All posts by allansuddaby

Charcuterie, Meat, Pork

Smoked Pork Loin – Kassler Rippchen

Leave a comment

The cured loin, smoking on the barbecueThis is hands down my favourite preparation of pork loin: brine-cured, smoked, and sliced into thick ham chops.

While the eye of loin is a very lean, mild-tasting muscle, it is surrounded by large slabs of fat: fatback on top, and the streaky side meat that becomes bacon.  Grilling or pan-frying a large pork chop with all this fat usually results in either overcooked meat or under-rendered fat.  By slowly bringing this roast up to temperature over several hours in a smoker, we render all that fat without overcooking the meat.  The final dish is somewhere between bacon and ham.

In Germany this preparation goes by the name Kassler Rippchen, which literally means “little ribs from Kassel”.

Details.  Use … Continue reading.

Charcuterie, Meat, Pork, Seasonal

A Fall Dinner, in August

2 Comments

I had to doublecheck my calendar: it’s still August, isn’t it?

This past Saturday I stood on my deck, wearing a sweater, tending a barbecue that was puffing applewood smoke into the yard.  Within the ‘cue was a cured pork loin.  Within the house, on the kitchen counter, was a head of cabbage.  Beside it, a jug of cider, weakly alcoholic, tart, sweet, faintly effervescent.

I have high hopes that there will be a few more weeks of heat, and a few more summer storms, but the last few days at my house have felt like fall.

 

A Fall Dinner, in August

A jug of the year's first ciderPart One: Windfall Hard Cider (Lisa’s Special No. 8)

The cider was the inspiration, the centre of … Continue reading.

Potatoes, Starch

Steak Fries

Leave a comment

Steak friesSteak fries are big French fries, usually in the form of wedges cut from a whole potato.

As with French fries I use a two-stage cooking method: one low-temperature stage to cook the potato flesh, and one high-temperature stage to crisp them up.

Because steak fries have a more substantial interior than French fries, I think they can handle a much crustier exterior, one that walks the line between crispy and crunchy, with jagged bits of browned potato to contrast the starchy inside.

For reasons explained below I like to use a potato variety that doesn’t hold it’s shape very well during cooking: Russets, which also happen to have a great fluffy, slightly granular texture.  Yellow-fleshed varieties hold their shape … Continue reading.

Meat, Poultry

Cutting Poultry

2 Comments

The latest in the “Cutting Whole Animals” series on Button Soup: a general approach for cutting poultry.

The general skeletal and muscular structure is almost identical for all meat birds.  Proportions of wing to breast to leg will vary, but the following procedure will work for chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese, and guinea hens, as well as game birds like pheasants, grouse, partridge, and so on.

This is a whole chicken.  It’s from Four Whistle Farms.  It weighs about 3 kg.

A whole chicken from Four Whistle Farms

 

Removing the Legs

The legs pull easily from the body.  You can see a good deal of loose skin between the leg and body.

Pulling the leg away from the body of the chicken

Cut the skin and pull the leg farther from the body.

Cutting the skin between the leg and body of the chicken

Bend the leg behind … Continue reading.

Meat, Pork

Crackling

1 Comment

A sheet of puffy, happy pork cracklingCrackling is pig skin, cooked so that it’s crisp.  Since skin contains, and is often adjacent to, a good deal of fat, it benefits from a long, slow, rendering process, followed by a quick, high-heat crisping process.

You can form perfectly good crackling while cooking a skin-on pork roast, so long as the meat beneath the skin is a cut that also benefits from a long, slow cook.  Pork head, shoulder, and hock come to mind.  After the slow cook, raise the oven temperature to 425°F and bake until the skin becomes brittle, almost glass-like.

You can also cut the skin from the meat, then render and crisp it on its own.  This yields a product more like commercial pork … Continue reading.

Meat, Pork

Rendering Lard and Making Grammeln

8 Comments

Slabs of lard rendered from raw pork fatI’ve rendered animal fat many times, but I recently learned that I was doing it wrong.  Or rather, not in the most effective manner.

Rendering is the process of turning raw, fatty tissue from animals into pure fat.  We render pieces of raw pork fat to get lard, and raw beef fat to get tallow.  I used to quickly cut up, say, pork leaf lard, or beef suet, or duck breasts, then throw them in a pot over low heat and leave them for several hours.  This works, but I was always surprised by the low yield.

My exploration of an improved rendering method began last summer, in Austria, while eating at a Heuriger.  I was served light rye … Continue reading.

Charcuterie, Meat, Sausages

A Survey of Commercial Sausage Additives

3 Comments

A pack of bologna, with ingredients listReading the ingredients list of an industrially-produced sausage can be daunting.  We’ve been trained to mistrust “scientific sounding” ingredients, and there are ongoing discussions about the health risks associated with many common additives.  I don’t wade into that debate too much in this post, partly because I know so little about it, but also because there are few reliable studies on the subject.  The fields of nutrition and health are so tied up with industry that it’s hard to know what to believe.  I’ll leave it for you to decide what ingredients are okay and which are not.  In this post I simply describe the role the additive plays in the sausage-making process.  Interestingly, most them are used to accelerate … Continue reading.

Austrian, Charcuterie, Meat, Pork

Alternative Pork Primals: Belly-Loin Combo

3 Comments

I first learned the pork primals in culinary school, and for years I considered that information dogmatic. Then in an Austrian grocery store I saw this:

Carinthian Farmer's Bacon in a grocery store in Austria

 

It’s called Carinthian farmer bacon (Kaerntner Bauernspeck).  Carinthia is a province in southern Austria, known for its rustic food.  It took me a few moments to realize where exactly this cut would have come from on a pig.  It is in fact a pork loin, with the side or belly still attached, cured as one large piece, cold-smoked, and sold in thick slabs.

Novel cuts like this are just as easy to butcher as the classics.  Following is a quick tutorial, with photos, to prove the point.

Here is a side … Continue reading.

Meat, Pork

Pork Cutting: Head

1 Comment

So.  This is the pig’s head.  It is not a true primal cut, but deserves some special attention. I’ve written about a few preparations that involve cooking the head whole, either simmered to become headcheese, or roasted for its own simple enjoyment.  This post will discuss cutting the raw head into its various constituents, namely the jowl and ear.

Pork head

By far the largest piece of meat and fat on the head is the jowl.  It is a gorgeous cut, very similar to bacon, though a bit fattier.  I remove the jowl by following the jaw bone with my knife.

Cutting along the jaw bone to remove the jowlThe head with removed jowl

The meaty circle in the centre is the cheek muscle.

The cheek muscle

The main difficulty in dealing with the jowl is the … Continue reading.

Lamb, Meat

Lamb Chops

Leave a comment

Raw lamb chopThis is as casual as lamb gets at my house.  Typically, serving lamb is an event.  Lamb chops are probably the only cut that we would casually remove from the freezer the day we plan to cook it, then grill it briefly for a private dinner.

Lambs can be cut however you want, but typically the loin is divided into two sections.  The thoracic section, containing the ribs, is usually formed into a rack of lamb.  The lumbar section, which has no ribs, makes lamb chops.  Lamb chops are analogous to the T-bone steaks on a side of beef.  In the picture at left, the round, white bone at the bottom of the chop is the chine bone, or backbone.  … Continue reading.