chart. He really nails a few of these categories:

Euro-Trash A-hole
A rare sighting, the A-Hole label is usually more than a label. Often, the whole bottle is some unique shape. Look! I’m a wine bottle in the shape of a shampoo bottle! Deal with it! Whatever.
What to Expect: I wouldn’t know, for I do not condone this sort of behavior. And neither should you.

Photo credit: Baynham Goredema

In 2008, I read a Frank Bruni review of WD-50. What struck me the most was a course that didn’t have anything to do with modernist cuisine: a popcorn soup.

Interested in some popcorn soup? You should be. It’s no triumph of cutting-edge technology; it’s just a blended, strained mix of microwave popcorn (Paul Newman’s, to be exact), freeze-dried corn, butter and salt.

It addresses the popcorn lover’s plaint of not always getting the right amount of butter and salt in each handful by delivering popcorn via the spoonful. A snack becomes a proper appetizer, especially with the addition of shrimp, which seems fitting, given that other restaurants fry it in nuggets called popcorn shrimp.

I started with a small amount of white aromatics, sweated in butter. I added frozen corn and popcorn, plus salt and pepper, cooked it gently for about 30 minutes and then blended and filtered it a couple times. I didn’t know exactly the result I was looking for, but I knew I wanted something that expresses corn a few different ways, with a full flavor. I was really happy with the results: a really deep corn flavor, with lots of butter and pepper. Also, the popped popcorn is a great thickener.

Since 2008, this has been one of the more popular posts on Tartare. It was originally written in two parts, which I think was likely confusing for people looking for the recipe. I combined the two posts, made a few well-needed edits, and reformatted the recipe. I hope you like it as much as I do.

Photo credit: Karl Baron

Nothing better than some quick bread-making from James Peterson’s Baking to make a day with two inches of rain and no internet access a much brighter one.

But what is really turning the gears in my head is this month’s Charcutepalooza challenge: sausage-making. Just the thought of making some Merguez sausage gives me a really big smile. I’ve got the perfect locally-raised lamb for the task. I’ll be making the sausage in the next week, along with a nice picture-filled blog entry to boot.

And one more quick hit: sometime next week, I’ll be writing up a piece on version one of my ideal ground beef mixture. The great thing about playing with food is successes and near misses still taste damn good.