Archive for the ‘Dry Cured Meats’ Category

Having largely settled into my new way of life with our cellar, I find I’m forgetting to post about the odd item that might be helpful for those considering going down that road. So some thoughts about the cellar. [the one that holds my wine, charcuterie, and cheese, not my root cellar]

First, the dry cured meats on the left are not from my hand, they’re from Oyama Sausage Co. – a generous gift from my brother having just returned from B.C.. A handy thing about having a cellar? No need to consume them before they get dodgy in the fridge – I can hang them in the cellar, and they can keep for months. I’d never considered this as a perk of being set up for dry curing, but let me tell you…it is. I welcome their flora to the mold-party, and will revel in their awesomeness through the summer and beyond if they’re not eaten before.

Secondly, the conditions. It’s 13.8C and 72% humidity down there. We just had 6+ inches of rain, and it’s 26C outside today so it will likely dip back down a bit on both fronts in the coming week. 15C and 60-70% rh is happiness for dry curing, if my memory serves me correctly. So in general, I’d say my cellar is on the cool side through the year as far as cellars go. That doesn’t hurt my feelings. My red wines will age slowly, my whites and apple wines will stay fresh, and really, truthfully, I’m happy to be storing meats on the cool side rather than the other way around.

Also noteworthy is an un-met expectation on my part. I had expected dry curing would be a seasonal thing. Not true. Conditions are naturally optimal through the summer [surprisingly], but with the intervention of water wicking onto the floor, the conditions were excellent through the winter and spring – albeit colder than optimal. I can dry cure meat all year. A rare expectation I’m happy to not have met.

Lastly. My cellar increasingly stunk for a couple months. I thought it was the cheese. Then the cheese was used up. Thought it was their bins. Nope. One of the batches of put up meat? That’d be gross. Finally, these last few days, I figured it out. It was the bucket of water and cloth that I use to wick water onto the floor in the winter to increase humidity. Despite having added a whole box of table salt to the thing, it still got nasty. Weird. I do know that the drops of water on the floor carry salt, as the splashes leave little salt deposits on my floor. Doesn’t hurt my feelings as it provides a level of antisepticness [that's not really a word, I just made it up]. All I can offer is that the salt wicked out through the cloth through the winter enough that the solution was desalinated enough to get gross. Weird. Solution? Remove bucket. Solved. Will bleach bucket, use new cloth, problem solved. I’m relieved it need not stink. [and if any of you chemists know of a salt that won't wick out of the bucket through a cloth, chime in please]

The cellar has offered such a boon of wealth of various forms in one short year. Yes, you should build one.

These batches were put up on Tuesday [Mar 29]. I find I have to write about this kind of thing or I simply lose track of when they were made, which makes it a bit hard to remember how long they’ve been aging and how they’ve responded to temp, humidity, etc.

Both are essentially Ruhlman’s recipes, with two major exceptions. First, the pork version [used Irvings Farm Fresh Berkshire] has half the garlic called for, as I’m looking for a cleaner expression of the pork, less dominated by garlic. I find Ruhlman generally likes ‘flavor’ about 25% more than me, so I tone down his aromatics, generally.

The second batch was made from wild cow elk shank – trim I’d reserved in November for sausage. Because I could, I used some of the now-ubiquitous-to-me dried morel and shaggy parasol powders in this batch. I’m not sure they’ll show up, but I had to try in the name of research. And because, well, wild game and wild mushrooms in the same dry-cured sausage just plain sounds lovely.

So there they hang in the cellar, at 5C & 76%rh for at least a month.

When butchering this cow elk in late November, I noticed how particularly perfect the shape and size of the eye of round would be for dry curing. No wonder it’s been done for eons. As usual, here I am, not innovating.

As I had run out of my first ‘test batch’, it was time for a more confident crack at it. Larger piece, thicker piece this time. I used Ruhlman’s  [poor Polcyn, always excluded] ratios of salt, sugar, pepper, and instacure #2, but for aromatics, looked to what I had as wild pantry items. Morel powder, shaggy parasol powder, wild thyme, and labrador tea. Sounded good in theory, but I suspected the labrador tea wouldn’t bring much to the party – that was until I crushed it with a mortar and pestle. Holy evergreen. Lovely evergreen. I hope that shows up in the final product. If so, it may become a standard terroir-driven pairing for me for this item.

So it’ll go into the fridge for a week, maybe two if I’m being forgetful(?) to cure, and then hung in the cellar for a long, long time. I’m going to guess two months minimum, with it being in a good zone for a few months past that. So I should be enjoying this through the summer with zippy salads, cheeses, and cold apple wine.

[update: this piece was scraped of aromatics and cellared March 27th. Told you I'd forget.]

We put up 20 Irvings Farm Fresh pork jowls December 11, and it’s finally at a place I’d hope it would get – nearly 2 months later. Dense, with a light high-toned loveliness imparted by dry curing pork.

The verdict? Sliced thinly and fried is a bacon-like experience that is lovely indeed.  It fried up extremely fast [low moisture?], and my meat-hating-toddlers happily devoured their ‘spaghetti-and-bacon’. This particular variation [we did 4] was herbed [from my garden], and I think the herbs are a worthwhile addition. My conclusion simply supports my previous conclusion that jowls, and the rest of the pig head for that matter, hitting the local butcher shop bin is nothing short of sinful waste. It’s a shame. And one of those opportunities for budget minded locavores that I seek – you want cheap or in some cases even free local, ethically raised pork? It can be done.

My honesty-bone requires that I divulge that the crunchy jowl fat texture in its uncooked form is not my favorite. But that’s just me, and palates vary widely. The bottom line I’m finding is that pork is pork, whether from the head, belly, or leg when it comes to flavor. So long as there’s enough fat to bring flavors to the party, the whole hog is all good, in my opinion. Which brings me back to: if it’s tasty pork, why are we throwing it out? I think lack of awareness is the answer. Ask your local pork producer for pig head, and cheap, and you should be able to score some majorly cheap but tasty locavore eats.

Moose sausage typically doesn’t get me excited. It’s generally made by local meat shops with pre-fabbed 5-gallon-bucketed mixes of ‘cure’ and ‘seasoning’, jacked up with pork to tame the flavor and add fat, resulting in a sausage that tastes like non-game something-or-other akin to a factory produced sausage item from a box store. Not always bad, just rarely that good and never great. Wow that’s a tad harsh. Truth hurts. [I actually feel for the butchers, as I would not want to defrost, de-hair, and trim out the often multiple bullet wounds from game animals shot by others. They probably don't want to either.]

I’ve made fresh game sausages with equally weak results. No boxed seasoning, perhaps, but still not something I’d be excited to tie into regularly. But that tide has changed. A while back I put up a batch of pork saucisson sec, and made a batch with this year’s calf moose to give it a go. Test run. Success. And to continue with my quasi-snotty french names for these products, I’ll be calling these ‘saucisson sec d’orignal‘.

This morning I finished a couple pieces of this and my brési with a hit of smoke. I’ll give them a few days to mellow out the fresh smoking before tying into them again. Smoke, like many things, is better with age. I may make the next batch a tad leaner, but other than that, very pleased. How to make it? Chacuterie‘s recipe for saucisson sec, substitute moose for pork shoulder. These took a month to cure at 4C and 65-70% humidity, and could stand to be a bit drier still.

[the photo is the saucisson atop brési atop guanciale - Christmas is a time to taste charcuterie, apparently. sweet]

It feels odd posting about items like this as it implies I’m some experienced pro at this, and I totally am not. But here it is, in all its glory:  my first successful crack at dry cured calf moose. I’m going to call it ‘Brési‘ after the french dry cured beef – the name derived from its appearance resembling brazilwood [Brazil in french = Brésil]. I was recently asked what the most complicated/difficult preparation I’ve done would be – and this would be up there. I put in my draw for a tag in June, hunted and butchered it in November, and dry cured it until Christmas. That’s a half-year process.

But making it is not rocket science. It’s essentially a smoked bresaola, for which recipes abound – I used Charcuterie’s as a starting point. The only key in my mind was appropriate use of Instacure #2 which is based on weight, and therefore quite straightforward. The big test was simply whether or not it would have a good time hanging out in my cellar or not. My first attempt at this last year  failed in a nasty-mold mess. This year, with the right cure and conditions in the cellar, it’s easier than pie – proving yet again that far more than half the battle in dry curing is creating the right space to do it. I used calf moose inside round, and I’m wagering that any cut of calf moose done in this preparation would be lovely – next time eye of round due to its fortuitous tubular shape.

The cellar has indeed been an adventure this year, and I’m enormously grateful.  I intend on posting more soon on how and why to build a space similar to what I have as it’s not hard or onerously expensive, and is proving to be an invaluable resource.

Today was the day the plethora of guanciale was due to hang. They’d cured for a week, had released a couple tbsp maybe of fluid per, and a fry-up proved salty enough to proceed – not wanting to risk oversalting if we left them longer. So into a big clean sink of water they went, got a solid rub-down-rinse, then dripped dry. We then did up 5 versions: sage & thyme, bay & thyme, black pepper only,  applewood smoke only, and plain. Poked a hole near an edge, tied them, and hung them up for their long visit to my cellar. Wasn’t sure exactly how this would all go down, but it went smoothly. Now, we wait.

The new hanging setup. One more item to share. Last night, before going to bed, I had an idea pop into my head that I put into motion this morning. I had learned that tying many items to dowels above your head is uncomfortable and just plain annoying – especially when the string’s a bit wet and you’re trying to tie knots securely enough to avoid meat on the ground. Or perhaps  if you cut the string a bit short to begin with. Solution? Nylon coated galvanized strapping [Home Depot] intended for hanging pipes, with a plain old stainless S hook run through the holes. You can buy steel strapping – but for the $3 more I opted for galvanized [it's a wet environment = rust], and nylon coating for overkill. A happy surprise – the nylon coat provides a super-smooth slide on the dowel when moving items. This setup is exceedingly better than untying and retying knots, they can easily be assembled/disassembled, is overbuilt in the strength department, and inexpensive [$6 for 10' strapping, $1.28/4 S hooks]. Now when tying stuff to hang, I simply tie the item, and tie a loop on the other end. The loop gets hung on an S hook, and voila. Hang-time is no longer time consuming. Need to move stuff? No problem. Ah, simple pleasures.

It’s been 3 weeks since I put up this batch, and the thinnest of them are just starting to become ready to go. The thicker ones – the game ones being especially thick, won’t be ready for another week or two at least.

My first successful batch is all but a memory, now long gone. It was lovely. This second batch was about twice as large. I’m making another today – pork from two local farms. I’m trying to have the resolve to put up a batch once per month – enough to have a continuous stock. Not too difficult to have the resolve when the product’s so dreamy.

For the  geeks. Modified my drying setup. You can see the dowels the small sausages are on – 3 rows 48″ long. I can make links the length of a half sheet pan, and make two per string – my solution to the links not touching each other. Then there are two dowels running perpendicular across the end of the room, also 48″ long. It multiplied my hanging capacity by about 500%. Still have some tweaking to do for ease of use, and may increase my capacity further down the road, but for now I’m thoroughly pleased. 5C 63% humidity. I’m still shocked that at this time of year I actually have to tone down the humidity in the space – it easily can climb into the 70′s if I allow the salt water wicking from a pail to pool on the floor. The rest of the house is sub 20% humidity. I’m likely going to have to knock it sub 60% RH before loading the space with all those jowls and new batches of saucisson sec, which will bolster it upward.

Today was day 1 of a pretty major charcuterie project – the dry curing of pork jowl. Not that jowl is tricky to cure, what makes this a big project is that we did not one jowl, not a pair of jowls, but 20. Yep. 20 pig jowls. Why? A friend wanted to do some R&D on having the cured product available for commercial use. Plus, it was essentially a waste product as sadly, most of the pig heads around here go in the bin at the kill site. What a waste. A good example of how food abounds, but just isn’t distributed properly. I’ve calculated about 5-7 lbs of meat off the head. The 10 pigs these jowls came from would have had 50-70lbs of usable food in the head. At least we spared the jowls.

These jowls were unlike any I’d seen – and I buy whole pigs from this farmer regularly. The difference: the place they have their pigs butchered cut big slashes into the jowl – which seemed tragic at first. You can see them in the photo below. My current theory is they do it for inspection, as the jowl has lots of glands – I’ve seen most pig kidneys slashed like this for inspection when you get a side. The plus side is it will cure quickly. Another plus side is it allowed us to easily locate and remove the many, many glands I’m fairly sure we’d have missed had the slashes not been made. Begs the question of edibility of the glands if the jowl’s left whole for this preparation. The only downside I can think of so far is aesthetic and potential inconvenience at slicing time.

So today was trim, gland removal, and cure day. They will spend up to 3 weeks curing in my root cellar at 2C before being removed, rinsed, and hung to dry cure for roughly 2 months in my curing room. We used this recipe, minus the herbs which we’ll add to some pieces pre-hanging for dry curing. Now we wait.

I put this batch up last weekend – about a 5lb batch of pork saucisson sec, and a similar sized batch of calf moose saucisson sec. I’m also dry curing a piece of sirloin tip from the calf moose to see how that goes. For my first attempt at the game version of saucisson sec, I opted for a higher ratio of Berkshire back fat than would be used for the pork version – the fat reserved from one of the many fall pig butchering escapades.

That’s one big change in my sausage making routine that rocks. When we butchered the pigs, the trim was set aside but not ground that day [which saves time and labor that day - both appreciated] AND an appropriate amount of back fat was added to each pack. Genius. So when I pull a trim pack from the freezer to make saucisson or fresh sausage, it handily includes the necessary fat. I used to freeze my fat separately.  No more. Saved time on butcher day, fuss on sausage making day, uses less packaging, and leaving it in trim form rather than ground gives me more options for texture of the forcemeat.

I’m a little shocked that my cellar is at 79% humidity – a little too high for my liking, and the opposite problem I’d expected at  this time of year with the furnace fighting the -30C weather and drying out the air something bad in the rest of the house [sub-20%]. I’m not complaining. Easier to dry it up here than get the RH up.

I can see me having an awful lot of saucisson to put every year if this keeps working out.