Appetizers: Expert Guides and Resources

Spices are the spice of life. You can find a lot of localized flavors in the charcuterie of an area, which can make this craft very fun for those who are adventurous. The rule of thumb, quality in equals quality out, applies very much to spices and other auxiliary ingredients for your recipes. M.studio / Adobe StockFollowing are some tips for finding and using the best ingredients: Spices and ingredients produced locally to your recipe are a great starting point.

Who doesn’t love saving time (it allows you to do other things, like eat more cheese)? Check out the handy table below and take the guesswork out of wine and cheese pairings. Time-Tested Wine and Cheese Pairings This Wine Goes Well with This Cheese Sparkling wine Fresh cow or goat milk cheese, triple-crè

This list of meats includes ten that are really good and should be tried at some point either on their own or as part of a charcuterie board presentation. Everything in this list is delicious, and if you are able to, you should track some of them down to try for yourself. Keep in mind that this list is in no particular order.

Successfully making sausages, bacon, cured meats, or any other type of charcuterie, requires very specific tools and equipment. Meat grinders are specialized machines designed for the sole purpose of breaking pieces of meat and fat into smaller pieces by forcing them through a metal plate containing several small holes.

Before you can even think about working with food meant for human consumption, and that includes aged meats like charcuterie, you need to be thinking about cleanliness and sanitation, and that starts with you. Hand washing is the first thing that you should do.According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), you should wash your hands with warm water and lather up with antibacterial soap for at least 12 seconds before rinsing and drying your hands with a single-use towel.

Proper procedures for hygiene and workspace sanitation, if done correctly, will prevent you from contaminating the meats that you are working with when creating charcuterie. However, you also need to be aware of pathogens that are commonly found in the different animal species with which you may be working.Over the last several decades, the U.

Meat grinders are machines designed specifically to break pieces of meat and fat into smaller pieces by forcing them through a metal plate with several small holes. Sausage in its most basic iteration is simply ground meat with seasoning; in USDA terms, it’s a non-intact meat product. You can choose from several different types of meat grinders.

If you want to get connected to your food, there is no better way than to purchase directly from a farm. There are many options today for doing this, whether through a CSA (community-supported agriculture) program, online grocery delivery services like MarketWagon.com, or your local farmers market.One of the many benefits to purchasing protein for your charcuterie directly from a farmer is that you can get all sorts of information on how the animals were raised, including the following: You can find out where the animals were raised, whether the critters lived inside or outside, if they had space to move and root around or were confined, and so on.