I like roasting large joints of meat. The largest that I typically cook is the Easter ham, which is the better part of a pig’s hind leg. This year’s fresh leg was fourteen and a half pounds.
In years past I’ve had problems with brine penetration. Though I made the brine with the proper concentration of curing salt, and fully submerged the leg for the recommended week, when I carved the ham I found a patch of grey pork in the centre. The year after that I brined the ham for a few extra days, but it still wasn’t pink all the way through.
This year I bought a syringe for injecting brine from Hendrik’s. It holds 2 fl. oz, … Continue reading.
The word “bacon” usually refers to pork belly that has been cured and then smoked. An exception is back bacon, which is cured pork loin. “Canadian bacon” is what Americans call back bacon that has been smoked.
Below are some notes on making bacon at home.
A Quick Tour of the Pork Belly
Before I started buying pork by the side, I ordered slabs of belly from Irvings Farm Fresh. A 5 lb slab was typically around $25.
Below is a slab of pork belly. You’re looking at the inside of the pig; the opposite side is covered with skin. The right side of this slab would have connected to the front shoulder of the hog. The left … Continue reading.
A detailed introduction to sausage-making at home: ingredients, equipment, theory, and procedures.
What are sausages?
Sausages are ground meat, usually stuffed into a casing, though there are certain sausages that aren’t in casings. For instance there are sausage “patties” and sausages encrepinette, which are patties wrapped in caul fat. For now let’s be content to say that sausages are ground meat stuffed into casings.
Why do we grind meat?
1. To tenderize
Meat is made of fibers that are surrounded by connective tissue, which are then bundled together in more connective tissue. Highly exercised muscles tend to be higher in connective tissue. Examples include:
Traditionally, in North America the hock is a section of the front arm bone of the pig. On one end the elbow joint is severed. On the other, where the arm of the pig meats the body, a cut is made and the arm bone is sawed through. So on one end of the hock there is a clean joint, and on the other the circular cross-section of a bone.
In traditional British butchery it is the analogous section from the hind leg that is called the hock; that from the front was known as the hand.
Nowadays, whether taken from the forearm or the hind leg, both cuts are considered hocks. They are almost always processed into ham, that … Continue reading.
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.
Heurigen (“HOY-ree-gen,” singular heuriger) are special taverns in Austria that serve young wine or cider, depending on the region.
The word heuriger literally means something like “of the current year”. So for instance new potatoes are called heurige erdäpfel. With regards to wine it refers to wine from the last vintage, ie. wine that has not been bottled or aged. Heuriger taverns open up for a couple of weeks at a time so that guests can drink young wine and eat plates of cold food such as cheese, spreads, bread, and charcuterie. The word for these savoury accompaniments is brettljause (“BRET-tel YOW-ze”). Brett means board, as the food is usually spread out on a wooden board. Brettl, … Continue reading.
At left is the first harvest from the yard, largely rhubarb and dandelions.
Describing dandelions as “edible” is misleading. The term suggests that they should only be eaten in survival situations. (Would you ever describe spinach, or cheese, or pork, as merely “edible”?)
In reality, dandelions are a treasured leafy green in several European cuisines. They even have an entry in Larousse. Some excerpts from that article:
“the English name is derived from the alternative French name dent-de-lion (literally ‘lion’s tooth’, referring to its serrated leaves)”
“Wild dandelion leaves should be picked before the plant has flowered…, when they are small and sweet.” This line confuses me a bit. While our dandelion leaves are definitely better when small and
I like roasting large joints of meat. The largest that I typically cook is the Easter ham, which is the better part of a pig’s hind leg. This year’s fresh leg was fourteen and a half pounds.
