Customer Reviews

Charcuterie Specialties (Prestige Des Grands Chefs)

5 star:		(0)
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3 star:		(1)
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If you have access to professional equipment (grinders, processors, stuffers) and you want to get serious about French charcuterie, this book is invaluable. It's worth the price just for their liver terrine à la Parisienne, which has you add hot, poached fat, and then steaming milk to the meat mix in the processor. Sounds crazy, but works wonderfully.

Unfortunately, the book also suffers quite a bit in its editing and translating. There are slight problems with just about every recipe. Ingredients will be listed in the beginning that will never be mentioned again, so you just have to figure out what to do with them. Translation is sloppy and misspellings abound.

Even with these faults, I would have given in four stars, except for one really dangerous - even potentially lethal - problem. The amounts of curing salt that the authors call for have not been translated or recalculated for this book's American audience. In the final chapter, on "Information and Technical Advice," they explain that the French curing salt that they use and that their recipes assume is 0.6% sodium nitrite. But curing salt with just nitrite sold in the US (under the names Insta Cure #1 or DQ or DC Curing Salt #1) is 6.25% nitrite OR MORE THAN TEN TIMES AS MUCH! This means that if you use one of these American products and put in as much curing salt as these recipes call for (up to 25 g per kilo of meat), the pāté will contain a dose of nitrite (1.56 g) that's considered lethal for an adult. This is a lawsuit waiting to happen.