The thing is, charcuterie as a term encompasses a LOT of stuff- anything from the classic cured and dried meats like prosciutto or jamon Serrano, to cured/dried sausages like salami, jagerwurst, to stuff like regular old ham and bacon, to beef jerky, to emulsified sausage like mortadella, bologna, and hot dogs, to pates like liverwurst, to terrines, to rilletes & confit, etc… I think even stuff like cold smoked salmon and gravlax could fall under charcuterie’s aegis these days.
I tend to agree that the ‘standard’ charcuterie plate of the usual Italian-style salumi suspects like coppa, some kind of salami-type dried sausage and some other stuff is kind of overpriced and often pretentious as hell. But I still like it, and every now and then you get cool stuff- my wife and I went to a place last month where we had lamb rillettes as part of the charcuterie plate. That was unusual!
I’ll say that sous-vide fish is where it’s at; unless you’re looking to brown the fish, like say… searing tuna steaks, you can nail the cooking temp with sous vide in a way that’s extremely hard to come close to with conventional cooking methods.
Also, sous-vide steaks are pretty good- they only take 30-45 minutes, and provided you have a hot cast-iron skillet or really hot grill, you can get a really good sear as well as a perfectly cooked interior.
I don’t have a lot of use for long sous-vided stuff like corned beef; yes, you may end up with supremely tender meat, but you get that anyway with the traditional braise, and you also don’t have that meat flavoring the veggies and potatoes in the pot. (I guess I’m thinking NE Boiled dinner not strictly corned beef.).
Switching gears a little… on the subject of IPAs:
I’m not a serious hop-head, but I do enjoy IPAs. But the biggest problem I’ve perceived is the arms-race between breweries on who can pack more IBU into their bottles. It’s a marketing thing, not a taste or quality thing. A “real” IPA is hop-heavy, but with a corresponding OG that gives it a lot of balancing malt flavor. Not as balanced as a bitter in that sense, but a lot more so than some random craft brewery’s “Triple Imperial-Royal IPA- “Suicide by Hop”” (or some other stupid-ass pun name) that’s like 130 IBU, but only 1.065 in OG.
I like the balance- a hoppy beer is fine, but I’m not looking for alcoholic hop tea.
For my money, I like a good, fresh, well-made lager. Something like Live Oak’s amber, Deep Ellum’s Neato Bandito or Karbach’s Karbachtoberfest, to name a few local/regional examples. Luckily, I think that’s the inbound thing for breweries.
And- if you get desperate, you can eat it, I guess.