Hog Week Part 5: Chorizo Two Ways

Posted on March 24, 2013 by admin

 

So here we are again, after that brief interlude of mass sausage production, let’s get back to the first lot of pigs.

Another thing we get through a lot of is chorizo.

To start with, 30 kg of lean pork. Mainly shoulder (or Boston butt as they call it in the former colonies, for reasons I have yet to fathom. Perhaps Brahmins can’t tell their arse from their elbow?). For salami and chorizo the meat needs to be as lean as possible. The fat is added separately.

Grindy grindy grindy. Medium-coarse plate – the chorizo needs to have some texture about it.

Here is a breakdown on a smaller quantity. This is 5kg of meat.  To which we add:

1600g diced hard back fat
150g salt
3g starter culture
10g black pepper
6Tbs hot paprika
3Tbs smoked paprika
2tsp saltpetre

And that’s basically it for our standard chorizo. In terms of heat, the chorizo gives it a bit of bite, but not excessive. Enough to register as spicey but not so much as too overwhelm the mouth if you eat a dozen slices or so. It needs to be kid-friendly, and whilst my kids will eat reasonably hot food now, they have their limits.

It is nice to have a few slightly pokier chorizos, though. So we are making a small batch – just 5 kilos – of chilli chorizo.

This is the same basic mix as before, with the addition of a large handful of assorted dried chillies from the chilli cupboard. Whizzed through the coffee grinder, seeds and all, and mixed through the mixture.

Stuffety stuffety stuffety.

We are using large hog casings here. Some people prefer to use beef runners to get really thick chorizo, but I find the thinner diameter easier to use and far easier for drying.

And the finished chorizos are hung out to mature. The time they take depends on a number of factors. You can do them entirely in a salami chamber, of course, and have control over temperature and humidity, but the weather we have had recently is perfect for drying them naturally.

Fast forward to the present day and the chorizos are about ready to taste.  Seen here a little out of focus in the company of some 18 month old culatello.

Still a little on the soft side, and will be at optimum firmness in another couple of weeks, but certainly quite edible. Nice balance of meat to fat, good level of heat without being overpowering. A worthy addition to the KaC larder.

“Hmm, think I’ll just have a little more, to be on the safe side….”


The chilli chorizo. If you look really closely you can just see the chilli flakes in the meat. This one is absolutely spot-on. The heat is barely noticeable at first – on initial tasting I was sure I hadn’t put enough chilli in, but as you chew it begins to bite back, and then the afterglow kicks in. Two or three slices and you really know about the heat. Mmmm. Wish I’d made more of this now

 

The second use we have for chorizo is as a cooking ingredient. In paellas, in Mediterranean stews, with cod or squid, patatas bravas etc etc, it is a wonderfully versatile ingredient that adds a hit of spice and a Spanish twist. For ‘dry cooking’ uses such as pizza toppings, we just use the standard dried chorizo, but for recipes which call for its use as a moist ingredient, we have our cooking chorizo. This we make in more of an East European style, and without the cubed backfat of the dry chorizo.

By this stage of the day we are rapidly running out of mixing vessels, so the baby bath is sterilised and requisitioned. We start with 10kg of ground pork.

To which we add 60g black pepper

and one and a half heads of crushed garlic.

200g of sea salt

then in goes the paprika: 70g Hungarian hot paprika, 200g sweet paprika and 50g smoked paprika. This chorizo has a bit more pep about it than the dried version.

and last but not least, 50g ground caraway seeds.

time for a touch of le mixage extraordinaire…

And that’s it done. We stuff about half of it into casings to firm up overnight and be used sliced, and the rest we pack as loose sausagemeat for use as stuffings, casing for spicy Scotch eggs and so forth.

And while we have a batch of it made up, we may as well test it out.

Pork Tenderloin stuffed with Chorizo

There are a lot of variants on this basic dish. You can add caramelised apple and onion to the chorizo stuffing, or spinach and Manchego, but today we are not going to adulterate our meat with fruit and veg and dairy. We are going to have our pork Slovak-style: meat stuffed with more meat.

We take one of those lovely lengths of tenderloin we stripped out of the pigs while we were doing the inital cuts.

Buterfly it open and pound it flat. (apologies for the fuzziness of the pictures from hereonin – the lens had got a bit smeared with fat and I didn’t notice until after the event.)

Then take a sheet of beautiful gossamer caul fat. Rinse carefully and spread it out flat.

Place a thick tube of chorizo mix in the middle of the flattened tenderloin

… and roll it up in the caul, tucking up the ends neatly. If it is big enough to go round twice, so much the better. It needs to be as snug-fitting as possible,if not tight. The caul will hold the whole thing in shape during cooking and slowly melt away.

It’s kind of like a spicey super-faggot:

Cover with foil  and put into a medium (190C) oven for about 50 minutes, depending on thickness. After half an hour, take the foil off so the outside crisps up.

Slice and serve. I like to drizzle the cooking juices over the sliced meat. All those spices in the juice… mmm…

A cross-section showing the chorizo stuffing.

The obligatory happy munching children shot:

… and that’s all I have to say about that.

Posted in Butchering, Charcuterie, Culatello, Pigs, Recipes, Salumi, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Hoggus Interruptus – The Razorback Challenge

Posted on March 23, 2013 by admin

For those of who have been on tenterhooks, or meathooks, waiting for the next thrilling instalment of Hog Week, I apologise. There is much  more to come, but my publishing schedule was rather interrupted this week by the arrival of a pair of unexpected guests.

Two enormous, ancient, feral saddlebacks, which, after our recent skirmishes with the good people of DEFRA, we shall say no more about in terms of provenance, despatch etc. They wuz gurt big old hogs,  I tell ‘ee. To say nothing of ferocious, unfriendly and not at all fond of human company.

They did quieten down after a while, though.

The beasts were at least five years old, and, rather like the pig in Black Cat, White Cat, seemed to have been subsisting on a diet of old wrecked cars – not just the upholstery either: tyres, bodywork… tender chops and roasting joints they were never going to make.

But they did make fine sausage. 2% salt, 1% pepper, 10% rusk and a bit of water to moisten the mix and they were transformed into very nice basic breakfast bangers indeed. Had some for breakfast this morning in fact, with some eggs still warm from the hens and a little of the bacon from last week, which has been cold smoking over oak for 48 hours.

Now, normally, dashing off a few sausages would not cause any great delay in the daily grind, but I had rather underestimated the sheer quantity involved here. Every scrap of the beasts was destined to be bangers, from tail to trotter. It ended up as just shy of 160kg of sausage. I got strange looks in Tesco as I returned for the third time in a day to buy yet another half kilo of black pepper and another ten loaves of bread for rusk. We cranked out getting on half a kilometre of intestine. I became heartily sick of the sight, smell and feel of sausagemeat. Bearing in mind that this was all on top of the efforts of my own Hog Week.

But anyway. It is done now. The sausages have left the building. I have my life back. Normal service shall be resumed. Let the blog flow…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s neck and neck in the Pork Lift Truck race:

Posted in Butchering, Pigs, Uncategorized, Wild Game | 1 Comment

Hog Week Part 4: Ham – Making it, Cooking it, Canning it

Posted on March 17, 2013 by admin

In the Slovak language, “Ham, ham” is what one says to small children to encourage them to eat. Like “yum, yum” or “nom, nom” in English, or that version of English spoken in the former colonies respectively. At first I was concerned that this would confuse my children. “Ham, ham” when they were being spoonfed pureed carrot and swede. However, that does not seem to have been the case, and now that they all can speak both languages, if you say “Pureed swede and carrot”  to them, they will pull a grim face, whereas if you say “Ham” to them they will reply “Yum yum!”, which is exactly as it should be.

So, getting back to the legs of the saddleback that we set aside in Part 1, let’s make some ‘wet ham’ as my wife calls it (wet yum yum sounds like something we really don’t want to go into, but I can’t resist tossing these asides in, if only because ‘wet yum yum’ and ‘tossing’ in the same sentence will send my Google search term traffic through the roof today).

We can probably dispose of this bit. I like a bit of tail as much as the next man, but generally not while I am eating ham. Time and a place for everything. This can go in the Hurky bucket.

Removing the tail bone and upper half of the hip socket. Fiddly. Time-consuming, but has to be done. The actual leg bone can, and will, be left in, For a boiled ham, this is pretty essential flavourwise in my opinion, and the difficulties the bone presents when it comes to carving are more than offset by the terrible loss of structural integrity that tunnel boning would cause. Tricky carving should also be viewed as an opprtunity to bone up (hoho) on your carving skills. So many people mimsy around when it comes to carving meat. There is no great secret to it, just a bit of thought and a sharp knife. So step up to the plate, people. And do make sure your carving knife is properly sharp before you start. I have encountered people weeping over massacred attempts at carving and invariably they are using a knife about as sharp as a plastic ruler from my kids’ schoolbags. I have also had people explain to me that they don’t like having their knives sharp, because they are dangerous like that. Err, WHUT? It’s a knife. It’s for cutting stuff. It needs to be sharp in order to do that. If you don’t want sharp, then use a spoon.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes. Out with the tail bone.

Then we simply cut the leg into three parts. Top, middle, bottom. I am not messing around with slipper hams and corner hams this time. I want a  big ham to feed more people in case we have visitors (you may think this unlikely but it does happen. In fact, my mother-in-law is coming for Easter with my niece, and more than likely half the village, which I will not discover till I get to the airport to collect them), a regular sized ham to feed the family for one meal and make sandwiches through the week, and a hock-ish bit for lentil soup.

Perfecto!

There are few things better than a decent plate of boiled ham, plain potatoes and parsley sauce. It is proper stick-to-your-ribs food, and when you have a house full of little oafs who are spending their days getting up to mischief like this:

then regular hefty feeding is the order of the day.

It will be  a week or more before these hams are ready to eat, but in best Blue Peter tradition, here’s one I prepared earlier.

This is a medium-small ham from one of the pre-Christmas pigs, that was cured in exactly the same way. The only difference is is that this one was skinned, as it was a home kill and we were despatching two or three pigs a week during the floods, so did not have time to be messing around with scraping off hair.

The ham is covered with cold water, brought to the boil , and then simmered for a couple of hours. That advice of ‘skimming of the scum after ten minutes’ is not necessary here, as this is a scum-free ham. I shudder to think what is in supermarket scum. Take that every way you will. Similarly, the need to pre-soak the ham is also redundant here, as, having been cured by the injection method, there is no excess salt to be got rid of. What a clever little ham.

Boiled ham calls for plain boiled potatoes as an accompaniment, and parsley sauce.

Parsley sauce is one of the easiest sauces ever, but one one of the most delicious. It is so simple in preparation and flavour, but transforms a ham beyond measure (I confess I do make a mustard-honey based sauce to accompany ham quite often, which is also quite excellent, but that is another story for another day). Parsley sauce is simply a bechamel with a lot of finely chopped fresh parsley mixed into it and left to combine for a good while.

The problem is that a lot of people struggle to make a smooth bechamel sauce. Gruesome, horrible lumpy stodgy cack. You know you have been subjected to it too many times.

If you suffer from this problem and your bechamel is invariably lumpy, there is a simple answer: you’re doing it wrong (note, if you are making onion sauce, this does not apply. You soften the onion in the butter, add the flour and cook off for a minute or two then take it off the heat for a moment gradually add the milk straight from the fridge if you like. It won’t become lumpy because the flour is adhering to the surface of the onions and is incorporating slowly into the milk as it warms up. You just can’t make onion sauce with lumps in, apart from the onion parts that is. If you can, then you are really doing something wrong and my advice is to become really good at your dayjob and marry someone who can cook properly).

Here is the secret. Rocket science it is not, but it is t probably the reverse of the way you are taught to do it. Conventionally, you melt buuter, add the flour and pour in the milk, a little at a time, off the heat at first. Almost invariably it becomes a bit lumpy at first and you whisk like a compulsive masturbator adding more milk all the while until you have  smooth sauce. Or not.

The answer is to do it the other way round. Melt the butter and make a basic roux with the flour as before, but then set it aside. Then clean the saucepan and heat the milk in it until almost boiling, and add the roux a little at a time, stirring the while. Result? Perfectly smooth sauce every time. The problem in the original model is the temperature difference between the milk and the roux. Nine times out of ten the milk will be straight out of the fridge.

I am not being pious here. That is the way I did it for years and years, and I had to whisk like a maniac to acheve a smooth result. I have only recently learned to make macaroni cheese the smart way too, but that is a story for another day.

The ham comes out of its simmery bath, the parsley sauce warms through, the kettle does nothing in particular.

Mmm, look at that ham. Meichel for the beichel, as my more unorthodox friends might say.

To my mind many hams are spoiled by baking after the boiling. Smearing with treacle and studding with cloves and roasting to within an inch of its life may be necessary to impart some semblance of flavour to a supermarket ham of horror, but with a nice piece of meat it is far better just to let the ham speak for itself without any further messing about.
Also, we want this ham to serve a dual purpose: despite its diminutive size we are not going to eat it all in one sitting (portion control is the new black at KaC HQ), and will use what is left over sliced in sandwiches and in the soup we will get onto next. I find a baked ham, however tender it might be and however well wrapped the leftovers, is always a bit dry the next day, which is a great disappointment. Whereas a plain boiled ham retains its moisture even for three or four days if treated well.

Plated up. Simple and scrumptious. Ham, spuds, parsley sauce. Obelix might not approve, but man can not live by spitroasted boar alone.

Ham, ham, ham as they say in Slovak.

 

Bottled Ham and Lentil Soup.

In the big pan we still have the stock in which the ham was cooked. Prior to which the bones from the two semi-air-dried hams had been simmered for six hours. It is lovely and rich, thick and gelatinous (Aaarrggghh!!! connective tissue meltdown! call the vegan msm police!) and swimming with pieces of butter-soft meat from the air-drieds. If that doesn’t just scream to be made into soup then I don’t know what does. In go some red lentils, leave it to simmer for a while, and bingo… soup. If we were eating it immediately I would add carrots and stuff, but this is going to be canned (bottled) for storage, so it makes sense to add the veg on reheatng, otherwise they would become too mushy.

The canning jars spend half and hour in sterilisng fluid and then 20 minutes in a very hot oven, prior to use. You want the jars to be properly sterile before use. It amazes me how many people are blase about preserving food. Botulism is perhaps not common, but not something I care to mess with. If you don’t want to do it properly, buy your food from the supermarket.

If you are doing any serious quantity of home-canning (and to be honest, if you are not, you probably wouldn’t have invested in the canner etc), my advice is, get yourself a canning handling kit. I got mine for a very good price (Thanks you Gail), but I believe they are not very expensive new. Picking up glass jars heated to 200C is a heck of a lot easier at a slight remove with the proper tools. There is also a little magnety thing for picking up the discs for the two-part lid tops from their hot water baths which sounds a ridiculous gadget but in practice makes life so much easier and saves much swearing and burned fingers.

Hot soup into hot jars (otherwise you’ll have a load of cracked jars), and into the canner. 90 minutes at 10 bar pressure and its good for years on the shelf.

A word of warning here, which applies to all canning: even the best bottles can fail some times. With reuse, over time, stresses build up in the glass where there is the slightest imperfection. When that happens, sooner or later… poof! or BLAMM!!! more to the point, given the pressures involved.

When it happen it can be heartbreaking, particularly if you are bottling something precious in small volume (which fortunately is not really the case in this instance), but you just have to be philosophical about it. If you were canning for survival in a pioneer or post-fall situation this would be much more of a problem, and it does make me raise an eyebrow when I see gung-ho preppers talking of having a stock of a hundred canning jars that they can pass down through generations. Generally speaking the better quality the jars, the less frequently this may occur, and if you are buying from sensible outlets, quality = more expensive. Even the best quality jars you can expect an attrition rate of about 3% each re-use though, in my experience.

Posted in Butchering, Pigs, Preserving, Pressure Canning, Recipes, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Hog Week Part 3: Making Bacon – Dry Cured Backs and Bellies

Posted on March 16, 2013 by admin

So, we need to backtrack a little now. When we cut up the saddleback we set aside the bellies – thats the long strip in the centre of the picture below, in case you are not sure. As these are the last pigs we are going to be killing for a while we are going to make all of it into bacon – 20kg in all (although by the time it is cured, that will come down to about 14 or so, given the amount of liquid that will leach out of the meat). Having a good stock of bacon is very important. The streaky bacon is a key ingredient in a great deal of our cooking, and back bacon for breakfast rashers – well, man cannot live without bacon sandwiches, as any fule kno (there may be some observant Muslims, Jews and vegans who might dispute this point, but recent statistics show that followers of halal, kosher and vegan diets do not figure highly in the KaC demographic).

We still have a couple of drawers of wet-cured bacon in freezer 3, so we are going to dry cure this bacon.

Belly…

Back…

Making dry cured bacon is ridiculously easy. All we do is trim our meat of any untidy bits, make up a cure, rub it in and leave it to work its magic.

The cure is applied to the backs and bellies. This is a very basic straightforward cure. No frills no flavours, nothing fancy, just salt, saltpetre and sugar for basic breakfast bacon in bulk, to continue our alliterative theme. The last pigs we did before Christmas, we experimented with using Supracure. Lots of people I know swear by it and say they get great results, but to me it tasted somehow synthetic. I don’t know if I left it too long or did not drain the leachate often enough or something, but the results were not entirely satisfactory – edible, just a bit ‘commercial’ tasting. So this time it is back to the tried and tested.

The cure needs to be rubbed in really well, making sure it is worked into all the little nooks and crannies and every inch of exposed surface (can you have unexposed surface?).

And the sides are stacked together, meat-sides in, nipples up.

And the box is closed and kept in a cool place for a week. The weather this week has been absolutely perfect for porcine processing, in fact: hovering around the 2-3 degrees C more or less all the time, dry with fairly constant stiff breeze. Couldn’t ask for better.

For the first couple of days the leachate is drained off and the sides restacked in reverse order. A lot of liquid comes off in this time. Thereafter it is considerably less so they can be left to their own devices.

After a week, the bacon, for bacon it is now, is removed, rinsed well and hung out to air dry for a day or two. As you can see, the bellies, or streaky bacon as we shall now call them  (the two middle pieces), are still slightly floppy, but the meat has firmed up nicely, this is just because they are relatively thin pieces.

Then it is time for the all-important Saturday morning breakfast taste test. We will start with the back bacon. So, coffee in hand,  it is off to the Shed of the Dead for slicing.

A view through the cut end of the bacon. As you can see, it has cured nicely and evenly all the way through. The eye is good and firm, if slightly on the slender side – although this was to be expected given the relatively small size of the pig.

The rashers. So far so good.

The first experimental slice in the pan. I wish there was an audio function on this page so you could hear the sizzle here. In fact it should not be to difficult to do that. I’ll wager my phone can record audio and there must be a function for uploading audio files onto the blog. Indeed, considering I started my career as a recording studio engineer, you would think I would be on top of stuff like that. Sadly, however, nothing could be further from the truth. My recording skills and indeed interest ended with the end of analogue (I would also argue that pretty much every album worth listening to was recorded prior to the advent of digital). I wouldn’t know one end of a wav file from the other and don’t even own an MP3 player (although my phone probably is one). If there was a way of syncing a 1/2 inch Studer running at 30ips to the blog I would record this sizzle on a Nagra right now and share it with you. As it is, you will have to imagine it.

However, we can share the soundtrack to the bacon tasting session, which is Killers, the fine second album by Iron Maiden, the last with the dulcet tones of ‘rough-hewn stable boy’ Paul Di’Anno, and actually one of my favourite Maiden albums. Today we have the first three albums on heavy rotation in tribute to former Maiden drummer Clive Burr, who sadly died yesterday, and in my view does not get the credit he deserves for his part in creating the classic Maiden sound.

Not that the classic galloping sound of Iron Maiden sounds much like this bacon, however.

Time becomes elastic. The universe begins to melt. Seconds drags like hours and it seems an eternity until the rasher is cooked.

Possibly sliced this a millimetre or two too thick, actually. It was 14 on the slicer and I think it could nudge back to 12. The rind is curling rather so I have had to snip it.

Smells pretty divine though. *

* Does not smell like Divine though. I have no idea what a 320lb drag queen would smell like, but can’t imagine it is how bacon should smell.

At last it is done. The offical taster can be called.

How’s the bacon, Max?

Well, that’s pretty conclusive.

It is indeed, very good bacon. I am very pleased with the way it has turned out. I said at the beginning of this post that it is ridiculously easy to make dry-cured bacon. That is true, in as much as it is difficult to get it completely wrong. You have to do something pretty weird to end up with a product which is not, broadly speaking, bacon. Getting it right is another matter. It is almost always edible, but it is very often overly salty, or tough, or bland, or just not anything special. Sometimes you will hit it just right, but the next time it will turn out totally different with no discernible difference in the process.  I have been making bacon for about ten years now, and it is only in the last couple of years that I have been achieving consistent results, and, as mentioned earlier regarding the Supracure, it is still not 100%.

Anyway, so much for the back bacon, now what about the streaky?

Here it is, cut through and ready for the slicer. It certainly has a nice texture and good colour.

A streaky rasher. We need the streaky much thinner than the back so have dialled the slicer back to 9. Thin as it is, it has a nice firm consistency.

Sizzle sizzle. Usually most of our belly bacon is left in slab form to be cubed for cooking bacon lardons, but when we have a goodly quantity of it, it is nice to have some proper streaky as well. It is very useful for wrapping terrines and so on, and in summer it makes a nice breakfast alternative to the traditional fry-up to have a few rashers of crisp-fried streaky with some fruit.

Finished. Streaky is easier to over-salt than back, as it is thinner. However, this is really nice and sweet. If anything I would say I prefer this to the back. As the name suggests, the streaky is streaked through with veins of fat which keep it more lubricated.

All that remains to do is slice up the rest and pack it into the freezers. The bacon is just as we want it in terms of firmness so if we left it to hang longer it will only become drier, so it needs to be dealt with immediately. Bitter experience tells me that leaving it a day quickly becomes leaving it for a week and then forgetting all about it and finally using it all as dried cooking bacon (those ‘little slabs’ we always have hanging around the place in recipes).

In terms of yield, we have ended up with slightly more than expected. The sides of back (the backsides?) are a shade over 5 kg each and the streakies a bit over 3 1/2, so just shy of 18kg in total, which should keep us going for six months. I am not sure why that should be. I can only imagine I was a bit under on my estimate of the raw weight. Still, better more than expected than less. All in all, the bacon episode of Hog Week can be considered to have been a success.

Hooray for bacon!

 

Posted in Butchering, Charcuterie, Pigs, Recipes, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Hog Week Part 2: Manga Butchery and Apple Roast Leg

Posted on March 15, 2013 by admin

So, the saddleback is out of the way. In just under two hours (there were bacon and ham prep bits that were not shown in the previous post which took up a bit more time). We only have about an hour before we are overwhelmed by children, and have two more pigs to deal with.

Luckily, they are only small pigs, 32 and 36 kg respectively, and the plans we have for them as simple as can be.

Brains out, heads off, rum-te-tum-te-tum.


Cutting a long story short (and because I was concentrating more on chopping than snapping), the pigs are simply cut into three sections: front – shoulder and foreleg; middle – loin and belly; and rear – back leg and rump.

The back leg sections are going to be frozen (and one eaten immediately) as roasting joints.
The front sections are skinned and boned out and off into the salami bucket.

Leaving only the centre section. Given the size of the pigs, it seems churlish to split back from belly, so we simply strip out the ribcages in one piece, which will make quite delicious eating come barbecue season, leaving the whole boneless belly/back as a single rolled joint. Extravagant? Moi?

And there we are, all done bar the bagging and labelling. And just in time, for at that very moment came the invasion of the Brownietroopers.

Once children are on the loose, there is only a limited amount of time before they require feeding.  But what to cook? Fortuitously we have a reasonable amount of pork to hand, so how about a nice roasted leg?

To be acceptable to the extremely fussy foodie child contingent, the pork will have to be tender as butter but will there will need to be crackling galore. Whilst the leg is a good 5 kg, it is not a thick joint in any place. Which is a bit of a challenge. We need a long cooking time, but we don’t want it to dry out.

So the answer is to inject the leg with brine to extend its cooking time. And to give that brine a little extra flavour, and imbue the whole leg with a delicious appleyness, what better than a jar of our own home-picked, home-pressed apple juice? I thought we had used up the last of this not making apple brandy because that would be illegal, but lo and behold, in the rearmost recesses of the catacombs beneath the Shed of the Dead, we turned up a forgotten cache of bottles…

and, while we are in the Shed of the Dead, I have to confess my dark, dirty, guilty secret. I have a microwave oven hidden at the back of the SotD. It is usually concealed in that cardboard box you see at left, and I sometimes sneak down to the end of the garden to use it to heat stuff up. It is, I must concede really good for melting chocolate and so on. Things that would take ages on a burner. And when all of the burners in the kitchen are otherwise occupied (although if I had that 10-burner industrial hob I hanker after, this would not be a problem, but my wife will not entertain the idea).

Also, as we are using it today, for blamming brine ingredients together. 100g sea salt, 50g muscovado sugar and the litre of  apple juice above. Whirr, pling, done. If only I had a blast chiller to bring it back down to temp I would be a happy man.

Finally cooled the conventional way, we inject the apple brine into the leg, using multiple injection points to ensure an even distribution.

The finished leg sits for half an hour to let the brine settle in. Note how much more pumped up it looks from before. Steroidal pork. We have locked away all the firearms in the house in case it leaps up and shoots its girlfriend in the bathroom.
Sweating like a ‘roid fiend too.

Into a very hot oven for half an hour then down to 180 for a further three hours. Sounds like a suicidally long cooking time for a relatively small leg, but the appley brine is keeps the meat as moist as moist can be.

Look at that. Porco Bello. It is moments like this that make me reflect on the death threats I get from vegans and smile a little smile, sigh a happy sigh and cackle maniacally.

And lo, when the Brownies returned from their activities, much crackling was eaten by all, and there was rejoicing high and low in the land of KaC.
A successful end to the first day of Hog Week.

Tomorrow we move on to the bacon and ham making.

Posted in Butchering, Pigs, Recipes, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Hog Week Part 1: Slaughter and Saddleback Butchery

Posted on March 14, 2013 by admin

Back once again, as promised.

Whew, what a  hectic week of hog-related activity

Spring sprang briefly, which meant that the warm winter quarters of the remaining Mangalitsas and the saddleback sow were suddenly requisitioned as maternity ward for problem mothers.

However, the ground outside is only just starting to recover from weeks of floods and saturation. The Mangas went out but it was clear they would have churned their acre up inside of a week.

So plan B for Butchery swung into action. The Mangas were still very small – they killed out at 33 kg each, but all the more tender for that and better by far to deal with them now than have the trouble and expense of destroying more pasture in spring.

The pigs were booked into the abattoir for Sunday afternoon. The Land-Rover was fettled. Knives sharpened, sausage skins prepared. Even a cutting plan. Everything had been thought of.

And then it all went wrong. I have edited out the long explanation of the saga of loading day. Suffice to say my pigs behaved splendidly, but two unexpected monster pigs became involved in the action and it turned into something somwehere between a Laurel and Hardy and a Werner Herzog film. I still cannot think about it without grinding my teeth.

This is my “not at all thrilled with the way the day is going face.” Have missed breakfast, coffee, The Archers omnibus and lunch. Still, finally the job is done.

 

cut to: three days later, and three lovely split, smooth carcasses are ready for collection. One of the great joys of having pigs slaughtered at the abattoir rather than home-killing them is not having to dehair them yourself. As detailed in previous posts, dehairing pigs is a miserable task at the best of times, and woolly Mangalitsa pigs are somewhere far beyond misery.

We went down to collect these carcasses after the school run and feeding the fowl. The slaughterhouse we use, C&S Meats in Holnest, near Sherborne, is a good 45 minutes drive at the best of times. There are closer ones, but C&S is an excellent place. A proper family-run abattoir of the old-school on a working farm. I have heard horror stories of mistreatment of animals at abattoirs; one of the ones local to us was busted by the RSPCA a couple of years ago (although don’t get me started on the RSPCA). When you go to the trouble of breeding and rearing your own animals naturally, organically and to the best welfare standards you can it seems incomprehensible to me not to ensure their deaths are as stress-free, respectful and humane as possible. Usually I prefer to home-kill – the animals are spared the stress of transport, and have no idea whatsoever that their death is upon them. One moment they are eating their breakfast as per usual, the next they are not. If I have taken responsibility for their birth and life, taking responsibility for their death is the least I can do. If I can’t do it myself, though, then I will certainly go the extra mile(s) to ensure it is done properly.

Anyway, the upshot of all that is that by the time we got home with the carcasses the morning was all but done. Ideally I wanted the main butchering out of the way before the kids got home from school. When I butchered my first pig it took me a whole day. Hah! That seems a long time ago. Many pigs have flowed under the bridge since then. And now I know what the heck I am doing and have a clear game plan of what I want to do with each section, it should be a mere bagatelle. Three pigs, three hours? Pfft.

It’s midday on the fuzzy penguin clock. Let’s roll…

My trusty assistant, ready to take care of any surplus parts.

So we are going to deal with the large (relatively – still only 84kg deadweight) Saddleback first.

An aerial-ish view. This is a lovely pig carcass, I must say. After dealing with so many pigs twice this size or more, for salumi purposes, it is a really nice change to have such a manageable carcass to deal with, physically, and such a small layer of backfat.

First of all, the head end.

We scoop out the butcher’s perk of butcher’s perks: the brain. If this were a more leisurely day, I would take a little time out to roll this in breadcrumbs, lightly sautee it so it was just crisp on the outside and mousse-like-ly soft in the middle and enjoy it with a glass of something, but time is not on our side today, so it goes in a bowl to be cooked later with some liver and onions and cream.

We’ll whip out the kidney, too. The kidneys are the only organs that are not attached to the pluck in the gutting process. They are tucked away on their own behind a little fatty membrane. It was the removal of a kidney from two of the victims of Jack the Ripper which led to the theory that the killer had surgical skills, although I have never really understood why this should be so – a knowledge of anatomy, perhaps, but any butcher would have that… however, we digress.

Next, off with the trotters. Front…

and rear…

Time to get some action on the back section…

Strip out the tenderloin, using just tip of the knife to tease the meat away from the carcass. There is no actual cutting going on here:

The tenderloin removed. A lovely piece of meat, which we shall keep for a later date, when we shall butterfly it and stuff it with chorizo.

Now it’s time to take off the back legs. I am working on both sides in tandem on this pig, as I have a clear game plan and most of the parts are going to be used for the same things.

Having said that, the exception is, of course the back legs: one will be used for ‘wet hams’ as my wife calls them, and the other sacrificed to make a culatello and the remainder into the salami bucket. Consequently they are cut to different lengths. The ham leg is longer, cut further towards the spine, whereas the culatello leg can be trimmed right back as it is only the rearmost leg muscle we are interested in. In this overhead view you can see the difference in the cuts:

The legs are put aside to be dealt with later. Now to get the rest of the creature into more manageable portions.

Off with her head!

Leaving us with just the torsos. Looking a lot more reasonable already, and we’re less than 20 minutes down.

The next thing is the split each half in half again, down the centre, dividing top from bottom, belly and foreleg from loin and shoulder. Strating at the rear, we cut in just below the tail end of a future rasher of back bacon, then slice up along the torso, switching to the bone saw when we get to the ribs (sawing part not pictured as it is not possible to use a saw, support a pig carcass and take a photo all at the same time)

Repeat this process on both sides and suddenly we have four sections

Okay, tackling the lower parts first, we separate the foreleg , then carefully nick away the short rib section from the  long belly section.

The foreleg can be put aside for now to be boned out later. The belly is destined to become streaky bacon, so is pretty much done, bar  trimming off any straggly bits, and the ribs can be bagged up for cooking as, er, ribs.

Repeat for the other side and we are onto the top half.

First of all, we separate the shoulder from the back. Counting four ribs backwards from the spine to avoid the end of the shoulder blade.
Then, repeat the process of carefully nicking the rins away with the very tip of the knife. It is always a bit of a trade-off between having meaty ribs and thick bacon. I err towards the latter. You can always have twice as many ribs, but mean bacon pleaseth no man.

You also have to tease the knife around the spine, which is slightly trickier, but the trick is to take it slowly (despite being pushed for time) and to remember always to only use the very tip of the blade.


And there it is pretty much done, it terms of the primary cuts. One pig, all sectioned out.

Time on the fuzzy, almost pointillist penguin clock now? Quarter to one. All of this in 45 minutes. Or about a third of the time it has taken to upload the pictures.


But it ain’t over yet. We still have a heck of a lot of boning out to do.

We’ll start with the shoulder. First the skin comes off, to be rendered down for lard and made into pork scratchings, and the spine and neck bone removed just as before with the ribs and spine.

Then we need to take out the shoulder blade. This is a really fiddly tricky bastard of a job to do if you are trying to do it neatly for a boned out roasting joint, which is why I always try to persuade people that the joint tastes so much better bone-in. Which is true, although it is then a real pig to carve.

However, luckily, today we are not making any roasting joints from this pig. All of the shoulder and leg meat is going into the salami bucket, for chorizo, so neatness doesn’t matter. To save time later on during the mincing stage I am making sure that all the meat is in chunks or strips small enough to go into the mincer.

And finally for now, the foreleg. Now you see it…

Now you don’t.

That pretty much rounds it up for the saddleback. There are still the two back legs to be processed, and the bacon to be dealt with  but I shall deal with that in the following posts.

Tomorrow: onto the Mangalitsas! I can hardly wait.

Posted in Butchering, Pigs | 3 Comments

Apologia

Posted on March 9, 2013 by admin

Haven’t posted for a week or two I realise. Fear not.

Have been madly busy with pig slaughtering and and processing but have been assiduously documenting the process, and will be back with a plethora of porcine posts presently.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Ćevapčići

Posted on February 17, 2013 by admin

There are precious few characteristics that we have in common with Sascha der aufrechter Deutscher other than wir essen so gern Ćevapčići.

So today we are going to make some.

Ćevapčići, for those of you who have never encountered this delicious delicacy are, in effect, skinless sausages. As the name suggests, it is a derivation of kebab. They are of Balkan origin, it is genrally agreed, although there is less agreement as to which are most authentic the Bosnian Cevapi, the Croatian, Macedonian, Czech etc, as all are subtely different in ingredients, preparation and serving. Does it matter which is the original when they are all delicious? Not really. Ours tend more toward the Slovak tradition, of course, but filtered through the usual KaC kitchen method.

Some of the aforementioned cultures use lamb for their Cevaps, some use beef, others pork.  Following the KaC motto of Never Knowingly Undermeated, we shall use all three.

Finely ground beef, medium ground lamb (well, mutton actually) and coarse ground pork.

And garlic, finely chopped. Bleedin’ loads of it (*).

(*= Roger Wear, that is a technically accurate measurement, and you are also a wanker.)

Salt and bicarbonate of soda in roughly equal amounts

Hungarian hot paprika – a generous handful

about the same amount of dried rosemary, and a tablespoon of black pepper. Then pound well you really want that rosemery pulverised and the whole lot incorporated into the garlic.

Then mixed into the combined meats with the beaten whites of 3 eggs, which should be frothed to just short of forming soft peaks.

Rolling, rolling, rolling…  or, if you have a sausage machine to hand, extrude the mix until camera blurs. They should not be too thick.  I use the chipolata nozzle for this.

and fry on a hot griddle pan. Being not too thick, they don’t tale long, and you can get them cooked through without charring the outside too much.

Pile ‘em up high. These are extremely moreish and you will be surprised how many you can get through at a sitting. The baking soda in the mix helps give a very satisfying crispness to the outer layer.

There are as many different ways of serving these as there are recipes. We eat ours the Slovak way with mustard, plain boiled potatoes and sliced raw onion.

Whatever you may think, these are expressions of joy and delight.

Being hardcore, my children like to have some whole pickled chillies with their Cevaps.

 

Posted in Pigs, Recipes, Sheep | 2 Comments

Wild Duck Blue Cheese Burger with Foie Gras and Lardo

Posted on February 15, 2013 by admin

you gotta say yes to another excess.

Actually this was a surprisingly light dish, although I am not sure my doctor would agree.

We had some wild ducks hanging around from the weekend and had already made so many jars of confit we were running out of shelf space. So what to do? as per usual, it needs to be something acceptable to the palates and whims of small people and the gluttony of large people alike.

And then inspiration struck…

Burgers! Like all children, my children love burgers. And will eat pretty much anything if it is delivered in burger form. Duck meat is nice and rich and well suited to the burger medium. And what goes with burgers? Cheese of course, and as we have an enormous quantity of stilton to hand, why not a blue cheese burger? And as the piece de resistance our trusty get-out-of-jail-free card… foie gras.

so Wild Duck Burgers with Blue Cheese and Foie Gras, here we go…

The good thing about anything which involves mincing birds is that it does not involve plucking. All you have to do is skin them, which, by this time of year after a full season and Christmas, is a big plus point. If they are larger, farmed ducks, then we harvest the leg meat, but with mallard and teal there really isn’t any point, so it is just a matter of slicing out the breasts.

The duck meat is rich and delicious and will provide the flavour for the burger, but, once separated from the fatty skin and carcass requires a bit of lubrication, so we hoiked out a bag of nice belly pork.

The pork is minced on a coarse plate and seasoned with salt, pepper and Chinese 5-spice.

… and a bit more cinnamon pounded up to bring out the flavour of the duck.

With the assistance of our old friend the medium plate (and our even older friend the cup of coffee) we grind the duck breasts and add to the pork.

Feets! Tiny feets! (Forgive my Richard Pryor voice – I often think I am funnier than I am after a lot of coffee).
In fact we are not going to use the feet in the burgers, but I mention them because we are going to put them aside for later use and a later feets-themed post. Remember these feets.

That odd prawn-like thing at the back of the footpile is, yes, you guessed it, a duck penis. It didn’t actually get used in the recipe, but is worthy of mention.  Duck penises, or drake penises, more accurately are interesting things, and not just to ducks. Did you know, for example, the drake’s penis is usually the length of its entire body, and is a corkscrew shape? I say ‘usually, because sometimes it can be twice the length of its body. Yep. It is kept in a sac inside the body until needed at which point it springs out in all its corkcrew glory. That’s the human equivalent of having a 12 foot penis in a little bag ready to ballistically unfurl when you feel the urge.  There is a species of duck which uses its penis to lasso. But, at the end of the mating, the drake’s penis drops off, so it does not have to supply blood to such a vast useless appendage through the months it is not needed, and then it grows a new one.

While you’re, er, digesting those fun facts, let’s move swiftly on.

While the meats are resting a little, we can start the basic assembly of the burger.
A wholemeal roll, lightly toasted in the pan and base spread with a thin layer of apple chutney is laid with a bed of fried onions and a slice of tomato

And then it’s time for the Lardo. This may only look a tiny little nubbin of lardo but a little goes a long way. It is pure fat after all. Back fat from a Mangalitsa that has been cured  and air-dried for a year, then cold-smoked. Pure indulgence, thy name is fat. You couldn’t eat it by the pound, but scraped tissue-paper thin and laid on the tongue it will melt and transport you to heaven.
I must get round to doing a lardo post, actually.

The lardo is sliced wafer-thin and laid atop the tomato. When the burger goes in, the heat will cause the lardo to sweat slightly, releasing its smokey aroma. Mmmm, yummy.

Now the meat patties (~I find that term odd) can get to cooking. I have missed the mixing of the meats phase, but there is  not a lot to say about it – take the pork mince and the duck mince and mix them together, then form into cricket ball sized portions and flatten a bit. If you can’t manage that bit without an illustration, ask a responsible adult to help you.

The pan is hot hot hot for the initial sear. About 30 seconds to get some caramelisation going and then flip over  to do the same for the other side.

While that is going on, let’s get some foie gras. I am not using fresh lobes of foie gras this time, but some pate I made earlier in the week (note how little is left from a whole loaf tin’s worth! Mice must have got into my fridge). It will melt and become all oozy and rich and yummy on top of the meat and the flavour will complement the sweet duck perfectly.

When the burgers have had 30 seconds on the second side they are flipped again and the foie gras laid on the still hot seared part. You will note that, by my standards, the quantity of foie gras is quite sparing. This year we are being a bit more diet-conscious.

This is the last time we are going to touch the burgers in the cooking process. Like cooking steak, they will not benefit from prodding, pushing about and worst of all, pressing down with a spatula so all the juices escape. Be patient with your meat.

The heat is knocked down and the lid goes on to let the burgers cook through. They are fairly thick and need to be properly cooked but we don’t want them to dry out. All those delicious juices are mingling and having a sensational little flavour party in there, the foie gras melting in from above… mmm. Sod patience, when is this going to be ready?

Time for some leaves. We don’t want to overdo it though. A bit of peppery watercress and some lambs leaf lettuce will do the job just nicely.

And while we’re at it, a good spreading of mango chutney for the upper bun surface.

Cheese!

Lest we forget, for what would a cheeseburger be without? I cannot understand why anyone, when offered the choice between hamburger and cheeseburger would opt for the cheesefree version.

We have already grated here a bit of nice sharp local cheddar (Cheddar is just up the road from us, in fact, but this cheddar is not from Cheddar. It is from Mudgely from Roger Wilkins Cider Barn, which is well worth a visit if ever you are in Somerset, or, if you are visiting the UK from overseas, well worth detouring from Gleneagles of London to experience. I may return to this topic another time).

The cheddar is but a supporting actor in this production, though, as the hero cheese is stilton. We happen to have many likos of stilton at the moment, having cleared out our local Tesco after Christmas when they reduced all the leftover Christmas cheeses to ridiculously low prices (we did raise a few eyebrows at the checkout that day as  they had also got big pots of extra thick double cream reduced to 5 pence, so we bought all of them. All 120-odd pots. Some we use for butter, and the rest we gave to the pigs, who were very pleased with it. When we wheeled our trolley up, groaning under 70 kg of cream and 12 kg of stilton there were some surprised looks, but I brazened it out by telling them we were going on a carb-free diet for New Year).

In winter it is important to observe the layering principle. Here we put a layer of cheddar and a layer of stilton under the burger, and then another layer of each cheese on top of the burger, over the foie gras.

And finally top the whole lot with some caramelised apple, for healthy eating, and a hint of sharpness to cut through the fattiness.

And there it is, done.

It would be superfluous to describe how it tasted. It tasted of wild duck, pork belly, foie gras, sharp cheddar and blue cheese. How good is that?

As I mentioned at the beginning, it was in fact a lot lighter than you might expect. It was lighter than, say, a Big Mac. Depite the powerful flavour punch it packed, there was no ‘mouth overload’ afterwards, although I confess I was not able to manage more than two.

The children devoured every scrap with many complimentary words to the chef. Their burgers had less stilton and more cheddar, but were otherwise the same as the grownups.

A successful addtions to the repertoire. Probably one to feature regularly on the autumn/winter menu.

Posted in Ducks and Geese, Pigs, Recipes, Wild Game | 3 Comments

Whole Smoked Piglets

Posted on February 13, 2013 by admin

In early autumn our remaining Mangalitsa sow, Betty, unexpectedly delivered a litter of 8 little blonde piglets. each was the image of their father, the late, great Boris.

and then it rained. And rained and rained and rained and rained.  This is where the mangalitsas were. The water is more than three feet deep in places. Which is not at all good if you are a one foot high piglet.

We moved the pigs to another field which was on higher ground. It carried on raining. That field got swamped. We moved them again to our main plot where our other pigs were squelching about on higher ground again. It carried on raining. We were having to move them from plot to plot as they churned up the saturated soil into something resmbling the battlefield of the Somme. We scraped off eighteen inches of liquid mud every day with a tractor and still it rained.
It simply was not viable to keep the pigs on. We had indoor space for a few. The rest had to go. We sold half a dozen mangalitsa/kune crosses we had been keeping as store pigs. We sold two of the mangalitsa piglets. still it rained. It became too wet even to take them to market, and even if we could have, nobody was buying, every farmer in the county was in the same boat. If they were lucky enough to have a boat. The road from the field to town was under enough water to go over the tyres of my neighbour’s biggest tractor. There was a picture in the paper of someone jetskiing over the fields on the adjoining farm.
It was wet. We had to do something with the remaining piglets.

And what better to do than eat them. Whole.

“Is it this way?”

Whole Roast Piglet

To make things more interesting we decided to do one hot smoked before roasting, and one plain.
Smallish though they were, there as no way to fit a whole piglet in the smoker with its head on, so ‘Off with its head!’. Then it was the long slow process of scraping off all the hair. Not for nothing are Mangalitsas known as ‘woolly pigs’. Moreover, it was important to keep the skin as unblemished as possible, which precluded using blowtorches.

We make up a brine of 10% salt, 5% brown sugar and a smal handful of spices (black pepper, allspice, ground cinnamon, paprika and clove) per volume of water.

The brine was injected, 10% by weight of the carcass, in a couple of dozen different points abou the body to ensure even coverage.

And then we fire up the mighty smoker. It had stopped raining for an afternoon.

The piglet squeezes inside over a heat barrier of water and beer and gently smokes away for a full twelve hours.

After which it comes out and is allowed to cool. As you can see, it has taken on some good colour. Already quite a lot of fat has rendered off, creating a little ‘slip layer’ under the skin. The smell when the smoker was opened was quite fantastic. It is a wonder that this beast made it any further than this as the temptation to just eat it there and then was pretty high.

But we have greater plans for this little piggy. The Oven of Doom awaits.
In order to get it to fit in a roasting tin, and to fit in the oven, it was necessary to fold its feet underneath, and curl it up. It did look a little like a snoozing cat at this stage, which was a bit disconcerting. Or perhaps the Ameglian Major cow from the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, more appropriately.
Not that we let minor things like that concern us or put us off the task at hand, for that way vegetarianism lies. We score the skin all over and leave it to rest overnight, ready for its final roasting the next day.

And turn our attention to the non-smoking piglet. There is not a great deal of prep required for this one. It is scraped and brined in the same way. As it is to be cooked head-on, a good deal of care is taken in the facial epilation. If anything is going to look offputting it is a roast piglet with a face that looks like it has been butchered by Sweeney Todd. I saw a roast suckling pig once that had evidently been slaughtered by having its throat slit after being stunned by a sledgehammer blow to the forehead. The shape of the hammerhead was clearly imprinted in the crackling on its skull, and somehow this detracted from the overall appetisingness  of the dish (although I did force myself to have a few helpings, for politeness’ sake).

Finally dehaired, the non-smoking piglet comes in to be reunited with its sibling. Note the difference in colour of the skins of the two pigs.

The skin is scored all over and left to dry off for a few hours. No salt is rubbed in. There is enough in the brine.

Then it’s into the Oven of Doom. 220 for half an hour then 2 hours at 180. Whilst they are quite large overall (in oven terms, if not in pig terms), the meat is not very thick anywhere, even on the butt, compared to a normal roasting joint.

After an hour the skin over the head needs covering with foil. The scores are spreading wide open and the ears and snout are beginning to get a little overdone. So much for all that time and care spent keeping the face unmarked.

At this point the whole house smells how I imagine heaven must smell.

And finally they are done.

What can I say? The piglets were beyond delicious. The crackling first and foremost was so delicious that we all just gorged ourself for hour, pulling off crispy bits of cheek and butt, munching them up, licking our fingers, wiping the grease off our chins and going back for more.
The meat was tender as butter. Despite the long cooking time and relative thinness of the sections, double cooking in the case of the smoked piglet, it was moist and juicy through and through, thanks to the brining. It fell off the bone at our fingertips and we ate it as pulled pork rolls. Both versions worked splendidly. Personally I preferred the smoked. The children preferred the unsmoked. Neither was in any way salty. The crackling on the smoked pig was crisper and the unsmoked one was a bit greasier, due to the layer of subcutameous fatrendering down in the long slow hot smoking process.

All in all a great success. So much so that we did the same with another piglet a few days later, and another the week after that. Writing this now I am calculating the days until we get the next litter of piglets.

 

Posted in Charcuterie, Pigs, Recipes | 3 Comments