More Charcuterie

It's getting to be that time of the year.  Hunting season and, for us, sausage making season.  We did the whole process this morning and ended up with a whole bunch of rings. 145, to be exact on the first run of the season.  Here it is, pre-smoke.

I can't wait for it to be done.  A good portion, probably around 50 will go straight from smoke into a cooler to dry for about a week.  Nothing beats good dry ring sausage.  Yum.

Heavenly postage - assembly required

A while back, That Guy was telling me about a very cool recipe/cookbook that he was reading.  I expressed great interest and he told me not to get it.  Guy code understood.  I have a birthing celebration coming up and guess what just came in the mail?

Oh, such beauty

Looks like work.  Yummy, yummy work.  And a big thank you to That Guy.  I can't wait to try some of these.  We've been making venison smoked ring for decades and dry ring for a few years.  We've dabbled in jerky and you've seen the bacon escapades here.  There are so many cool things in this book.  Also, they know what they're talking about...

Yes, yes it is

My dad and I have been talking about advancing to summer sausage and there is a pretty cool recipe in here for that.  Venison summer sausage would be a fantastic addition to our normal goodies.  I just can't wait for cooler weather.  Oh, but do I have a surprise that might make hot weather a moot point.  Just wait and see...

Meat Miscellany

So, first of all...

The bacon is done!  Well, most of it was done before, but the pieces I wanted to smoke were done yesterday. I didn't have a "bacon hanger" (yes, there is such a thing) nor the desire to get one.  So, I used what we had.  Since we make a lot of sausage, we have a lot of twine.  So, here you go...

Hey, how's it hangin?

The pepper cure is in front and brown sugar in back.  I didn't want a lot of heat under it, so I started a separate fire and put the coals in a pan.  Those were topped with wet wood chips and sawdust.  The wood chips were a mixture of oak and mesquite.  There was also a little pecan in there since that was part of the coals from the fire.  After 2 1/2 hours of waiting...

Beer:  Shortening wait times since 5,000 B.C.

this is the result:

I know it doesn't look much different, but you can just see the color change.  It took on a perfect amount of smoke.  One of the suggestions which I'm glad I paid attention to, was to make sure the surface of the meat is completely dry.  I let it sit, uncovered, in the refrigerator to ensure dryness and it paid off.  The droplets of water collect smoke particles and can cause almost a bitter, smudgy surface.  So, after this I cut it all into nice thick, uniform pieces and vacuum packed them in Ziploc bags.  FYI, if you want a good tip put a few boxes (or more) of Ziploc vacuum bags and a hand pump in your "go" kit.  The possibilities are endless and no batteries or electricity required.  I did a little test before packaging and must say the smoke was the perfect final touch.  Of course, now I wish I would have smoked all of it.

And now, on to more curing.  I mentioned the peameal bacon and it started tonight.

I cleaned up two large back loins (back-straps for you hunters) today and cut the center section of each out for this project.  I'm excited about this because I fell in love with it while visiting Canada and you can't get it down here.  I'm sure this is the item from which the misnomer "Canadian Bacon" was coined.  So, this is step one, curing for 5 days.  More to come.

P.S. I chose the title so kymber would not try to avoid the post.  :)

Bippity Boppity BACON

To start off, I will show you an amazing piece of discussion regarding bacon.  It's everything I believe on the subject:

Heh.  Of course, you know I ripped the title of the post straight from the video.  Now, on to the meat of the matter.  The curing is complete and...

Table for Yum, please

So far, so good.  The color is right.  So, after taking it out of the fridge, I thoroughly rinsed and then soaked each slab in cold water for 30 minutes.  After draining and drying with paper towels, we're ready to do some testing.  At this point I was a bit concerned that maybe I let it cure for a bit long and it might be too salty.  Turns out that was all just nonsense.

Oh, yes!  Yes!  Yes!

Top left - chipotle; top right - brown sugar; bottom - black pepper.

Also, this is where I give HUGE kudos to Old NFO for mentioning black pepper curing.  This was oh so fantastic and was my favorite.  It had a wonderful black pepper flavor throughout the whole piece of bacon.  Mrs. 45er preferred the brown sugar cure.  It had a nice sweet/salty flavor going on.  The chipotle was very nice, but I'm afraid I didn't give it much of a chance.  It had a nice cure and wasn't overpowering in flavor, but had just a nice hint of heat in the back of the throat.  Unfortunately, I used the worst cut of meat for that cure since I thought it might not be that great.  Turns out it was just fine.  Oh well, we'll have more soon.

Results?  Well, after the few test batches...  need more BACON.

So I slice a bunch more of the black pepper cured stuff and filled up the pan.  I was discovering now that this stuff is rather lean and you don't get much fat in the pan.  I started with a touch of olive oil in the pan until some of the fat rendered out.  Normally, I would add bacon fat to start things off but I didn't want to alter the flavor with commercial bacon fat.  Also, it was hard to cut it real thin but I did ok.  I started the heat medium low until the meat was close to cooked and rendered some fat, then cranked it up just over medium to put the crisp on it.

Cue angels singing

Just some observations:  What we have come to know as "bacon" has its own distinct flavor and smell.  It is  truly a great thing, but the commercial bacon has a different smell and flavor.  It's a funny thing, what you become used to becomes your point of reference.  It's like eating canned green beans all of your life, then trying fresh ones.  You may not think you like it, but not because it isn't better only because you aren't used to it.  This is kind of like that.  However, I don't know how you couldn't think this was good in a different way.  We loved it.

So now the meat is ready for some smoke.  I cut the slab of pepper cure in half to keep some normal and smoke some.  Same with the brown sugar.  We will see how that turns out after tomorrow.  I'm so happy with the results, I can't wait to do some more curing.  Next up, cured back loin (peameal bacon).

Makin' Bacon

This starts a new label on the blog called "charcuterie."  That is, essentially the smoking and curing of meats.  We will be making venison sausage soon, as we do every year and I've been trying to expand what we can do with what we have access to, which I must say is a lot and we are blessed for it.

Well, not having a ton of time to get this going, I asked Mrs. 45er to get some straight curing salt when she did the groceries.  All they had was this:

It is a pre-mixed cure, so my ability to play around was limited.  I want to try the High Mountain stuff that dakota mentioned because I've heard good things, but I would have to order that and wait.  The good news is that we have 2 more pigs to go, so there will be plenty of bellies.  I did a quick look on-line and saw some recipes that gave me a basic idea of how to use the product and decided to play anyways.  It's just in my nature.  So, the basic recipe seemed to be about one oz per pound of meat.  I started with that as a base and added other things.  For the nice, big cut I decided to take NFO's advice.  I do love pepper...

Pepperific

So, this one is going into the bag just like this.  It is essentially:

1 oz/pound of Morton's Quick Cure (2/3 on the meat side, 1/3 on the fat side)
1 cup cracked black pepper

Most of the recommendations for bags to use are 2 gallon Ziploc bags.  I'm going to get some of those for trying smaller sections, but for a monster like this I used some brining bags I got from Sur la Table.  These worked wonderfully.  I got them to brine the turkey for Thanksgiving (a must, trust me) but I will get more before then.

Goodness in a bag

So, I zipped it up, folded it over and put it in the beer fridge.  Yes, you heard me.

Now, on to the other experiments.

Yes, that is a beer from the fridge.  I had to make room for the bacon.  :)  The Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout  goes well with bacon makin'.  

On the bottom, I added some brown sugar to the cure, so:

1 oz/pound of meat of Tender Quick Cure and
1 Tbsp of dark brown sugar

On the top, well that is going to be chipotle bacon.  I'm real interested to see out this one turns out.

1 oz/pound of meat of Tender Quick Cure and
1/2 Tbsp of ground chipotle chile pepper

And this is the ground chipotle I used:

Yum in a bottle

So now, we are at the "we shall see" stage.  I have learned a few things since this process started about harvesting the belly from the pig and what is considered "belly."  Pork belly being belly is about as much a misnomer as the pork butt is from the butt.  Also, these pigs were fabulously built but rather lean so you don't see the classic 3 to 4-inch-thick pork belly. I'm not too worried.  There is plenty and if this turns out, we'll be rolling in bacon, which is kind of a fantasy of mine.  ;)