Collaborative Bacon, Part 2

As you may remember from this post, Jess Watsky (Foodette) suddenly appeared last week bearing the two most important ingredients for making bacon:

1. A pork belly
2. A desire to make bacon

Curing the bacon took about four days, from Sunday afternoon until Thursday night when I removed it from the cryovac pouch in which it slept, gave the belly a rinse under cool running water and picked off any remaining spice bits. I set it on a few paper towels and patted it dry, and later I set it aside in the cool pantry  covered with a loose-knit cotton dishtowel. The idea was to age the belly, allowing more of the moisture to evaporate out of it before sending it to the smoker.

By the time Jess arrived on Saturday, the bacon was ready to go. The fat was dryer and waxy, and the lean had firmed and darkened in color.

For comparison's sake, I trimmed a few thin slices off of one end and fried them up crispy in a small skillet. Simple, unsmoked (or "green") bacon. The flavor was delicious: bacony to be sure, but with just a hint of the juniper berries and a slight sharp edge from the mustard seed. Jess' choices for seasoning were great. So I added a couple of meat hooks to the thick end, and we hung it in the smoker for a little quality time with some smouldering apple wood.

I set the fire in the smoker to low and started the chips. To prevent a big heat build-up around the meat, I set an heavy aluminum baker's tray above the burner. We kept the temperature very low (less than 200F) and left the side to hang and smoke for 3 hours.

After chilling the side for about half an hour in the freezer to firm it up a bit, I brought out my slicer and we cut it 18 slices to the pound. Because the side was on the small side, this was just right for moderately-thick slices. We made up 1-pound packages.

Jess was really happy with the end results. She's still got another side from that Berkshire pig. We're thinking maybe making some pancetta next.

Collaborative Bacon, Part 1

Photo by Foodette

Last week I got a message from Jess Watsky (aka the famous Foodette.) Seems she had a big ol' pile of pig meat which included a belly, and she was wondering if I could find some time to show her how to turn that belly into bacon.

But of course!

I had recently been enchanted by her recent foray into offal, a slow-roasted pig's head - the creation of which she detailed on her blog, Foodette Reviews.

Another photo stolen from Foodette

And that is how it came to be that on a fine Sunday afternoon, Jess, Lynnafred, Maryanne, and I gathered around my kitchen table with a propane torch, singeing the bristles off a wonderful Berkshire pork belly.

I prepped a bowl of basic bacon cure - 2 parts kosher salt, 1 part demerara sugar, 1 generous tablespoon of curing salt - in a bowl. We added seasonings: sweet Hungarian paprika, freshly cracked black pepper, mustard seed, juniper berries and home-grown bay leaves crushed in a mortar.

And then Jess and I donned food-service gloves and gently rubbed the salt mixture into the pork before vacuum sealing it into a plastic time capsule not to be opened until Saturday.

Photo by Dave. For a change.

The salt had already started working its magic by Sunday night. Every now and then I'd take the package out and massage it a little. As the salt draws moisture from the meat, a brine forms in the bag. Although it had only been a few hours, a noticeable brine was already pooling up the the spaces by the meat.

Join us later in the week as we continue the adventure.

Review: Columbus Salame Secchi

If there's one thing I find hard to resist, it's a good salami. (Stop snickering, I didn't mean it that way.) And when I'm browsing along the deli counter at a supermarket and find one I haven't tried before, it's fairly certain that cured meat stick is coming home with me.

And that's how I met this Columbus Salame Secchi, made by San Francisco's Columbus Salame (aka Columbus Manufacturing, Inc.) they've been making cured Italian meats on the west coast since 1917, and Secchi was one of their first products.

It's truly an awesome dry-cured salame, mellow and meaty. It's a great addition to an Italian sandwich, and it's perfect alongside some sharp table cheese, olives, and giardiniera for a snack platter.

Links:

Columbus Salame website
Columbus Salame on Facebook

Pekarski's Sausage, South Deerfield MA

Lynnafred and I were headed north on US 5 in Western Massachusetts on other business when we spotted a small hand-lettered sign at the junction of US 5 and MA 116, promising us a visit to a smokehouse if only we would take a short 2-mile side quest.

That was too tempting to resist, so off we went.

Sure enough, we soon found Pekarski's Sausage, a small company that makes good, honest sausage and smoked meats in small batches by hand.

I can't even begin to list all the products they had available, but I can give you an idea of what they had in the twin display cases running the length of the store...along with a few reviews, since we bought a bunch of stuff to try out.

In photo of the meat case on the left, you can plainly see their kielbasa. It's awesome. The spice blend and smoke is absolutely perfect. Many commercial kielbasas are either runny with grease, or so dry that they crumble. Kudos to Pekarski's, because they have the most ideal ratio of fat to meat I have ever tasted in a kielbasa. 

In the background, just barely identifiable, are Daisy Hams.  If you're from New England, you might be familiar with them - in the 1970's, they were very cheap and common in the supermarkets here. They used to be a boneless pork shoulder, rolled tightly, cured and smoked, and they were sold in tight little plastic-wrapped cylinders that needed only to be boiled with some spuds, carrots, and cabbage for a traditional New England Boiled Dinner. As time has passed, Daisy Hams have gotten a lot more expensive, and a lot crappier. The last time I bought one in the supermarket, it seemed to be a conglomeration of meat scraps and chunks of random pork fat, and it wasn't very good.  Not so here at Pekarski's. Their Daisy Hams are rolled and smoked in a mesh sleeve, and it is totally obvious that they're making them the old-fashioned way, out of boneless pork shoulder. We didn't buy one on this trip, but we plan to pick one up next time.

Pekarski's slab bacon is excellent - much better than the usual supermarket bacon, and easily the equal to my own homemade dry-aged bacon. We bought a pound of it and had the butcher slice it at nice and thick. Next time I think we should get two pounds.

On the other side of the case were various sausages and links.

Their breakfast sausage is, to use a wicked overused term, amazing. The links are roughly twice the size of ordinary breakfast sausage links - about the same size as a hot dog. They fry up wonderfully - moist and delicious and not at all greasy. The spice blend is excellent; I was able to identify sage, thyme, and maybe a bit of coriander and some pepper. Really top-notch.

Lynnafred couldn't resist picking up some chorizo, which turned out to be far and away the best tasting chorizo EVAR. Plans are in the works to use Pekarski's chorizo in a batch of arroz con gandules.

Also available the day we were there: Back bacon (aka Canadian bacon), bratwurst, unsmoked (fresh) kielbasa, fresh pork ribs, smoked pork ribs, smoked pork chops, whole smoked chickens, and whole smoked Cornish game hens. And probably more stuff that I either didn't notice in my wide-eyed wonderment or have forgotten about.

I spoke to the butcher when we were there, curious to find out where they are sourcing their pork. I sometimes have trouble finding good quality pork belly when I make my bacon, and was wondering if they had a local source. They told me that most of their pork comes from farms in New Hampshire. Cool - keeping it regional.

Seriously, Pekarski's is a hidden gem of the Pioneer Valley, and even though it's a good forty-five minute drive from my house to get there, the trip is worth it (and besides, if you get off the highway and take MA 116 all the way there, the back-country drive is gorgeous.) The prices are slightly higher than what you'd pay for mass-market stuff in the supermarket, but the vast improvement in quality and freshness more than makes up for that.

There is plenty to do in the area if you want to make a day trip of it. You can wander around in the Yankee Candle store, smelling Man Candles and more until the overwhelming scents give you a headache. There's Historic Deerfield, where you can wander around in the village and take tours of the cool old Colonial-era houses.  And if you're into bugs flying all around you and landing on you and crawling up your arms and whatnot, you can also visit the Magic Wings Butterfly Conservatory and Gardens, which is a big damn glass building filled with flowers and butterflies which delight in invading your personal space (yeah, I know - they're butterflies, so what's the big deal? Well, butterflies are still BUGS, dammit, and I don't want dozens of them on my SKIN, thank you. I'd go again if they'd only let me in with that can of Yard Guard I brought.)

Pekarski's Sausage

293 Conway Road (MA 116)

South Deerfield, MA 01373

413.665.4537

No credit or debit cards accepted - cash or check only.

Let's Make Some Pastrami

Geez, have you priced pastrami at the deli lately? Nine bucks a pound! Also, I happen to like my pastrami with some fat on it like they used to make when I was a kid, and that stuff is getting harder to find these days.

Here's a quick primer about pastrami. Take a look at the beef cuts chart below. The parts we want to pay particular attention to are the plate, the brisket, and the round:

Illustration courtesy Wikipedia Commons / Ysangkok

In my youth, Plate Pastrami was common. As you can probably figure out, it's made from beef plate, the fatty "belly" area of the beefer which is also the source of short ribs. Plate pastrami gets a lot of it's textural character and richness from the fat which is integral to the cut. It closely resembles bacon, which shouldn't be surprising. Bacon is cured and smoked pig belly, and plate pastrami is cured and smoked beef belly. Plate pastrami is hard to find these days; most supermarkets and delis don't carry it, and if you want to make your own the plate cut often has to be special ordered from a trusted butcher. This rarity is market-driven - while once upon a time, consumers wanted flavorful fatty meat, they are now demanding leaner cuts, and there is no way anyone can describe the plate as "lean."

This is why so much pastrami sold nowadays is Round Pastrami. It's made from the round of the beef, which is very lean. It's very popular and has all but replaced plate pastrami in supermarkets and most delis, but I don't find it at all desireable - pastrami should have some fat on it!

And so, without ready access to beef plate and without any interest at all in curing a round, I direct your attention to the brisket, the cut just in front of the plate. Brisket Pastrami doesn't have quite as much fat as a proper plate pastrami, but it's not bad. It's actually a pretty good compromise between the very fatty plate and the very lean round. And because briskets are pretty easy to come by, you can make pastrami just about any time you want.

Making the Pastrami

Pastrami starts out as a brine-cured cut of meat - a corned beef, actually. There are many perfectly acceptable commercial corned beefs out there, so when I make pastrami at home, I start with a commercial corned  beef rather than a fresh brisket. That allows me to skip the curing process and get right to the seasoning and smoking.

So: Start with a commercial corned beef. You can use a flat cut or a point cut as you prefer. (I happened to get a great deal on a whole brisket and decided to turn the entire thing into enough pastrami for family and friends.)

Remove the corned beef from the wrapping, drain off any juices, and rinse it off. You can also use this opportunity to trim some of the fat and membranes off. I remove the membranes, but only minimally trim the fat.

Notice that this is pretty much an untrimmed brisket. Remember, fat is flavor.

Place the corned beef into a container and add enough water to cover the pastrami. Let it sit and soak for about twenty-four hours or so. You don't have to change the water - just make sure the meat is covered by the water.  The idea is to soak out a lot of the salt that's in the corned beef. As the beef cooks over the smoke and turns into pastrami, it can lose up to 20% of its weight, which will concentrate any salt remaining in the meat. Without this soaking step, your finished pastrami will be almost unbearably salty.

The next day, make up a batch of Pastrami Rub. The most basic of pastrami rubs contain black pepper and coriander with a touch of paprika. Over time, I've developed a rub that gives me exactly the flavor I'm looking for, and that's the recipe I'm sharing here. I encourage you to do some experimenting, too, so you can find your own perfect blend.

Pastrami Rub
Makes enough to transform 1 average point cut or flat cut corned beef into pastrami. If you're using a whole brisket, double the recipe.

1/4 cup black peppercorns
1/4 cup coriander seed
1 tablespoon white pepper
2 tablespoons yellow mustard seed
2 tablespoons good paprika
1/4 cup kosher salt

Grind the peppercorns, coriander, and mustard seed coarsely in a spice grinder or use a mortar and pestle. Add the paprika (use a good quality Hungarian paprika if you can, not that nasty red dust they sell in dollar stores in plastic tubes) and salt, stir well to thoroughly combine.

Take the brisket out of it's soaking water and pat it dry as best you can. Rub the spices liberally onto every square inch of the brisket's surface, pressing the mixture into the surface as you go so there is a decent coating of spices.

With the beef well-coated, put it into the smoker and hold it over the smoke at 250 F for three or four hours, or until the internal temperature of the brisket reaches 165 F on a meat thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the meat. I like to use a mild wood for the smoke - apple is good, and so is citrus wood and maple.

Take the brisket out of the smoker, wrap it up well in aluminum foil, and chill it thoroughly. Cold meat slices better than hot.

When the meat is cold, slice it as thinly as possible. I have a meat slicer, but if you don't, that's okay - use a good sharp slicing knife and make thin, uniform slices against the grain.

Check that out - isn't it just gorgeous?

You can eat it just the way it is if you like - remember, it is fully cooked - but you can also sizzle it a bit in a frying pan or, if you've trimmed a lot of the fat off it first, steam it. Get yourself some good rye bread, some sharp mustard, and some strong horseradish if you so desire, and have yourself a feast.

Home-Cured Back Bacon

I had been thinking of making back bacon (also known in the US as "Canadian bacon") for some time. Though the cure and process is just about identical to the "regular" kind, back bacon is made from pork loin rather than belly.  I got an awesome deal on an untrimmed bone-in whole pork loin not too long ago, and after making a top-notch pork roast for dinner in the beginning of the week, I decided to use the center part of the cut for back bacon.  So, using a meat cleaver I took off a section of the whole roast that would yield about five pounds when the ribs were out.

The first step is removing the rib and chine bones from the loin. This is mad easy - using a long, sharp boning knife and the ribs themselves as a guide, cut between the loin and the ribs to remove them.

This shot is also a great way to look at the loin. That big round muscle on the left is the actual loin - the part you'd buy if you were buying a "boneless pork loin roast" (or, if you buy "bone less pork chops" you'd be getting that muscle cut into slices.)  The long muscle at the top of the cut, well sheathed in fat, is the "tail" of the cut and would normally be removed before curing back bacon.  I left it on so I could have a more UK-style bacon.

After the meat is trimmed of the bone, it's time for curing. For the five-pound loin, I used:

¼ cup Kosher salt

2 teaspoons InstaCure #1 ("pink salt")

¼ cup dry glaze packet swiped from a spiral ham (see  below)

3 tablespoons coarsely-ground black pepper

2 teaspoons dried thyme

3 bay leaves, broken up into tiny bits

The spiral ham glaze is made of sugar, dried powdered honey, and spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, and a hint of clove. I had bought a spiral ham at ALDI awhile ago and cooked it without the glaze, but when I read the glaze ingredients I thought it would be just the thing for a bacon cure and held on to it.  If I didn't have the glaze packet, I would have used a straight-up ¼ cup of brown sugar.  Mix the ingredients for the rub thoroughly together.

Put the loin into a plastic ziplock bag and massage it all over with every bit of the curing rub. Don't just dump the rub into the bag with the loin, either.  Put the cure in the bag a handful at a time and rub it into the meat as you go along.  When all the cure is used up, seal the plastic bag and set it into your refrigerator for 5 to 7 days.  It will look something like this when you first put it in...

...and it will look like this three days later when you pull it out of the fridge to give it a bit of a massage half-way through.  Notice how the rub has drawn some of the moisture out of the meat.  The cure is well underway.

Five days later, it's time to pull the meat out of the cure and finish it up.   Preheat your oven to 250 F.  Remove the meat from the refrigerator and take it out of the plastic bag.  Rinse it off well under cool running water, gently running your hand along the surface to knock off most of the clinging bits of herbs.  The meat might look a little grey, but that's nothing to worry about.  After rinsing, pat it dry with a paper towel and put it on a rack in a roasting pan.  Back bacon is usually unsmoked, so for this batch I just put it in the oven at 250 F with a temperature probe inserted in the thickest part of the loin muscle to indicate when the internal temperature got to 150 F.  This approximately five-pound chunk of pigmeat took about 3 hours.;  A nice low temperature is essential to cook the pork without melting out all of the treasured fat it contains.

The chunk of bacon is out of the oven and looks awesome.  This point, by the way, is the hardest part about making homemade bacon:  Not eating it before it's been wrapped and chilled.  Tightly wrapping the unsliced bacon and putting it in the refrigerator overnight sets the juices in the meat and makes it much easier to slice.  I cheated a little and cut off the barest sliver of bacon to taste it.  Cue choir of angels - it turned out incredible.  It was all I could do not to slice the whole thing up right then and there and NOM THE HELL OUT OF IT.  But no, I wrapped it up and quietly set it into the fridge to chill.

The next day, take the bacon out of the fridge and use a meat slicer or a sharp carving knife to pare off thin slices from the end.  On the rib side of the meat, the slices will look like wafer-thin pork chops, with a large round loin muscle and some belly fat and meat as a "tail." These slices were taken from the other side - the loin side of the cut - because I wanted some streaks of fat along with the big areas of lean.

 Brown the slices slowly over low heat in a dry skillet - the meat will caramelize and the fatty parts will brown and crisp up as some of the remaining fat is rendered.

My version, using the ALDI spiral ham glaze instead of brown sugar, was totally awesome.  The hints of cinnamon and clove in the glaze gave the bacon a flavor very reminiscent of Chinese char sui pork while still retaining the hamminess typical of back bacon.  It was a huge hit with the family (Huzzah! That gives me an excuse to do it again!)

A Tale of Two Beef Tongues - Corned, and Smoked

Tongue.  It's not a very popular cut of meat nowadays; this is perhaps because it is the one common cut of meat that most resembles a chunk of dead animal.  There aren't that many things that can be done to a whole tongue to make it look untonguely.

And it's expensive, too!  I was checking out prepared tongue at ShopRite last week.  Ready-to-eat corned tongue was going for $10.95 a pound, making even the smallest one in the meat case almost $24.  Damn.  Luckily though, Tony Impoco at Impoco Poultry Market in Springfield came to the rescue - he had fresh beef tongue in and selling for a delightful $2.00 a pound.  I bought two of them.

Fresh tongue is not a pretty sight, and takes some work to prepare properly.  It's covered with a  thick, rough skin and there are fatty sections and glands underneath near the base of the tongue before it can be used.  At left is a picture of the tongues as Ithey looked when I  got them home. 

The plan is to put both tongues into a curing brine for the better part of a week.  One of them will be slow-cooked for several hours as Corned Tongue, while the other one will be taken from the brine and with the application of smoke and time be turned into tasty Smoked Tongue.

Onto a cutting board and into the sink they went for cleaning and trimming.  I gave them a good scrubbing and trimmed off the unpleasant bits with a sharp boning knife.

The picture at right shows the difference between a "pared" tongue (on the left) with an "unpared" tongue (on the left.)  I usually remove the fatty sections on the right and left of the tongue's base along with any remaining bits of glands that might be there.  I also pare off the root of the tongue (about 1/2 inch in or so) to remove any dubious or bloody bits.  (If you'd like to see a larger version of that pic, just click on it)

With the tongue trimmed and rinsed, it was time to make the brine.

Corned Beef Brine

For Corned Beef or Tongue

Makes 1 Gallon

1 gallon water

1 cup Kosher salt

1/2 cup sugar

1 teaspoon InstaCure #1, aka "pink salt" (this is optional, but using it will keep the meat an attractive pink color. Without it, the tongues will turn grey during the curing process.)

6 garlic cloves, crushed

3 teaspoons whole peppercorns

1 teaspoon whole allspice berries

1 teaspoon juniper berries

1 tablespoon dried thyme

6 bay leaves

2 teaspoons whole mustard seed

Bring the water to a boil and stir in the remaining ingredients.  Simmer the brine until the salt and sugar is dissolved, then allow the brine to cool completely before using.

Corning the Tongues:

Pour the brine into a tightly-sealable container - a large Tupperware or Stearlite food storage tub is ideal - and add the tongues, submerging them as much as possible.  Most of the techniques I've read say that you should hold the meat under the surface of the brine using a heavy plate, but if you have something that closes with a leakproof seal, you can omit the plate since you can flip the container over periodically to make sure it brines evenly (which is what I did.)

Seal the container and put it into the fridge for about five days.  Twice a day, flip the container over - or open it up and turn the tongues over.

At the end of five days, the tongue is cured and ready to cook.

Cooking Corned Tongue:

Prepare a flavorful vegetable stock by bringing about 6 quarts of water to a boil in a stock pot.  Add some sliced carrots, sliced parsnips, a couple of cut up fresh tomatoes, a few ribs of celery, a few onions,  some parsley, a couple of bay leaves, and a chopped up bell pepper.  Simmer the stock for about an hour, and then add the tongue to the pot.  Simmer the tongue for about four hours, until it's nice and tender.  When it's done, remove it from the pot to a cutting board and let it stand a few minutes to cool down a little - just enough for you to be able to handle it.

 The cooking time will have made the skin covering the tongue hard and plastic-like, as well as loosening it from the meat.  Use a sharp knife to carefully slit the skin at the base of the tongue and you will find it pretty easy to peel off the skin - it won't slip off all in one piece, but it won't offer much resistance as you peel it off in strips.

The skin is not widely considered to be edible - it's tough and not very pleasant to eat for people - but if you have dogs, you can give it to them as a treat.  Zim and Iris both loved the bits of tongue-skin that I gave them as Good Dog Cookies.

.Slice the tongue after peeling - warm and served with veggies if you want to serve it as an old-timey dinner, or chill it overnight and slice it thin for sandwiches.

Making Smoked Tongue:

The process for Smoked Tongue is similar, but there are some differences.  When you remove the tongue from the brine, rinse it off well and soak it in fresh water for an hour or so to draw out some of the excess salt.  This is necessary, because the tongue doesn't cook in liquid as long as boiled corned tongue. After the soaking period, simmer the tongue in vegetable broth just like for corned tongue - except don't fully cook it until tender.  Simmer it only for about an hour and a half to two hours - just long enough to loosen the skin - then peel it and place it into the smoker.

I put the par-cooked tongue on a rack in the center of my smoker, which was preheated to about 175 F.  There is some fat in the meat - mostly toward the base - but for the most part, you'll need to keep the heat on the low side to prevent it from drying out (some instructions on the web say your should cover the tongue with strips of bacon to keep it basting in the smoker, but I was going for a more traditional, all-beef approach.

A boldly flavored smoke is best for tongue.  I used some awesome old citrus chips that have an exceptional flavor.  Keeping the heat below 200 F, I held the tongue over the smoke for about 2½ hours.

(Note:  You can put the tongue directly into the smoker from the freshwater soak if you want - skipping the initial simmering and peeling steps - but this makes the tongue a little harder to peel in the long run, and the skin really is nasty.  Also, if you don't simmer the tongue, increase the time in the smoker dramatically, by two or even three hours.)

The tongue is done cooking when it can be easily pierced by a fork.  The outside will be a rich, dark brown from the smoke.  While it's still hot (but after taking a couple slices off for immediate OM NOM NOMming, of course) wrap the tongue tightly in aluminum foil and stash it in the fridge until it's chilled.  This will firm up the meat and make it much easier to get lovely wafer-thin slices later.

Notice in the photo how much darker the smoked version is than the simple corned version - the meat is less red and more of a mahogany brown.  The smoke adds another dimension of flavor as well.  Serve it on sandwiches, or slice thinly as part of a charcuterie plate with other delights like salami and capicola and various sharp cheeses.

How to Turn Really Good Pepperoni into AWESOME Pepperoni

No matter which brand of pepperoni you like best, and no matter how delicious it is, there is something you can do with it that will increase it's awesomeness exponentially.  You need no special skills or experience to do it; you only need a stick of pepperoni (unsliced, none of that  sliced deli stuff or bagged slices) and a paper towel.

Start with a good brand of pepperoni, like Hormel Rosa Grande or Armour's Margherita. You can't get good results if you start with junk.  When you get it home, take the label and plastic wrap (if any) off and wrap the pepperoni stick loosely in a paper towel.  Now, put it on a shelf in the back of your fridge and leave it there for two weeks before you start slicing into it.

Done.

Regardless of how high the esteem in which you hold your favorite brand, the fact of the matter is companies just don't age their pepperonis as much as they really should before getting them to the market, and so many of them hit the shelves with a higher moisture content.  Over the years,  consumers have come to accept and even expect this.

Well, the manufacturers, with their tight production schedules and need to turn over product, might not have the time for an extra couple of weeks drying time, but at home we do.  And you'll be amazed by the difference it will make in your pepperoni.  Yes, it will be a little smaller (not that much - remember, the manufacturers considered the curing done before they shipped it)  but it will also be bolder tasting, richer, and a little dryer.  The basic flavor of the pepperoni won't have changed, but it will have more character.

Step by step:

1. Wrap the pepperoni stick loosely in a paper towel and put it in the back of the fridge
2. Check on it after the first week (unwrap it and look at it.)  Some red grease may be in the paper towel - don't worry about it, that's what the towel is there fore anyway.  Look for mold on the pepperoni.  There shouldn't be any, but if you find some, wipe it off with a paper towel dampened in vinegar.
3. At the end of the second week, start slicing off pepperoni to enjoy.  With some of the moisture evaporated out of it, the flavor will have improved.
4. You can keep the pepperoni out in the general refrigerator population, wrapped in the paper towel, as long as you want, even after you've started slicing it.  It will continue to dry.  If you feel like doing some experimentation, slice off a bit every three or four days until it's all gone to find out just how dry you prefer your pepperoni so you can get it "perfect" next time.

It's easy and delicious, you just have the patience not to OM NOM NOM that pepperoni every time you open the fridge and see it back there on the shelf, biding its time.

Cold Lunch

Clockwise from bottom:  Pickled herring with homemade smetana (Russian-style sour cream); dry-aged hot Italian spicy; sliced smoked veal tongue; sliced Hungarian salami; Kosher dill pickle spears.

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Introducing The Pickled Pig

If you're into charcuterie, check out this brand-new blog:  The Pickled Pig.  Blogger Cole Marvin's stated goal is to cure his way through Ruhlman's Charcuterie, one recipe at a time, kind of like Julie & Julia only with lots of pigmeat and without annoying, whiney Amy Adams.

A noble effort, indeed, and one well worth the time (both for Cole, and for us as we follow along.)   Now's a great time to start following, too, because The Pickled Pig is only a few posts out from it's launch - we're getting in on the ground floor.  Also, Cole is making bacon, a subject which is always interesting.

You'll find The Pickled Pig from the link up in the first line of this post, and there's a permanent link on my blogroll in the right-hand sidebar (blogs with new posts always go to the top of the roll, so you can stay up to date easily.) 

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Homemade Breakfast Sausage

The Stop & Shop in my town is one of the most sausage-friendly stores in the area.  They always carry natural hog casings, and they're really good about carrying inexpensive cuts of pork for grinding up batches of homemade sausage.  And they're the only store in town that routinely sells pork fat, an essential ingredient for good sausage. (You can talk about lean sausage all you want, but I guarantee that you wouldn't like the stuff if it were less than 20% fat.  It's a fact of life.)

Last weekend, I scored a nice batch of Stop & Shop's pork fat that was slightly more meat than fat; since the ratio looked so good, I decided to just grind it as is and make some breakfast sausage from it.   I broke out my ol' faithful meat grinder - a massive Porkert No. 10 - and threw both the grinder and the pork trimmings into the freezer to condition them for processing.  Partially freezing the pork makes it grind much easier and better, and putting the huge, heavy grinder into the freezer gives me about half an hour or more of thoroughly chilled equipment for perfect grinding.

After mixing in the spices and letting the flavors blend for a few hours in the fridge, I stuffed the sausage meat into the casings, twisted them off into links, and set them back into the fridge overnight.  We fried them up the next day.  They were awesome.

Breakfast Sausage

Makes 2 pounds of sausage

2 pounds of fatty ground pork - 20% minimum, 30% is better

2 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon dried marjoram

3/4 teaspoon rubbed sage

1 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper

3/4 teaspoon of dried thyme

1/2 teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes

1/2 teaspoon coriander

1/2 teaspoon MSG

Mix the ground meat with the remaining ingredients and allow to rest, refrigerated, for a couple of hours for the flavors to blend.  Stuff into casings for sausage links, or just form into patties and fry.

Notes:  

• Use less ground black pepper for a milder sausage.
• I used Turkish Aleppo pepper instead of the crushed red pepper flakes. You could also sub hot Hungarian paprika or cayenne pepper if you wish
• Skip the MSG if you want.  I've tried it both ways, and I definitely prefer the MSG version.

These really should be stuffed into a small-diameter natural sheep casing, but all I had was the wider-diameter hog casings.  So they came out the same diameter as Italian sausage.  They were still delicious, though.

Sizzle, sizzle.

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Last Capicola Update for 2010: A Partial Success

This was a tough year for my capicola.  I got a bit of a late start this year, which usually isn't a problem, but going into March, the temperature came up unseasonably warm and conditions in the attic where I cure the cappy got a little iffy.  I kept an eye on the temp up there, and when it started breaking 60 F it had me a little worried.  

As it turned out, daytime temps started hitting the high 80's and even topped 90 F for a couple days, and that short run was bracketed by several days in the upper 70's.  Worse yet, nighttime temps didn't drop low enough, or fast enough, to moderate the temperature in the attic.  Everything hanging there had to get to the spare refrigerator. for the last couple of weeks of curing.

I suspected we might have been too late for at least one of the capicola - when I brought them down from the attic, I noticed a single patch of mold on one of them - a fairly standard green mold, which woujld have been harmless, but with small spotty bits of what looked like a black mold mixed in, especially infiltrating the netting on the outside.  It worried me, but wince there was just a few weeks left to the aging, I decided to take a chance and try to save it.  I scrubbed the moldy section with a stiff-bristled brush and plenty of white wine, then patted the meat dry and stashed it in the fridge to finish curing.

I checked the capicola daily, giving it a squeeze now and then to test for firmness, waiting for that magical "just right" point where the meat isn't squishy and isn't hard, but just firm enough to resist the squeeze and just soft enough to have a bit of yield when pressed.  That point finally arrived for most of the cappies a few days ago, so I took them out for the unwrapping.

All of the hot capicola came out perfect.  The meat was firm and just a bit moist; the outside surfaces under the casing were dry and well-crusted with their pepper coating. There were no spots of mold on any of the hots,  And the flavor was just was as good as the appearance: slightly smoky thanks to the chipotle powder, with a good but subtle burn from the chipotles and cayenne pepper - not really enough to cause any rebellion in the mouth (just a hint of fire, really) with a bold hot finish that builds as you enjoy a few slices, but never gets overwhelming or too powerful.

A closeup of the green and white molds growing on the meat.
On the left of the photo is the casing and a flap of meat being
pulled back to reveal the bright orange patch of mold growing
there.  The picture doesn't do justice to the awesomely bright
yellow and orange molds found here.

Two of the sweet capicola, however, were troubling.  The one I mentioned earlier had regrown some of the mold on the exterior in the same place where I had scrubbed it previously.  When the casing came off, I found out why:  There was an extensive green mold colony under the casing, extending down into a crease in the meat. This was not necessarily a problem, since green and white mold are harmless and in some ways even desireable.  But when I peeled back the shallow meat flap that was covering the crease, I was dismayed to find bright orange mold growing in the center of the moldy patch.  Squeezing the cappy gently caused some liquified fat close to the meat to ooze out, and that was orange-red as well.  There was no seasoning or pepper type in the mixture I rubbed into the meat that would have made anything to turn color this way, so into the trash it went.

A second piece of cappy went to the trash when I was trimming one end off, in preparation for vacuum-packing the product: when the knife went through, it revealed a bright orange spot on the border between the meat and the fat.  Further investigation revealed that this contaminated area actually ran for quite a ways down the length of the meat.  This was also not a "keeper."

Bad.

So we ended up losing two of ten sweet capicoli, and none of the four hot. Not a bad result, I suppose, but still bothersome.  This underscores, for me, the need for a better and more controllable curing area, and it is looking more and more likely that I will be picking up a small refrigerator which can be adapted into a curing cabinet which can be used year-round not only for capicola but for other cured salumi as well.

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Checking in on the Capicola

With daytime temperatures getting into the 70's over the past few days, it was definitely getting too warm in the attic to leave the capicola hanging up there.  I brought them downstairs and stacked them up on the top shelf of the spare fridge.  If the temps come down, they can go back up to the attic, but for now I'll just keep them here, restacking them every so often to make sure they continue to dry evenly.

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Bresaola is Ready!

I went up to the attic last night to check on the meats - with the temps climbing toward the 60's during the day, I don't want to let the attic room get too warm - and found that the bresaola was ready to open.  Actually, I think it might have hung a few days too long because it seemed a little stiff to me.  So I brought it down to the kitchen for a tasting and photoshoot.

There it is, dried to a lovely nut-brown, wrapped in its casing.   The casing is a little drier and stiffer than I would have liked.  I suspect the curing room's humidity might be little low.  We'll see when we cut into it.

I cut a few lovely paper-thin slices.  They are absolutely delicious.  The beef has a rich and meaty flavor with a distinctive flavor of rosemary and hints of juniper.  I still think it could have hung three or four days less - especially considereing the temperature lately - but it was moist and yielding and the interior fat veins were creamy and not at all unpleasant (the way beef fat can so often be, coating one's mouth and so on.  That didn't happen here at all.)

However, it's obvious that I am going to have to start better regulating the humidity in the curing room.  The outer edges of the slices are very well-dried and dark, making sort of an edible "rind" on the meat which I prefer not to have.  I suspect I am going to find the same thing on the capicola when I take it down and this does not please me.  I haven't had this problem in the past but I think that the unusually cold winter we had this year affected the humidity levels in my attic and it will make this batch of cappy less glorious than my past efforts.

At any rate, despite the extra drying around the edges - which I will remedy next time - the bresaola came out quite acceptable (though not perfect.)  Slices of it will definitely be on the charcuterie plates this year.

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Capicola and Bresaola - The Meat Hanging in my Attic

Time once again to check in on the delicious meats which are aging in my attic closet.  In the background are two hot capicola - rubbed with a mixture of black pepper, smoked paprika, and powdered chipotle pepper.  In the foreground on the left is the bresaloa - a cured beef eye of round.  On the right is a sweet capicola.

The capicolas have several more weeks left to cure.  They're still soft and pliant.  I think they're curing a little faster this year because they're not strapped with wooden slats, but they still have a long way to go.

The bresaola, though, will be ready much sooner.  It's already fairly firm because the beef loses moisture faster than the pork even though they are both cased.  I'm checking it every few days now to make sure it doesn't become overdried.

Meanwhile, the weather is getting a bit milder, though the temps are still in the high thirties during the day, so I'm monitoring the temperature in the attic a little closer too,  If we get a warm spell I'll have to move the meats to the spare refrigerator until the weather cools down again.

Bresaola Update

I had been keeping watch on the beef eye round in the fridge as it cured, checking it every so often to see how the cure was working.  It felt ready to come out on Sunday - the meat had firmed up quite a bit as the curing process pulled moisture out of the roast - but I just didn't have a chance to get to it until yesterday.  (That's the good thing about doing this - a day or two longer doesn't make too much of a difference in the long run as long as your raw materials are fresh and decent to begin with.)

Even though I had pulled the curing roast out last week and drained it, the fresh cure had found plenty of moisture left to draw out, and the wrinkles in the cryovac were filled with red brine.  I cut the bag and drained the brine, then rinsed all of the herbs from the meat under cool running water.  Some of them still clung a little, so I finished rinsing the meat with white wine, the same way I had done weeks earlier with the capicola before hanging it.

It looked pretty good - nice and red and ready to age.  Some little bits of herbs and especially black pepper clung to the meat even after rinsing and patting it dry.  I considered rinsing the roast off again, but in the end decided to leave the remaining flavorings where they were.

Meanwhile, the casing (a beef bung cap, the same as I use for capicola) soaked in warm water with a good squeeze of lemon juice added.  After soaking for a half hour or so, I rinsed the casing well inside and out and stuffed it with the roast.

Surprisingly enough, I found that stuffing the casings with the beef went a little easier than with the pork.  The somewhat oblong shape of the pork loins lamost require stuffing to be a two-man job, with one guy holding onto the loin and the other working the casing up from the bottom, until finally the casing is on far enough for the loin to "drop in" to the bottom.  The beef eye round was more regular and circular in cross-section, and wasn't that hard to do by myself.

So, here's a ridiculous-looking photo of the bresaola getting the elastic netting applied.  The beef eye is a lot longer than the pork half-loins for capicola, so it stuck out of my homemade pop-bottle sleeve tool.  It was a little tighter fit, too, because the diameter was a bit larger.  But the plastic bottle still made it into a relatively simple job, and the elastic netting was fit to the meat in no time.  I pricked some holes in the casing to squeeze out any trapped air, and then it was off to the attic for curing time.

And there it is, my proto-bresaola, hanging in the curing closet up in the attic alongside the cappies.

Foreground left: Bresaoia

Foreground right: Sweet capicola

Background:  Hot capicolas  (That'w why there's a color difference.)

As long as we're up here anyway, here's an observation about the capicolas:  This is the first year I've tried using elastic netting instead of wooden slats tightly clamped to the meat.  I notice that there isn't an awful lot of shrinkage in diameter as the meat ages and dries, but there seems to be quite a bit of shrinkage in length.  The cappies are getting firmer, though, and are only a little damp to the touch, so I'm reasonably sure that they're drying okay.  I'm hoping that the texture will be as good as normal when we unwrap them.  (If not, no problem, we just go back to slats next year.)

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Quick Bresaola Update

I took the round roast out of the first cure stage today. The cryovac it was in was filled with meat juices and brine and the meat was starting to get firm, so the cure is doing its job. The meat was a vivid pink and smelled gorgeous with the thyme, rosemary, and juniper in the mix.

I rinsed it off with wine, patted it dry, and reapplied a fresh coating of cure, then resealed it in cryovac. It needs to stay for another five days or so, then I'll put it in a beef bung cap casing and hang it in the curing room in the attic with the capicola.

Pictures next week, when it comes out of the cure for the last time.

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Cumberland Gap Hickory Smoked Sliced Pork Jowl Bacon

On January 19th, over at The Ridiculous Food Society of Upstate New York, Mr. Dave (no relation) reviewed Cumberland Gap Jowl Bacon. Click here for a link to that post.

It's been a while since I had jowl bacon, so I immediately headed over to my local Price Chopper to see if it was available, and it was! So I bought a package, and last weekend the family and I tucked into some for breakfast.

Now if you've ever seen a smoked jowl before, you'll know that it is very much crescent-shaped: the ends are narrow - pointy, even - and the central part is broad. From a commercial packers' point of view, it must be a nightmare, because it would be really hard to get a product like that into neat, uniform slices that are easy to package.

Cumberland Gap seems to have come up with sort of a solution to that problem, though. They apparently take the jowls and compress them into a cylindrical shape, then split them down the center and cut them into neatly uniform semicircular slices. The irregular shape of a natural jowl doesn't lend itself easily to this kind of shaping, though, and there are little pockets of gelatine filling in the gaps in the slices.

What this all adds up to is a variety of bacon with more of a moisture content than usual, and which tends to get a little tatty-looking as it cooks. Thick slices and wet cures mean that cooking over a lower heat is the best method here, but the irregular way the jowl is jumbled together in the slices cause them to take on a wicked curl as they start to fry. Accordingly, I kept the fire down to low and used my cast-iron bacon press to hold the slices down in the pan. They cooked up every bit as ugly as I expected - unevenly shaped, with bits falling off here and there. But all was not lost! The slices also cooked up evenly and, with the help of the bacon press, nicely within that range of bacon perfection where the slices are crispy but not brittle and uniformly golden brown.

At right, you can see what I mean by "tatty-looking" bits of pork. The compressed bits just simply "let go" of each other and sizzled up into more-or-less random shapes that had nothing to do with either the natural shape of the jowl or the semicircular shape that was imposed upon them.

But with bacon, it doesn't matter so much what the stuff looks like; the important part is how it tastes. And Cumberland Gap jowl bacon has a very good flavor, indeed.

It's not too salty, yet not bland. The smoke flavor is noticeable and delicious, and as Mr. Dave mentioned, it has a richer and more "porky" flavor than standard bacon. Parts of the jowl are a bit cartilaginous, so you also get bits of chewy, tooth-resistant bacony goodness that adds to the textural interest.

Overall, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Cumberland Gap's jowl bacon to anyone. It really does make a nice change from the standard rashers of bacon we find everywhere. I just can't help but wish that they'd leave the stuff in its natural shape instead of trying to impose a fragile uniformity upon it that just falls apart upon cooking.

Link:

Cumberland Gap Provision Company - Learn about the company and about their many other pork products.

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