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charcuterie

Molasses & Moonshine-Cured Ham

26 Jun 2012

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The charcuterie bug has bitten me again, inspired by my friend Beth’s adventures in sausage-making and finding my copy of Charcuterie by Rulman & Poleyn after the move. I had this beautiful miniature wild-hog picnic ham and a couple of pork steaks in the deep freeze, just calling to me. The last ham was a partial success and I was itching to try it again. I made sure I had all the ingredients and just dived in.

This is my quick & dirty version of the Blackstrap Molasses Country Ham, page 198-199. I’m ashamed to say I’m just not comfortable hanging meat to cure outside of the fridge. My kitchen hovers around 82 degrees during the day and around 76 at night. The ideal temp for curing meat is 60. Until I can rig a special curing box, it’s fridge-curing for me. If you’re leery of hanging meat outside of the fridge to cure like I am, this isn’t a true “country” ham, but it’s damn tasty. It’s also a smaller piece of meat if you’re a little nervous buying a 15-pound fresh ham to try this for the first time.

Molasses & Moonshine-Cured Ham

2 1/2 lb bone-in fresh “picnic ham” and 1 lb fresh ham steaks
1 1/2 c kosher salt
2 tbl pink salt/Insta-Cure #1
1/2 c raw sugar
3/4 c molasses, blackstrap if you have it
1/2 c Apple Pie Moonshine
1 tbl ground ginger
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp coriander seeds, toasted
1 tbl juniper berries

Combine salt, pink salt, sugar, and spices in the goblet of a sturdy blender. Add moonshine and molasses and puree until the mixture becomes a smooth paste. This method works very well if you don’t have a way to grind spices. Pour 1/4 of the mixture in the bottom of a glass dish, then add the meat, spooning more cure over and under each piece. The dish should be a fairly tight fit so the meat is mostly submerged in the cure paste. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and put in the back bottom shelf of your fridge. Leave for 2-3 days, turning the meat in the curing paste each day to make sure all surfaces are evenly coated.

On the 2nd or 3rd day remove the meat from the curing paste. Rinse off as much of the brine as you can. The meat should be firm to the touch. Cover the meat with cold water in a large glass or plastic container and soak for at least 6 hours. Then take the meat out and place it on a rack over a rimmed baking sheet and let it dry for another 4-6 hours in the fridge, or overnight.

Hot-smoke the meat for 3 hours at 200-250 degrees. I used applewood chips, but any fruit wood would be nice. At the end, the meat should have a strong smoky smell and be firm to the touch. Let cool all the way to room temperature, then wrap and freeze or refrigerate. To serve the picnic ham, let it come to room temperature, then braise the picnic gently in a small amount of water for an hour. You can do this on the stovetop on low or in the oven. Check the internal temperature before serving.

The ham steaks have the consistency of country ham and I’m using them like country ham, in small amounts for flavoring. The strong smoky-salty-sweet flavor is excellent for cooking with fresh lima beans.

Next up: More bacon! Happy curing!

By: Andi Houston Category: Charcuterie, Cow Pooling, Recipes! Tags: , , , ,

February Sausage-Making Workshop

7 Feb 2012

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Make your own homemade sausage!

Guess who has two pigs ready for slaughter!

Custom Sausage Workshop

Saturday, February 18, from noon to 2:30pm at Crawford’s Custom Meats in Worthington Springs/Lake Butler.

Registration is $45 per person. We will be observing the hog butchering process from carcass to sausage using a local hog, fattened by Mr. Bill himself. Each person will assist in cutting up the meat. You will bring home between five and ten pounds of your own custom sausage by the end of the workshop.

If you want to make your own custom sausage, bring enough seasonings for ten pounds of meat, already measured out if possible. There are several recipes in Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing by Ruhlman & Polcyn, and you can search online. If you do not want to bring your own seasonings there will be seasonings available for no extra charge.

The class is limited to 8 participants. Please email me ASAP to register.

By: Andi Houston Category: Charcuterie Tags: , , ,

A Homemade Christmas Ham

26 Dec 2011

2 Comments

We cured our own ham! December’s Charcutepalooza Challenge is a charcuterie tray showing off three projects. I only had two out today: the spicy sausage from last month’s workshop and a home-cured Holiday Ham both from local wild hog.

We started last Friday with a butt-end half fresh ham. First we put it in a brine of sugar, salt, sodium nitrite, and water then weighed it down. That went in the fridge and the meat turned in the brine every other day. The sediment on the bottom of the super-saturated brine solution should have been a warning.

Our cute little petite ham, brined and dried overnight.

Then on Christmas Eve we took the ham out of the brine, rinsed it, and left it in the fridge uncovered overnight to dry out a little. On Christmas morning we set up the small gas-powered grill as a smoker. The ham went on the far side of the grill. We turned only one burner on to low, and set a foil-wrapped tube of soaked applewood chips directly above the low flames.

This small grill did not make a great smoker because the temperature was difficult to control. It took several adjustments of flame to get the chips to smolder enough to produce smoke and keep the ambient temperature of the grill close to 200. Finally my husband found that propping the lid open slightly helped maintain the smoke without letting the temperature get too high. We hot-smoked the ham for two hours.

Ham after two hours of hot smoking with applewood chips. See the crispy fat on the front? This is what happens when the smoke is *too* hot.

I was worried when the ham came off the grill. It had obviously started to cook, and the corner closest to the flame has already started to burn. We decided to finish the ham on the grill instead of in the oven to increase the smoke flavor since that’s something we all enjoy. Jim made a lower-sugar glaze of spicy mustard, honey, and garlic and heavily glazed the ham, then put it back on the grill, this time with the meat thermometer inside the ham.

After another hour I went out to check the ham. As soon as I went out on the porch I could smell burned pork. I don’t know whether the constant checking had kept the temperature unnaturally low before, but after an hour the grill was well over 350 and the internal temperature of the ham was 214. Pork is considered “done” at 155. I was sure the ham was ruined. We let it cool and then sliced into it.

My dad and I literally held our breaths as Jim sliced into it. But look! It's pink all the way through, showing that the brine penetrated to the center of the meat, and still juicy under the caramelized outer layer.

Our home-cured Holiday Ham was very salty, very smoky, and a little dry… but definitely not ruined. It’s closer to country style ham, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but not what we were really going for, either. What I think we did wrong:

The brine solution was too strong for the size of the ham. We followed the recipe exactly, not thinking about the ratio of ingredients to weight of the roast. We used a smaller roast than the recipe called for but made the brine at the same strength.

This “grill as smoker” experiment is not working. If we’re going to keep doing charcuterie experiments involving smoking, we need to build another smokers. We need a new Alton Brown-style flower pot smoker.

All in all, this experiment was a success! I think we have a slightly larger fresh ham still in the freezer so we can try again in a few weeks. In the mean time, I’m making sweet potato biscuits to eat with thin, thin slices of ham, and making ham & white bean soup with the rest!

More about the rest of our Christmas all-day buffet tomorrow!

By: Andi Houston Category: Charcuterie, Recipes! Tags: , , ,

December Sausage Workshop

23 Nov 2011

2 Comments

What sausage do you want to make?

Crawford’s Custom Meats has decided that this sausage-making workshop thing was pretty fun, so we’ve decided to do one more this year.

Custom Sausage Workshop

Saturday, December 3rd, from noon to 2:30pm at Crawford’s Custom Meats in Worthington Springs/Lake Butler.

Registration is $45 per person. We will be observing the hog butchering process from carcass to sausage using a local wild hog. Each person will assist in cutting up the meat. You will bring home between five and ten pounds of your own custom sausage by the end of the workshop.

If you want to make your own custom sausage, bring enough seasonings for ten pounds of meat. There are several recipes in Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing by Ruhlman & Polcyn, and you can search online.

The class is limited to 8 participants and I already have three registered. Please email me ASAP to register.

By: Andi Houston Category: Charcuterie, Cow Pooling Tags: , , , ,

Behold! Pancetta!

22 Nov 2011

1 Comment

The pancetta that we started has been hanging in my parents’ fridge for 2 weeks. It was looking good, not too dried out, so we decided to sample some last night.

The small end. We didn't get the meat wrapped quite tightly enough, there were definite air pockets. Made us doubly glad we decided to air-cure this in the fridge.

Here you can clearly see the air pockets inside of the rolled meat. Maybe next time we'll butterfly the belly piece to get it thinner so it will wrap tighter? There must be a better way to do this.

I love the swirls of white fat and pink meat here. The pink meat all the way through to the center shows that the cure penetrated the meat.

We finally screwed our courage to the sticking place and fried up a thin slice. Right now it is intensely porky and salty, with a strong resinous flavor from the juniper berries, garlic, and other herbs and spices in the initial cure, and a strong peppery bite at the end. This is definitely not something you'd want to eat a chunk of like bacon, it's definitely something to use as a flavoring ingredient. It was delicious and complex and I can't wait to cook with some!

After poking it, prodding it, slicing off some, and tasting it, we decided to let it hang for another week. It’s not drying out like the book cautions against but it’s also not firm all the way through, so I think some more air-drying needs to happen.

Thanks to Mike Thomas, my dad, today’s guest photographer!

By: Andi Houston Category: Charcuterie Tags: , , , , ,

My Own Bacon!

18 Nov 2011

2 Comments

Wow! James saved the bacon… literally!

I was ready to throw it away, but my younger son James begged me not to. So last night he carefully trimmed away all of the outer charcoal and sliced the remaining unburned middle.

And then I fried it up.

Smelled... sooo... good...

Oh wow. Salty. Rich crackling fat. It browned faster than store bacon, and no water came out of it at all. It did render a lot of fat very quickly, more than even the bacon from Wards.

So much better than store-bought bacon

It was sliced very thick, so was chewy rather than crispy. So much richer than store-bought bacon! One small piece was totally satisfying.

Beautiful, beautiful home-cured bacon

By: Andi Houston Category: Charcuterie Tags: , , , , ,

bacon fire, sausage dinner, and poutine, y’all

14 Nov 2011

7 Comments

Dinner last night started in tragedy.

Jim and I got the grill set up to smoke the pork belly which has been curing in the fridge for the last 10 days on its way to becoming bacon. He soaked applewood chunks, we set the grill pan on the lowest setting, waited until the coals were nice and glowing, set the wrapped applewood chunks on top, set the slabs of pork belly on the warming rack above the grill surface, closed it up and went inside to continue dinner prep while the bacon smoked for a leisurely hour or so.

About 20 minutes later I went out to check the temperature and saw flames shooting out of the side of the grill.

Doesn't that just bring tears to your eyes?

The slabs of pork belly had caught fire. We had to pull them out with long tongs and put them in the fire pit and smother them with the lid of the cast iron dutch oven. We’re still trying to decide whether to try and salvage what’s left or just throw them away.

The bacon conflagration

The rest of dinner, thankfully, was fantastic. We took the coils of sausage I made Saturday, speared them with perpendicular metal skewers, grilled them until almost done, and then finished them in a simmering bath of beer and sauteed sweet peppers. I love cooking fresh sausage this way and the extra moisture from the final beer braise kept the lower-fat sausages from drying out.

I also made poutine for the first time. Poutine is a Canadian dish, but I made a Southern version with sweet potatoes from the farmer’s market, locally made cheese, and gravy made from pork roast drippings.

Poutine, y’all

6 big sweet potatoes, cut for steak fries
olive oil
2-3 tbl Cajun or blackening seasoning
2 cups brown gravy, however you want to make it
1 lb Wainwright Dairy fresh cheddar curds (Get ‘em at Wards!)
Plenty of cracked pepper

Heat oven to 450. Toss cut up sweet potatoes with olive oil and plenty of blackening or Cajun seasoning. Roast in the oven for 20 minutes, and then turn them all over and roast until well browned and soft on the inside. You may have to cook them in batches. Heat gravy to simmering. Once all the fries are done, put them all in a baking dish. Separate the cheddar curds with your fingers and scatter over the fries, then pour over the piping hot gravy. Hit with a final blast of black pepper.

Then back away quickly so you’re not trampled by the ravening hordes.

By: Andi Houston Category: Charcuterie, Eat Local Challenge, Recipes! Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Sausage workshop success!

13 Nov 2011

7 Comments

The butchering and sausage making workshop was a total success.

We expected five or six people, and eight actually came! I was thrilled. First we got a tour of the facilities and asked questions. Then Bill showed us our pig. He was a fairly fat old boar, and we were all amazed at how quickly Bill took the boar apart into pieces using the bandsaw.

Bill the butcher using his bandsaw. He was incredibly fast and precise.

Then came the cutting. Since we weren’t cutting the big pieces into specific cuts, just deboning and cubing the meat and fat, everyone got to work together on this part. Bill gave us all thin tapered boning knives and we went to work.

Practicing our knife skills.

With eight people this part went fairly quickly. Bill started weighing out the cubed meat and quickly realized that we had plenty of meat for 10 pounds of sausage per person, when we had only planned on five pounds each. This was an unexpected bonus, and everyone was very happy.

Extra sausage for everyone!

Then the sausage-making began. Bill rinsed the casings and set up the grinder. This was a different kind of meat grinder. The cubed meat and seasonings are combined in a bin at the top of the machine, and then the meat is ground and then fed immediately into a narrow tube, which the casings are gathered onto. The stuffing went extremely quickly for each person.

Loading the hog casings onto the sausage tube of the grinder. These were real hog intestines, but Crawford's doesn't process their own, they buy them.

I chose a Greek herbed sausage recipe from Hunter Angler Gardener Cook because it was specifically for wild boar meat, but added a significant amount of fresh oregano and rigani, since I have so much of it. I only brought enough of the spice mixture for 5 pounds of sausage, so I used Bill’s standard spicy sausage mix for the other five pounds.

Aren't they beautiful?

We will definitely be doing this again. Bill had a good time, made a profit, and taught more people about butchering and charcuterie. Everyone was able to do each step themselves, from deboning and cubing the meat to using the grinder and stuffer to using the vacuum sealer. And we each got to make our own custom-flavored sausages, which is something most home cooks do not have the equipment for. I can’t wait to try our sausages tonight!

By: Andi Houston Category: Charcuterie, Cow Pooling, Current Fascination Tags: , , , ,

Charcutepalooza, here we come

3 Nov 2011

5 Comments

Last night my father and I made our first forays into charcuterie. I have been hoarding pork belly from the last several pigs and we finally set a date to begin our new food producing adventure.

I first heard about Charcutepalooza, a year of food projects based on Michael Ruhlman & Brian Polcyn’s book Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing, on Punk Domestics. I was immediately interested but it was too late to join in on the fun. I ordered the book, read the Charcutepalooza blog posts there and on the dozens of other blogs participating, and then started reading the book. Then last month we started gathering the ingredients, and I knew when I saw the perfect three-pound thin whole pork belly from this wild hog that it was time to start.

So last night, after an insanely delicious dinner of pork belly bulgogi with fish cake and sweet lap xiong sausages, fresh winter kimchi, shredded cuttlefish, and hot rice, we got to work.

my small marble mortar and sad broken pestle was not up for this task, and we quickly resorted to the blender.

First we mixed up the basic cure using “pink salt”, kosher salt, and sugar, then the savory cure for the bacon. I know most people like sugar-cured bacon, and there is some sugar in the cure, but my husband and my father are both diabetic and I wanted them to be able to enjoy this bacon. So first we used my small marble mortar and pestle to crush peppercorns, bay leaves and garlic together. Then we slathered the bacon pieces in the cure, dropped them carefully into plastic bags, and put them in a deep casserole dish in the fridge.

This is the two pieces of proto-bacon. When this is done curing so the meat is firm and then smoked, it will then be proper bacon.

Then we started on the pancetta. As soon as I saw this large thin piece of pork belly I knew it had to be used for pancetta. It’s too thin for sliced bacon but perfect for rolling. We realized that my little mortar and pestle would not be up for this cure, we dumped the mixture in a blender and pulverized it all together, then rubbed it into the meat.

This is proto-pancetta, in its initial cure of salt, sugar, pink salt/sodium nitrite, pepper, juniper berries, garlic, bay leaves, nutmeg and thyme.

The first steps were easy. Next week: smoking and rolling!

By: Andi Houston Category: Charcuterie, Cow Pooling, Current Fascination Tags: , , , , , , , ,