by This Little Piggy » Tue Nov 13, 2012 3:43 pm
As Mark Twain once said, "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated!"
As a huge fan of Italian salumi, I also looked forward to Ruhlman and Polcyn's new book. I found it a little disappointing, but then I'm a pretty tough grader. Below is the review I posted on Amazon:
It’s great finally to have a book in English dedicated to the subject of Italian cured meats, but – since it’s the only book we’re likely to have – it’s disappointing that’s it’s not better.
In several respects, this book does improve on their Charcuterie book. First, they no longer recommend the grinder attachment for the Kitchen Aid mixer, since it can’t handle partially frozen meat, the auger churns it too much, and its dull blades smear rather than shear the fat, all resulting in sausages with poor texture. Thanks, guys, if you’d ‘fessed up about this 7 years ago, you’d have saved aspiring sausage makers a lot of frustration.
Second, their salami recipes now say that the meat should sit for up to a day after salting and grinding, before finally mixing and stuffing . This extra step allows the salt to extract myosin (a protein in meat, like the gluten in wheat), which makes for a good “bind” in the final product.
But in other respects, this book reads like time has stood still or the authors have missed out on new developments. For example, you’ll find no mention of sodium phosphates, even though they’ve long been available from their favorite supply house, Butcher-Packer. As other recent books, such as Modernist Cuisine, explain, sodium phosphates are a useful additive for dissolving myosin and accelerating the development of a cured flavor. Similarly, you’ll find no mention of vacuum-sealing, sous vide, or even the use of a simple temperature controller to create a precisely calibrated water bath.
And if you found some of the recipes in Charcuterie to be unpalatably salty (and I have quite a salt tooth), be warned: the amount of salt called for in Salumi is even higher, as much as 50% higher (consistently 3% of the mix, including curing salt).
Most distressing is their continued reliance on a single strain of bacterial culture to ferment all their salami: Bactoferm F-RM-52 (the strain they recommend on page 65). As Butcher-Packer’s website explains, F-RM-52 is “the culture recommended for the production of traditional North European types of fermented, dry sausages with a sourly [sic] flavor note.” Even Ruhlman and Polcyn confess that the lactic acid produced by this culture results “in a tanginess that is slightly overbearing” (p. 68).
Of course it is! This strain is designed to produce the strong sourness characteristic of German fermented sausages and is simply unsuited to making salami. The Christian Hansen culture formulated for southern European types of salami is T-SP-X, and it has been available from Butcher-Packer for about 5 years now. Other recent books on fermented sausages, such as those by Stanley Marianski, recognize that this is the appropriate culture for Italian salami.
Similarly, the ingredients called for by the recipes are perplexing. Trapani sea salt is recommended, as “an Italian sea salt from Sicily used all over Italy,” but then they freely acknowledge that other ingredients they use a lot in their recipes, such as paprika, are actually uncommon in Italy. For example, their recipe for nduja calls for La Vera pimentón from Spain. If they’re calling it “Nduja di Calabria,” shouldn’t they use actual Calabrian chili peppers, which are now readily available in this country (from The Sausage Debauchery, for example, which is listed among their Resources)?
Aside from such lapses or oddities, the book is simply skimpy on meat and long on filler. Those hoping to make Italian salami will find less than 75 pages of recipes, and even these are padded. The steps in making a salame hardly change from recipe to recipe (a different diameter die for the grind, a different diameter casing for the stuffing), yet the authors write out all the steps in full each time, ensuring each recipe fills up 2 pages. And some recipes are basically repetitions. On page 139, they have a recipe for Salamini Cacciatore, calling for equal portions of pork shoulder and wild boar. On page 155, is a recipe for Salsicca di Cinghiale Crudo, which is identical in all its seasonings, just altering the ratio 3 to 1 in favor of the boar and calling for beef middles instead of hog casings. A two-sentence note to one recipe, suggesting this variation, would have sufficed.
And the final section of the book is dedicated to “cooking with and serving salumi,“ with recipes for crostini, roasted garlic, pesto, pizza, chicken stock… Seriously? It’s hard for me to believe that anyone who’s interested in Italian food enough to break down a pig and cure their own pancetta or guanciale needs a recipe for crostini or spaghetti carbonara. Their “recipe” for serving prosciutto or coppa with fruit says “We have no specific instructions here other than finding excellent ingredients. In terms of quantities, use common sense… Put all the ingredients out on a cutting board, or arrange the ingredients on small plates…” Such “recipes” simply don’t deserve the 63 pages that they take up.
"Nothing exceeds like excess."
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Francis
