Salt Smoke Time Cookbook Review

Salt Smoke Time: Homesteading and Heritage Techniques for the Modern Kitchen

If this is not your first time on our website, and if you already follow us, you probably know how much we like outdoor cooking. In this week’s cookbook review, we are back with this topic, but this time through Salt Smoke Time cookbook, from Will Horowitz.

Executive chef and owner of New York City’s highly acclaimed Ducks Eatery and Harry & Ida’s, Will Horowitz is also an avid forager, fisherman, and naturalist. In Salt Smoke Time, he explores ideas of self-reliance, sustainability, and seasonality, illuminating our connection to the natural world and the importance of preserving human and food traditions.

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Reconnect With Nature

We already had the opportunity to review hundreds of cookbooks, but it’s difficult to find one that connects us to nature more than this one. Drawing from the recipes and methods handed down by our ancestors, Horowitz will teach you a variety of invaluable techniques, including curing & brining, cold smoking, canning, pickling, and dehydration.

In this book, he also shares his in-depth understanding of milk products, fishing, trapping seafood, hunting, butchering meat, cooking whole animals, foraging, and harvesting, and even tips on wild medicine. And the best part of all this knowledge and tips is that you can used them even if you live in a one-bedroom apartment, as you will see in the first chapter of this book.

Salt Smoke Time is not a typical cookbook, where you look at the recipes and go shopping at the supermarket. Instead, this is a book that will get you to make your own products, like pickles, butter or even charcuterie. At first, you may consider the recipes to laborious to do, but if you give them a try, you will see that the work was worth it. After you try your own smoked fish or your own Sauerkraut, you will never want to go back to the store-bought products.

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Generation After Generation

The idea behind this book it’s actually quite simple. Horowitz takes traditional foods that have been enjoyed for generations and turns them into fresh new dishes.

Behind all the products that we already talked you will also learn some Horowitz’s signature dishes. With Salt Smoke Time, you’ll learn how to make his signature Jerky and a host of other sensational recipes, including Smoked Tomato and Black Cardamom Jam, Fermented Corn on the Cob with Duck Liver Butter, North Fork Clam Bake, Preserved Duck Breast & Mussels with Blood Orange, and Will’s Smoked Beef Brisket.

And if all these were not enough to convince you to buy this book, he also shares the recipe for his acclaimed Watermelon “Ham”.

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Final Thoughts

Salt Smoke Time is both a nostalgic study of our roots and a handy guide for rediscovering self-reliance and independence in our contemporary lives. An excellent cookbook, with step-by-step illustrations, delicious recipes, and mouth-watering photographs, that promises to change the way people look at nature, making it our own grocery store.

Salt Smoke Time is a book that we believe that any foodie should read. Whether you are an outdoor cooking enthusiast or just a home cook that wants to reconnect with nature.