Category Archives: Meat

Air-Dried Beef

September 25, 2012 allansuddaby 1 Comment

Air-dried beef goes by many different names in many different places. The most famous, I think is bresaola, from northern Italy. In adjacent Switzerland air-dried beef is pressed into a unique block shape and called Bündnerfleisch, after the Swiss canton of Graubünden. Nearby in eastern France it is often lightly smoked, and called brési. In all of these alpine regions it is a common accompaniment for fondue.

Eye of round is one of the best cuts to use for air-dried beef. It is a single muscle, with very little internal fat, easily trimmed to a convenient size. First remove any silverskin and fat.

The cleaned eye of round:

The clean muscle is then rubbed with salt, … Continue reading.

Beef, Meat, Offal

Braised Beef Heart

September 24, 2012 allansuddaby 5 Comments

This was my first time cooking beef heart. My logic was this: “Heart, while offal, is a muscle, not a gland. A hard working muscle, at that. I guess I’ll braise it.”

In hindsight, probably not the best way to cook beef heart. The final dish was okay: it was tender, but a bit dry. This makes sense, as heart has no intramuscular fat, and I trimmed away what little fat there was on the outside.

The heart’s texture really surprised me. Raw heart has no visible grain, almost as if it were a very firm, nebulous liver. A few people had told me that heart is not a very “organy” meat. Michael Ruhlman goes so far as to say … Continue reading.

Meat, Poultry

Roast Chicken

September 23, 2012 allansuddaby 3 Comments

Crisp, delicate, golden skin. Moist, tender, well-seasoned flesh. A whole bird, brought to the table and broken into pieces, distributed amongst the diners according to their personal preferences. This is the beauty and simplicity of the ideal roast chicken dinner.

You can go to ridiculous lengths to roast the perfect chicken – (see the In Search of Perfection episode on roast chicken, which involves brining, soaking in water, scalding three times, cooking in the oven for five hours, then searing on the stove top…) – but with a fraction of the effort you can have mostly the same results as the most complicated procedures.

The following process results in by far the highest ratio of eating quality to effort. All … Continue reading.

Charcuterie, Ham, Meat, Pork

Pork Tongue

September 21, 2012 allansuddaby 2 Comments

A brined, cooked, peeled pig's tongue The tongue is one of those cuts that sounds way, way weirder than it really is.

The tongue has two sections. There’s the part that we usually think of when we consider an animal’s tongue: the part at the front that can move freely around the mouth. Then there’s the base, at the back of the mouth. The meat from these two sections is different.

The tip meat has a very close, dense texture, and is lean. The base meat has a coarser texture, and is a bit fatty.

The meat from both sections is very tough in its raw state. As you can imagine, the tongue is a highly exercised muscle, and requires extensive cooking at low temperatures, usually … Continue reading.

Charcuterie, Ham, Meat

On Brining Meat

September 20, 2012 allansuddaby 6 Comments

There are two types of brine: seasoning and curing. Each will be discussed in turn.

Part One: Seasoning Brine

Seasoning brine typically contains three ingredients: water, salt, and sugar. But why do we season-brine meat to begin with? There are at least three reasons:

Flavour. The first reason we season-brine meat is to evenly distribute flavour-enhancing salt throughout its mass, instead of simply on the outer surface. We can also impart the flavour of herbs and spices to the meat.

Increased Tenderness. As Harold McGee writes in On Food and Cooking, “salt disrupts the structure of the muscle filaments [and] dissolves parts of the the protein structure that supports the contracting filaments.” A strong enough brine … Continue reading.

Beef, Canadian, Charcuterie, Meat, Québécoise

On Smoked Meat, Montreal, and the Gout

September 16, 2012 allansuddaby 5 Comments

I have a certain old friend. Technically we went to high school together, but I first got to know him in Lister Hall, then at the Kappa Alpha house on university row. He studied philosophy, and after graduation he followed a girl to Montreal. There he fell victim to many of the city’s seductions: strong beer, girls, and cocaine, yes, but above all these, smoked meat.

For a while he lived only a few blocks from Schwartz’s, that Mecca of Montreal smoked meat. For a while he ate there every day: a sandwich, a pickle, and a cherry coke.

Montreal smoked meat is that city’s answer to New York’s pastrami: beef, cured with a concoction of spices similar to those … Continue reading.

Bacon, Canadian, Charcuterie, Meat, Pork

Peameal Bacon

September 15, 2012 allansuddaby Leave a comment

It’s always confused me that Americans call back bacon “Canadian bacon,” when it’s much more associated with Britain than Canada. To my knowledge the only uniquely Canadian form of bacon is peameal bacon: cured pork loin rolled in ground split peas, which keeps the surface of the meat dry and inhibits microbial growth. Sometime over the past century cornmeal has taken the place of peameal, but the name hasn’t changed.

This week I made two forms of peameal bacon: the contemporary favourite – lean, centre-cut pork loin, fat trimmed down, brined and rolled in cornmeal – and a rustic recontruction, inspired by the fantastic book The Art of Living According to Joe Beef. I left an inch or two … Continue reading.

Charcuterie, Meat, Pork

Smoked Pork Loin – Kassler Rippchen

August 30, 2012 allansuddaby Leave a comment

This 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

August 26, 2012 allansuddaby 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

Part One: Windfall Hard Cider (Lisa’s Special No. 8)

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

Meat, Poultry

Cutting Poultry

August 1, 2012 allansuddaby 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.

Removing the Legs

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

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

Bend the leg behind … Continue reading.

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