In the States this preparation is called Canadian bacon, but we usually call it back bacon. It’s more or less the same process as regular bacon, only done to a section of the loin instead of the belly. There’s an old style of back bacon from eastern Ontario called peameal bacon, in which a cured section of loin is rolled in peameal (crushed split-peas) before being smoked. Peameal bacon is still made down east, though nowadays cornmeal is used.
Back bacon is usually made from the eye of loin: the large, round muscle often made into centre-cut pork chops. You can also use the rib- and sirloin-ends of the loin, which have more fat and flavour than the centre. I … Continue reading.
A while back I wrote a post on cold-cut Bath chaps: a boned-out pig’s head, cured, rolled around the tongue, tied, poached, and sliced. While I was extremely happy with the look of those Bath chaps, they were pretty bland. I figure that the cure leached into the poaching liquid.
I had another go at the chaps with this fall’s pig. This time, instead of using a whole head, I used only one jowl, cured, and wrapped around the tongue.
After rolling and tying, I seared the meat over high heat. Once chilled, I vacuum-packed the chaps and simmered them for two or three hours. This was not proper sous-vide: though the meat was vacuum-packed, it wasn’t cooked in … Continue reading.
These are scrunchions. They’re a bit like pork rinds.
“Pork rind” simply means pork skin. It can refer to the fresh, raw skin cut from a side of pork, but more commonly it means pig skin that has been rendered and fried crisp. It is actually the same as crackling, though commercially-produced pork rinds are much more delicate than the crackling that develops on oven-roasted pork.
Scrunchions are made by a similar process, but they consist of pork fat, not skin. I know it sounds funny that deep-frying fat results in a crispy treat, but raw animal fat also contains a good deal of connective tissue that holds the fat cells in place. When you fry strips of raw, … Continue reading.
Everybody rejoices when November kills its pig.
-an inscription on the Münster Cathedral
Edmonton gets cold enough to butcher outdoors a bit sooner than Westphalia, so our version of the inscription would have October killing the hog.
This year Lisa and I bought a side of pork from Nature’s Green Acres. I cut up our meat at Kevin’s, on what he and his family call Pig Day. While the majority of the pork was wrapped and frozen, there was also some curing, smoking, and grinding, processes that have come to typify the season.
Brine-Curing
Processing a side of pork is made less daunting by the presence of a brine bucket. Certain pieces can go straight from the cutting board … Continue reading.
Turkey is certainly one of the finest gifts made by the New World to the Old.
-Brillat-Savarin in The Physiology of Taste
The Saturday morning of Thanksgiving weekend we pick up a turkey from the Four Whistle truck at Old Strathcona, then take it home and cut it up, usually into two suprêmes (breasts with the drumette still attached) and two leg-thighs. I know: bringing the whole roasted bird to the table, and carving that bird in front of the guests, is an indispensable part of Thanksgiving. I appreciate the pageantry of tableside carving, but there are some huge advantages to separating the bird.
With the bird broken up into smaller pieces I can sear them to jump-start the browning. … Continue reading.
Even once I had a handle on basic techniques like dough-shaping, I found that the bread I made at home wasn’t as good as the bread I made at NAIT, where they have commerical equipment like proofing boxes and deck ovens.
Here are some quick notes on using household kitchen items to replicate the equipment in professional bakeries and bake better bread.
Proofing
I’ve always felt that my bread doesn’t proof as well at home as it does at school. At first I thought this was a temperature issue, so I tried fermenting and proofing my bread in increasingly warmer corners of the house. Turns out humidity was the more important factor.
This is the single most useful preparation that I learned in Austria. It’s invaluable to establishments that use a lot of cured meat, but also a good trick to have in the home kitchen. It’s called Fleischknödel (approximately: “FL-EYE-SH KNUH-dl”). Fleisch just means meat, while Knödel is a type of dumpling that is popular in Austria and Bavaria. Fleischknödel is a fantastic way to use up leftover meat, whether cooked or cured.
Most cooks are familiar with how to use scraps of raw meat. When butchering a side of pork, for instance, you reserve the miscellaneous bits of meat and fat so they can be ground and used in sausages and forcemeat.
I recently picked up some pickerel from Rebekah’s Fish at the Strathcona Market and took my first stab at cold-smoking on my barbecue.
To hot-smoke on my barbecue I just remove the grate from the righthand side and put foil packets of wood chips directly onto the flames. I put the meat on the left side, which remains off. This way the meat isn’t over direct heat and will cook evenly. With the right burner on a medium-low setting, the wood chips smolder and the average temperature inside the barbecue stays around 250°F.
The point of cold-smoking is to impart the flavour of the smoke without cooking the meat. Examples of food that you might want to keep raw are … Continue reading.
Würstlstände are Austrian sausage stands. They punctuate the sidewalks of every city in Austria. People from all walks of life crowd around these kiosks for, say, a quick lunch, or a post-bar snack: a sausage, fried or steamed, served with some manner of bread, mustard, and beer or pop.
While certain types of sausage appear on almost every würstlstand menu, it can be frustrating trying to pin down their characteristics, as a huge variety of sausages can go by the same name. Bratwurst, for instance, is sometimes based on pork, sometimes on veal, sometimes stuffed into slender lamb casings, sometimes into wider hogs…
Here are some very general descriptions of the most common würste:
When I was little I watched cartoons on Saturday mornings.
At one o’clock custody of the television passed to my mother, who watched Victory Garden, an American public television show that tours some of America’s greatest gardens.
I hated this show.
Now that I’m all growed up, I rather like it. A couple years ago I was watching Victory Garden when they interviewed a chef from Boston who used sunflowers like artichokes. I filed this idea in the deeper recesses of my brain until this summer, when I came into some sunflowers from Tipi Creek.
I pulled out the flower petals, then started cutting away the dark brown seed heads until I had something that looked sort of kind of … Continue reading.
The personal website of Edmonton chef Allan Suddaby
