Olympia Provisions: Cured Meats and Tales from an American Charcuterie [A Cookbook]

As a foodie, I love to stretch my culinary skills in directions where I've never traveled. I saw this book,read a few preview pages, and bought it. The first half describes how to make nearly every cured meat known to man. Starting with pate, the charcuterie journey travels through sausage, bratwurst, bacon, frankfurters and finally cured hard salamis. The second part of the book takes the meat made in the prior part and creates wonderful dishes that are served at the OP restaurant in Oregon.Each of the recipes have been reduced to home-sized projects, where 3 pounds of raw meat are transformed in to a dozen brats or two dozen frankfurters. And the recipes are absolutely delicious! If you're over 45 years old, the franks will take you back to the ones sold in butcher shops, still connected to each other by the natural casings in which they are stuffed. The brat recipe is by far the best I've ever eaten (and I am German and have been raised on Oktoberfests). The homemade bacon will make you abandon the horrible renditions currently being offered in grocery stores around the country.If you've ever had the desire to try to cure your own meats at home, this is a wonderful cookbook to take the charcuterie amateur to the journeyman's level. Make some sausage for your friends and watch the expression on their faces when they bite in to the best bratwurst they have ever eaten.

I left the Pacific NW just before Olympia Provisions opened up. I have been following them ever since as charcuterie is a crazy passion for me. This book is so well done and explains things simply.

I bought this book a couple of years ago for a relative that lives in Portland, OR (home-base for Olympia Provisions) and is into cooking. During a visit to Portland in the summer of 2016 I had some sausages from OP (wonderful) and I started leafing through this book at my relative’s house and got really engaged by the photos, the stories, and the potential to make cool stuff. So, I bought the book and jumped right in.The book includes six chapters on charcuterie. I have made every recipe in three of the chapters (slow cooked meats, fresh sausage, and fermented) and a few recipes from two (smokehouse and dry-cured) and nothing from pate (not opposed to pate, but some in my house are less-inclined). I have also made several of the recipes in the back of the book. Everything I have made has turned out well.What I like about the book. It's really cool and unique. It is about 50% charcuterie recipes and 50% stories and other recipes. I find the design to be beautiful and the stories of family and travels reasonably interesting. The recipes turn out pretty well and aren’t too hard to follow.Why did I give this book only two stars?First, there are some crazy measurements. Early in the book there is a statement about the importance of measurement and using a scale. However, in the recipes both weight and volume measures are shown. For example, it will read “2 teaspoons (10 g) of ground coriander”. This is in the very first recipe in the book. When I made it I immediately thought, should I do 10g or two teaspoons because they are not even close. Two teaspoons weighs 4.2 grams. This type of error is throughout the book. In this same recipe it reads, “1/2 teaspoon (2 g) of curing salt #1” and “1/2 teaspoon (2 g) of freshly ground nutmeg”. There is no way that ½ teaspoon of curing salt #1 (3.3 g) and nutmeg (1.6 g) would be even close to the weight. This bugged me because it seemed like some editor just went through will a calculator added either weight or volume after the fact. No one ever went through and said, this recipe makes sense. It is just sloppy. This isn’t the only case of sloppiness. Checkout the recipe for nduja. It says to mix up the live cultures with distilled water and set aside, but never mentions them again. They are just set aside – they cannot ferment the sausage if they are sitting on the counter! By the way, when I first noticed issues in the book I messaged OP through Twitter because I thought I was going crazy. I just wanted to confirm that I was on the right track. They never got back to me.Second, I basically went through and bought everything that they recommended. This included the Little Chief smoker, which the author said was his “smoker of choice”. The thing is, this smoker is useless for almost every recipe in this book. It is too hot to cold smoke, not hot enough to really cook through, and only has one temperature setting. In many recipes they ask you to smoke at multiple temperatures, which cannot be done on their recommended smoker.Third, there really aren’t enough recipes. I have since purchased many other charcuterie books (including the great books by Marianski), so I have lots of recipes and ideas. However, it would be nice if they included more options. I don’t think it would be hard to do. Most of their instructions are literally cut and paste from recipe to recipe and take pages upon pages. If you look at the instructions for the fermenting salami the instructions are literally word for word on every recipe and take two pages. In some ways this makes the screw up with the nduja recipe even more ridiculous because they had been copying and pasting, then in the last recipe in the chapter they leave out a crucial step.I am open to changing this review if this book gets updated. Fix the measurement issues, make recommendations for products that make sense for your recipes, and add more recipes. With the high-quality design and interesting stories this could be an easy four star book.

I've had the good fortune to have been to the restaurants and eaten their yummy charcuterie. So it was with much anticipation that I awaited the arrival of the book And last week I received it, opened it and realized, this ain't no ordinary cookbook,. This gem of a recipe book is a love affair, a compelling story, gorgeous photography, and of course amazing recipes.I've ordered copies for all my family and friends.

A food enthusiast living in Portland, OR, I am very familiar with Olympia Provisions, their restaurant, and fine products. I am also familiar with their experience with IOC over use of the name "Olympic". So sad ... Naming matters aside, Olympia Provisions' book is a beautiful portrayal of their essence and purpose in the food industry. I have recently taken a butchery class and this book inspires me to continue on.

But for so many reviews that make this book sound, inappropriately in my view, like a "comprehensive" book (let alone "reference work") on making cured and preserved meats at home, I'd probably have given it a 4 star rating. But it is far from that. It does go into great detail about the basics of charcuterie making, and it has most of the more currently-popular sorts of charcuterie Internet-dwelling "foodies" are into these days. But having read all the over-the-top reviews, I was really rather surprised at how few specific recipes there are, relative to the size of the book, for cured and preserved meats, and how many of the recipes are for "other stuff" (some, but not all, using charcuterie as ingredients). There's also a LOT of back-story, which many people seem to like, but which others (like me) may find to be basically irrelevant. I'd say this is a decent "introduction" to home charcuterie making, especially (mostly?) if you're also interested in the other, more general Olympia Provisions recipes (which I myself happened not to find very interesting), but it certainly isn't sufficient as a general-purpose reference on the subject of "making charcuterie in the home kitchen".

A great recipe book filled with great pictures, insight, guidance, and recipes. I have done two thus far and they have turned out great. I would fully recommend this book.

Very interesting read

My son does Charcuterie meats for a living, this is his must have book. Highly recommended!

This is the cure for cured meat cravings. Warning: Vegans should stay far far away from this horror thriller.

Inspiring !