The Agony and the Ecstasy - Curing Pork (Part Three)

Part Three: Smoking.

The pancetta in the basement was joined by even more hanging meat. Smoke permeates the meat better if the surface is totally dry.

Jeff got to work preparing the wood. While it is true that you can buy wood chips all over the place, it seemed more fun to do that from scratch too. (Although not as much fun after an hour of sawing..)

This huge branch of Manitoba Maple fell down during one of last summer's windstorms.

Next morning, bright and early.

A few pieces of lit charcoal and a couple of chunks of maple got the smoke puffing nicely. Nice and cool.

Look at the happy smoker on the deck!

Look at the happy ham and happy hock and happy sausages!

Now look at the burnt, sad and unhappy ham!

This catastrophe occurred around hour 3 of smoking.

Everything had been going really well until that point. The wood was smoking consistently and was nice and cool for the first hour and a half, but then it started fizzling out. It took a while to get the next batch of charcoal and wood smoking nicely, so I figured I'd have to time it a little tighter on the next batch. Which led me, an hour later, to add half a dozen burning briquettes to the wood when the last half dozen were still going.

About fifteen minutes later, Jeff saw flames spitting out of the smoker. No more smooth, cool smoke. We had fire.

Now, the whole thing about smoking is that you want to flavour and somewhat dry out the meat without cooking it. This is why the low temperature is so important - you don't want to render any fat or cook the meat. Which is what happened.

I wept bitterly.

But all was not lost. The burnt parts of the ham were cut off, and then we roasted it. The smoke had permeated about 3/4 of an inch into the ham, leaving a nice pink ring on the outer layer. It tasted...kind of hammy.

Some of the bacon had started cooking in the fire and had gotten pretty leathery. I cut those pieces off to use later as salt pork, some of which flavoured a huge pot of spicy baked beans beautifully the next day.

There was about a 6-inch square of usable bacon from each slab that I had prepared. Hey, for my first try, that's not so bad, is it?

Mmmmm. Homemade maple bacon.

The Agony and the Ecstasy - Curing Pork (Part Two)

Part two: Bacon and Pancetta.


The dry cure sucked out a lot of the moisture from the meat as it sat in the fridge, creating its own brine, as seen below. After about 5 days, it was time to get the meat out of the salty brine. The remaining salt was scrubbed off the meat and thoroughly washed.


The two slabs designated to be bacon were dried off, and placed into new bags into the fridge. I added some maple syrup to one of them, and garlic and pepper to the other so the flavour could permeate a bit before smoking. (The scallops pictured on the Valentine's Day post were wrapped with the maple bacon from this stage.)


The slab designated to be pancetta was also scrubbed and dried off, then covered with a thick layer of cracked black pepper.

Then came the fun part - rolling up and trussing the tightly rolled meat.

Rolling - easy, trussing - tricky.

And then the easiest part - Hang it up, and let it cure.

Thank god the cats can't jump higher than two feet - the basement is usually their domain, but the cool, dry environment down there was very nice for the pancetta.

The finished product, after curing for almost four weeks:

For more info on making pancetta, check out http://www.chowhound.com/recipes/10699.

The Agony and the Ecstasy: Curing Pork (part one)

2007 - The Year of the Pig.

Pork intrigues me more than beef, somehow. Beef is too simple. You don't have to work with it to get results. It justs sits there, tasting good, being beef. But pork! Working with pork is like a culinary costume party. Different preps of pork leaves you with totally different tasting meat. Pork for the sake of pork - I could take it or leave it. But seasoned, smoked or cured pork becomes a seasoning of its own.

Yes, I could find simpler hobbies. Hobbies with less sleepless nights, with less heartache and tears, with less crushing disappointments. But then I'd never have homemade bacon!

O.k. So this all started about two and a half weeks ago, when I purchased half a pig. Half an organic, raised under the oak trees in La Broquerie pig. After trying out the flavour of the fresh pork by roasting the bone-in loin roast (juicy and succulent - organic pork for the sake of pork is pretty damn good!), the work of curing began.

Three projects were started: ham, bacon and pancetta. I received several small ham roasts cut from the leg, and I chose the largest roast (about 6 pounds) as well as the hocks to brine and eventually smoke. The belly came in a 8-pound slab that I cut into three equal pieces. One piece would become pancetta, and the other two were destined for becoming bacon.

Darling husband made the brining possible by procuring some lovely plastic buckets from the cafeteria at U of W.The brine for the ham and the hocks was salt, brown sugar, some juniper berries, and water. Next came the pancetta. This was a dry cure, pictured above: salt, brown sugar, bay leaves, juniper berries, fresh thyme, chopped garlic and cracked black pepper.

This spice mixture was rubbed liberally all over the slab of pork belly. This was repeated with the other two slabs of belly, but with a simpler cure of salt and sugar.

The slabs of bacon were placed into air-tight plastic bags, and then weighted down in the fridge. I used a sophisticated method of placing canned goods on top of them. Clever, yes?

The brine with the ham and the hocks were placed in a cold corner of the pantry. There happened to be a cold snap during this time and this room was probably around 5 degrees. Although it probably slowed down the process of salt absorption, I didn't have to panic that it was going to go bad on me!

Then, I waited.

Happy Valentine's Day!

My Valentine's gift to Jeff: A kielbassa heart.



Jeff's Valentine's gift to me: fresh Digby scallops, brought home on the plane. (wrapped in our very own homemade bacon - as yet unsmoked - updates on bacon shall come soon...)


...and pretty flowers too.

Tourtière!

Here on Planet Borscht, I present to you our very first guest Blogger.
Please warmly welcome Miss Harms and her tales of fine food from afar!



Hello fine foody folks.

I recently returned from La belle province, and while there, I dined at 'Aux Anciens Canadiens'. This most charming restaurant in Old Québec specializes in old school cuisine served by delightful wait staff wearing period costumes. . .the period being French colony Québec.

The lunchtime meal--Table à Haute: your choice of main dish, including soup du jour (a delightful creamy tomato while we were there), dessert (maple sugar pie or apple cranberry pie served with fresh cream, not whipped cream or ice cream. . . cream!) and a glass of wine or beer! And the beer was not hum-drum beer. It was all tasty beers like Boréal Russe, ooh or Blonde. . . mmmm) (Coffee was extra) for a mere 14.95$!


And now, the meat of my entry-- the main dishes! First, "Tourtiére Lac-St-Jean avec des viandes sauvages" (right). The wild meats included caribou, boeuf, cerf (deer) and wapiti (elk). It was a most succulent tourtiére. So juicy, and seasoned excellently. It was the best tourtiére ever to touch my tastebuds (sorry St. Jo).


Also, the tourtière was not in pie form. It was more of a loaf. The breaddy crust wrapped around the meaty filling. Note the lovingly cubed potatos, and the bits of extra-burned. Oh, Heaven!


And the daily main dish special "Pâté en croûte de Wapiti avec le Romarin" (super-flaky crusted wapiti pie with rosemary). Oh my, yum yum yum! the wapiti was definitely much drier (and therefore leaner?) than the tourtiére. The crust was most dilectible, and melt-in-your mouth. I am guessing it was definitely lard. And the rosemary crept up on you and enveloped your olfactory and savory senses in a big blanket of joy!


To top it all off, the sides that accompanied the main dish (viewed here and above) were divine! The orange-red-yellow mixture is a tomato, onion and yam pickle. It is sweet, tart and delightful, and I will never enjoy ketchup again. There was a smattering of lightly--perfectly--steamed sugar snap peas, and the most amazing yams I have ever tasted. They must have been approximately 2/3 boiled yams mashed with 1/3 butter, and liberallty mixed with salt. And piping hot! Everything arrived at just the right time, and steaming to perfection!

Vive Le Québec!