Cured and Smoked Foods

Prerequisites

Before studying this chapter, you should already

• Have read “How to Use This Book,”, and understand the professional recipe format.
• Know how to accurately scale up and scale down recipe formula amounts.
• Know how to accurately weigh ingredients using both a spring scale and a digital scale.
• Be able to correctly fabricate various cuts of meat, poultry, and seafood.
• Be able to create and maintain accurate records of the times and temperatures involved in food production.

Our ancestors, faced with the challenge of preserving meats, poultry, and fish in the days before refrigeration, used several methods of preserving food that were handed down from generation to generation. Of these, the most basic method is curing with salt. The art of smoking is also a preserving technique that dates to prehistoric times. Today, smoking is used not so much for its preservative qualities as for the flavors it gives to some of our favorite foods.