“As Americans, we’re told that we’re too stupid to cook,” Michael Ruhlman says, and his recent books— including Charcuterie, Ratio, and Ruhlman’s 20— are all about demonstrating that the basics of good cooking are well within the grasp of anyone who cares to learn. During a two-hour talk/sausage-making demo at The Butcher & Larder last night with owner Rob Levitt, Ruhlman talked about how he became serious about writing about food, his experiences in kitchens ranging from the Culinary Institute of America’s to Thomas Keller’s, and the sheer pleasure of good sausage when made the right way with good pork and plenty of fat.
Questions from the audience, mostly amateur charcuterie-makers selected in a contest via Twitter, ranged from how to know if your sausage is mixed sufficiently to when Thomas Keller stopped being a screamer and became such a nice, mellow guy (“He said he realized that when he screamed, it was was already too late— so now he focuses on fixing the problem before it gets to that point”).
Take a look at the whole process in our slideshow.
