Thursday, August 09, 2007

The transformative power of salt part 2

This time, two duck breast halves, salted overnight, then dusted with pepper and wrapped in cheesecloth went in the trusty wastebasket to hang for a week. When dried, they'll be much like prosciutto. With any luck our melons will be ripe by then and we'll have a feast.

4 comments:

jo said...

Is there a temp you try to maintain when curing? My house has no central A/C so I am at the whims of nature.

jo
amuse bouche

peter said...

Do you have a basement? That would be the best bet, or you could wait until fall. I finished the guanciale hanging from a beam next to the kitchen sink (we haven't used A/C yet this summer) and it turned out beautifully.

The duck is in the crawl space under the house right now. After a week, if it's still too wet, it will go over the sink to finish. If you have a wine fridge, especially one with humidity control, that would work well too.

cookiecrumb said...

Oh, you're Big Time! I'm not ready to be this brave.
Very nice...
(So what, about a week or two? I have often thought of using the crawl space as a root cellar, and now this!)

peter said...

We're planning on using the crawl as a root cellar too. This sort of thing isn't hard, and the results are so good you'll never go back.