Can you rub salt, sugar and spices on meat? Can you add things to alcohol? Can you let a jar of wine sit for a spell, or heat milk?
You can. And so you don’t need the supermarket for bacon or cheese. Skip the liquor store if you want a liqueur, or, say, a bottle of cherry-infused bourbon. Hankering for a few slices of pancetta? The gourmet shop might be calling, but you can ignore it.
You can make a wide range of kitchen staples at home, without expensive equipment, fancy ingredients or deep knowledge of chemistry. What you will need is time and patience.
There’s nothing complicated, for example, about making your own bacon, although few people do it, says Eric Skokan, owner of Black Cat Restaurant in Boulder. Rub some pork belly in salt, sugar and spices. Let it sit awhile. Rub the stuff off. Smoke it for a spell. Bacon.
At Black Cat, Skokan makes loads of staples, like vinegar, pancetta, pasta, vermouth and even cocktail bitters.
He does it to leverage what otherwise would be waste — old red wine becomes vinegar, and artichoke scraps are transformed into cocktail bitters, for example. But also for flavor.
“Making our own bitters lets us tweak the spices,” he says.
The move toward handcrafted everyday fare — like bacon — is “a big movement” in restaurants, and increasingly in people’s homes, says Frank Bonanno, the owner of several Denver restaurants, including Mizuna and Osteria Marco, where the menu features Bonanno- made cheeses and cured meats, including bresaola (beef cured in red wine).
“Haystack Mountain goat cheese (made in Longmont) took us by storm a couple of years ago. It was unbelievable,” he says. “Then I realized it’s not hard to make, so I started making my own goat cheese.”
Bonanno says he routinely has people to his house for dinner, where he makes mozzarella as everyone chats, and serves meat he has cured himself.
“It takes me 10 minutes to make two balls of mozzarella,” he says. “They are eating it while it’s warm and moist, and they say it’s the best they have ever had. That to me is the ultimate thing.”
He added: “If you can make it, you should make it, and have fun doing it. And people will appreciate the effort you are putting into it.”
Making fresh cheese like ricotta is especially simple. You heat a bunch of liquid dairy products with some lemon juice and salt, you wrap it in cheesecloth, and you have ricotta. If you buy curds of mozzarella cheese, which Bonanno says are available at some gourmet stores, Whole Foods and online, then making plump, glistening balls of mozzarella is even easier. Turning milk into curds is something any home cook can accomplish; it just takes more time and work.
Fresh cheeses don’t demand much in terms of time or patience. But meats are different.
“It’s a fun way to spend a day,” says Hugo Matheson, the owner of The Kitchen restaurant in Boulder, about curing meats, although by “spending a day” he really means spending portions of several days. Curing meats involves applying the cure to the pig’s leg or the slab of beef, and waiting. Checking up on it, and waiting. Hanging it up somewhere, and giving it weeks to dry. The best part is the party, when you serve the ham you made, and people can’t eat enough of it.
“It’s often much more interesting,” says Matheson, “because you don’t know what you are going to end up with.”
Matheson makes his own hams and salami, among other things, for kicks, serving them at home for family and friends. There’s nothing complicated about the process.
“All you are doing is removing liquid and preserving it with the old-fashioned method of using salt,” he says. “It becomes an adventure in finding flavors.”
You dig margaritas, you’re not fond of Triple Sec, and Grand Marnier is too pricey. Try curaçao, another orange- flavored liqueur, but this time make it yourself (or for that matter, go ahead and make Grand Marnier).
“It’s just fun to do this,” says Norm Andrews, a bartender at Aji restaurant in Boulder who makes his own liqueurs from scratch, including curaçao and the hard-to-find falernum, an old-fashioned liqueur popular in tropical drinks that has flavors of clove, ginger and other spices. Gingerbread in a glass.
Look closely at Andrews’ bar, and witness the bottle a third- full of slivered orange peels — that’s his curaçao, the orange peels essentially marinating in alcohol. Once he thinks the taste is right, Andrews will strain out the peels. Andrews is no closet chemist. He just adds flavors to booze, and reproduces popular liqueurs, only he can control the punch of spices.
At the next-door restaurant Leaf — a vegetarian place — tall, spouted jars stand on a prominent shelf, full of liquid containing things like apples and figs, kaffir lime, saffron, espresso beans, and carrots and ginger. These are Leaf’s infused vodkas, and making vodka — or other alcohol — infusions is a matter of just adding stuff to the booze and waiting until the flavors ripen.
“Anybody can do this,” says owner Jerry Manning. “It’s easy.”
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
