Year of the Pig

The following post is dedicated to loyal Y.O.T.P. reader Ben, who got a cast iron dutch oven for Christmas and didn’t know what to do with it. Try this!

All Year-of-the-Pig long, I have neglected one of the best cuts of pork around, the loin. Why would I do this? I guess sometimes I think that pork loin gets a little dull, but that doesn’t have to be true. It’s a great cut and there is certainly no shortage of good stuff to do with this leaner piece of pork.

Awhile ago, my dad pointed out the interesting fact that pork is the only meat where the bony and fatty pieces (like ribs) are more expensive than that meaty lean parts (like the loin). That is an interesting point, and this lean cut should not be neglected.

Since winter started, I have been enjoying braised dishes as often as possible. In the winter when the grill is covered and the heat is on, there is nothing better than a nice braising dish to fill the house with savory smells and to heat my cold basement kitchen! A couple weeks ago I tried the following pork and peas recipe out of the book Pork & Sons which I got for Christmas. This is a pretty great book. It is beautifully laid out, and really fun to flip through. Full of lots a super uber frenchies doing everything under the sun with pigs. Not to mention that the photos and recipes all look great. This book is a must if you have a pile of pig cheeks laying around and you have no idea what to do with them. If you wanna know what to do with your pork, surely you must be able to trust these folks:

This is the recipe from Pork & Sons:

This is a quick simple standard braising recipe. Basically, you take your pork loin and brown it on all sides in a little oil (10 minutes). Then you add the bacon, shallots, onions, garlic and cook until they are a little softened (another 10 minutes or so).

Then you add your braising liquid (white wine) and herbs, cover it and simmer until done, about an hour or so, basting it from time to time.

Of course you need a secret ingredient, so I added a little extra nipular smoky pork flavor by tossing in a smoked pork nipple, for much needed flavor but mostly for effect.

When you are about done with braising the pork, cook up a butt load of peas and the mix them in with with all that delicious braising liquid. Serve.

Makes great leftovers too!

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This looks like a great simple pork shoulder recipe to try. Thanks to Squidocto for the link!

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People just love bacon, and who can blame them. People always say that everything is better with bacon, but what about better bacon? After reading the bacon recipe in the Charcuterie book, I was really surprised how easy it looked to make this magical food. The only unusual items you need are “pink salt” and pork belly. The pink salt is a mixture of salt and 6.25% sodium nitrite which you do not want to eat by itself despite its candy like appearance! It is used to kill bacterias including botulism when curing meats. This is cheap and pretty easy to find, and I ordered it online. As for pork belly, chances are you aren’t gonna find it readily. You will have to look around and probably need to speak to your butcher about ordering it. My friend Kat ended up getting this slab from a fancy New York meat market for $4.99/lb, but it was nothing special; my local supermarket can get it cheaper, like $1.50/lb. One of these days, I would like to try it from a heritage or farm raised pig, where prices get more expensive, more like $9.99/lb, and is most likely thicker and fattier than its factory counterpart. As for selecting a pork belly, I would say get one that looks like bacon! Also, this bacon recipe calls for boneless, rind on pork belly.

Like I said, this is a really easy recipe. I was really eager to try it, especially after seeing this documentation from a very interesting blog which followed the exact same recipe from the Charcuterie book. The results looked wonderful!

The first thing is to mix up the basic dry cure: 1 pound of kosher salt, 8 oz. of sugar, and 2 oz. of the pink salt. Whew, that was hard!

Then I poured about 1/2 cup of the curing mixture (the recipe calls for 1/4 cup) onto a baking pan, spread it out and liberally covered the pork belly, coating it on as thick as I could. The book talks about the endless variety of bacon flavors you can add at this stage, and suggests 2 directions. One direction is the more traditional breakfast bacon which is sweetened with something like maple syrup. The other direction is to take it in a more savory direction using something like garlic, pepper and crushed bay leaves. I elected for the sweeter variety, so after coating the bacon with the curing mixture and putting it in a large 2 gallon ziploc, I added about 1/2 cup of maple syrup, which seemed to pretty much liquefy the salt immediately.

And that is pretty much it for now. Next, you just put it in the fridge for about 7 days, or until the pork belly feels firm and not squishy, turning the belly over every other day always keeping it in contact with the liquid. I ended up keeping mine in the bag for about 8 days, then took it out and let it sit uncovered in the fridge overnight to make it a little tacky and get it ready for the next step: smoking.

If you don’t have a smoker, never fear, you can still make great bacon by just cooking it in the oven at this point, but certainly the smoker is gonna add a lot of great flavor to the bacon, and of course that’s what I had to do. I got out the weber bullet smoker and lit a fire with some plum wood as my smoke wood. Then I slapped the pork belly on and let it smoke for a couple hours turning it over a couple times until the bacon had reached and internal temperature of 150 degrees, and had acquired the most delicious looking smoky color.

The final step now was to remove the rind. The book recommends doing this while the bacon is still hot, and I would agree; it sliced off very easily with a large knife. Then I cut up the bacon into manageable sizes, let it cool and wrapped it in plastic wrap, freezing some and tossing the rest in the the fridge. The book says that it will keep refrigerated from 7-10 days and will keep in the freezer for about 3 months.

Of course the moment I had been waiting a more than a week for was here: time to eat some bacon. I was not disappointed, believe me. The maple syrup cut through very prominently and mixed with the delicious smoke flavor. The intensity of the bacon flavor was way better than anything you get in the store. If you are a fan of bacon this recipe is worth the time it takes, the end result far surpassed anything you are gonna be able to buy in the supermarket. I will be making more!

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I have thought about making sausage before, but after reading the most informative sausage chapter in the excellent aforementioned book Charcuterie I had to try it. I went out and bought the meat grinder attachment for a kitchenaid stand mixer (~$40) which I borrowed from my upstairs neighbor. I decided for my first time I would make a sausage “log” which could be cooked as patties, instead of making things more complicated and stuffing the sausage into casings. I looked in the book for a recipe to try, and could not resist the description for:

Breakfast Sausage with Fresh Ginger and Sage
Homemade breakfast sausage (aka Da Bomb) is one of the easiest sausages to make, tastes far better than store-bought and doesn’t require stuffing if you don’t have the materials or the inclination—it can be shaped into a log, wrapped in plastic, and frozen, and disks can be cut as needed.

Fresh ginger makes this sausage vibrant and fresh sage enhances the clarity of the flavors. This sausage is best sauteed so that its aroma fills a morning kitchen, but it can be roasted. It’s also excellent grilled or smoked.

5 lbs Boneless Pork Shoulder Butt
1 1/2 oz. kosher salt
5 tblspn grated fresh ginger
5 tblspn tightly packed finely chopped fresh sage
1 tblspn minced garlic
2 tblspn ground black or white pepper
1 cup ice water

It just so happened that I had a 4+ lbs pork butt in the freezer so I got it out and let it defrost for a day. The next day it was still partially frozen, but actually that made chopping it up a little easier. I chopped it up into 1-2 inch chunks and removed the bone, the fatcap, and anything that seemed too sinewy. I measured out all of the dry ingredients (and I actually used a little more ginger, and a little less sage than the above recipe), mixed them all together and popped them in the fridge over night.

In the morning I got everything set up according to the book’s instructions. One of the most important thing they stress is keeping the meat good and cold during the whole process. This has to do with safety concerns, but more importantly it has to do with the getting the right texture of the sausage, so that the protein and fat do not “break” during the cooking process. I put the meat in the freezer for about 45 minutes before grinding it, and also refrigerated the grinder attachment. The kitchen aid bowl which I grinded the meat into was also placed in a bowl of ice. Here is the set up:

And then, I was ready to go!! Excitedly I switched on the mixer to a low speed and started feeding the grinder worm some pork. The worm feeds the meat through the attachment to the spinning blade which cuts the meat against the die (I used the smaller one) which is basically a metal plate with holes in it. Almost immediately the meat started to chug out through the holes, and also right away the meats started to get all “gunked” up becoming a big smooshed mush of meat, instead of nice distinct columns of ground meat (something the book had warned about). I thought, “oh boy, I see how this is gonna go down,” and I switched off the mixer and disassembled the grinder to see a bunch of sinew and stuff clogging up the die and wrapped around the blades. I got out a knife and cut away the sinew and reassembled the attachment thinking that this was gonna be an annoying uphill battle. I switched the mixer back on and the meat started its march through the grinder again coming out in a nice defined grind, just like Pink Floyd. And that was about it. I just kept feeding it more meat, and it chugged away grinding with only one more sinew clog towards the end. It was actually a totally painless process and the grinder attachment was quite easy to clean up.

The next step was to add the cup of ice cold water and to mix up the meat with the paddle attachment of the stand mixer for a minute or so, until it is combined and sticky (called the “primary bind”). This basically develops the protein in the meat to make it stick together, making a uniform rather than course and crumbly texture.

All that was left to do at this point was to roll up the sausages into logs (which could be sliced later to make patties) and in wrap them in plastic. Here are 2 guys wrapping up their sausages:

And now for the final test…FRY IT UP:

Wow, this sausage was potent and delicious. I think it tastes better simply because you ground it up yourself, and put everything in it. The combination of sage and ginger is really great, and smells wonderful cooking. In this case, since I used about 4 lbs of pork (after trimming and de-boning) instead of the called for 5 lbs, the seasoning was especially intense, maybe too much so, although still very good, but I especially enjoyed it with eggs or a side dish to tone the seasoning down though. My mistake. Next time I will make sure to weigh the meat and adjust the seasoning accordingly, or at least to a closer proportion.

Anyway, it was really fun and surprisingly easy and rewarding to make sausage. Next time I will have to try stuffing the sausage into casings and see how that goes, although sausage patties are great too. The possibilities are endless! I see the future and it is sausage!!

Also my thanks to Kat for all of her sausage-making photographs. She loves pork too:

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Back in July I found the book Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn while poking around at the New York City Library. Before I got through the first chapter, I knew this was a book I wanted to own and I returned it to the library. After a very irritating experience with Abe Books (don’t use them), and a 7-week delivery time from a bookseller less than an hour’s drive away, the book was finally in my very anxious hands. The book is a wealth of information about salt and meat, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in hand preserved meats.

The chapters include a wide range of subjects including salt cures, brining, smoking, sausage making, dry-cured meats, terrines and confit, among others. The recipes range from very simple to very complex, but there is just a ton of interesting information in there, and it is very well written and researched, and even has very nice and helpful hand drawn illustrations.

Last week as I was heading to work on the train, perusing the “sources” appendix in the back of the book, I saw the heading for “outstanding sausages, especially dry-cured sausages and meats,” and was very surprised and happy to see that one of the 2 places in the U.S. that the book recommends was just a few blocks away from my office at the corner of 29th Street and 8th Ave, Salumeria Biellese. I just love New York for those moments when you realize that something you are really interested in is right under your nose. Well, of course that day I took a stroll over to the shop during my lunch break. I was very surprised by the look of the place which was totally nondescript; I have probably walked by it 100 times, and have never given it a second look. The place has been open since 1925, and is apparently one of the largest wholesalers of sausages in the country, and I beleve all of their meats are cured in a building right there in Manhattan.

I walked in the door, and it was not at all what I expected. It looked like a dingy sub-par New York deli counter with dirty tables, and steaming buffet trays behind glass filled with unappetizing pastas and soggy to-go lunches. I walked around looking for some sausages. After seeing the huge diversity of offerings on their website I was expeciting a smorgasbord of sausage. Nothing. Just the dingy counter. I got the attention of a guy working there, and asked him about the sausages. He sorta motioned to a cooler behind the cabinet, and asked me what I wanted. I had no idea what they had, so I just asked for a selection of what he would recommend. He ended up slicing me up a 1/4 pound each of the genoa salami, hot and sweet soppressata, prosciutto, and bresaola. There wasn’t much other interaction, but I left with a bag of over a pound of top quality cured meats for about 14 bucks.

The meats were delicious, and I will be going back there. I especially recommend the prosciutto, the sweet soppressate and the bresaola. From reading online, I think you could order some of their more unusual products if you called ahead and had them set one aside for you. This place is a little weird, but a great place to know about.

Stay tuned for more posts about charcuterie. I don’t think I will be attempting any dry cured meats anytime soon, but there are a lot of other recipes in that book that I must try.

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Last weekend was my birthday. Whats 34? That’s a throwaway birthday, but if nothing else, a good day for some ribs. We had some people over to play card games–Canasta, if you can believe that. The day before I bought 4 racks of spare ribs from the supermarket. I trimmed them up, realizing that I have gotten quite a bit better at the trimming, although it is still a little time consuming. I took off the remaining membrane, and some of the pockets of fat. Then when the rain stopped on Saturday afternoon and I was ready to smoke, I took the ribs and brined them in a light salt solution with a ratio of 1/4 cup of salt to 1 quart of water, for 30 minutes. I had read that this would help keep them moist so I thought it was worth a try.

I seasoned the racks based on two recipes from Paul Kirks’ “Championship Barbecue” book, which I like very much. I seasoned two racks with a thick coat of store bought saltless Lemon Pepper, and for the other two racks I chopped up about a tablespoon fresh rosemary and a tablespoon of thyme and ground them together with a head of pressed garlic using a mortar and pestle, til it was a thick garlicly paste. I rubbed the garlic mixture onto the racks. Since it didn’t coat the ribs like the rubs I usually use, I was afraid it wasn’t gonna really impart much flavor. I did my best to really rub the paste into the ribs, and it turns out that the flavor took very well.

I smoked the ribs all told for about five hours, using hickory chunks and some bourbon barrel oak chips. The temperature built up slow, but stayed around 225. About halfway through I turned them over in the rack, and basted them by rubbing butter on them, the more fat the better right?! Here is a picture of them at the halfway point:

After the halfway mark, whenever I opened the smoker (every 30 min or so) I would put a little smear of butter along the top of the racks and I would also spritz them with apple juice to keep them moist.

When the rib meat had drawn back off the tip of the bone by a good quarter inch or so it was time to take them off. I let them sit for about ten minutes and they looked wonderful:

I sliced them up and placed them on a platter to serve. Both recipes proved to be delicious and they were a big hit with everyone, but I especially liked the potent and simple flavor of the garlic and herbs ribs. To be honest, I found them to be the best ribs I had ever made. I wonder if the brining or the butter-basting made the difference, or something else, but I am telling you, these ribs were delicious. I was very happy with the result. These were the best birthday present I could ask for.

As for the ribulation, including that night an subsequent leftovers (yum) I ate ten delicious ribs, bringing the Year of the Pig count to a respectable 133 ribs. And counting. Thank you piggie!

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I made some ribs in my new smoker today, and they were fine. Very fine. Here are the recipes that I used, the full post will follow soon.

This Magic Dust is a very good rub. I recommend it highly.

Since I am most certainly violating copyright law, I should at least plug this book written by BBQ’er extraordinaire, Mike Mills (not from R.E.M.): Peace, Love and Barbecue: Recipes, Secrets, Tall Tales, and Outright Lies from the Legends of Barbecue, which is very good if you are at all interested in barbecue.

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I had bought a 1/2 a pork picnic at the supermarket and I decided to smoke that and make pulled pork for dinner on Sunday. I had invited over Corin (Crushinator) and Renee and Matt (our own Squidocto) for a relaxing Sunday evening dinner in the back yard and also found out that my housemate Kat and her friend Matt were planning to make a bunch of food too, including some ribs that they had made before and told me about. Sounded promising!

Neither Alissa nor I had ever cooked a Pork Picnic before, and the night before we had trimmed off the thick layer of skin. Wow that pig skin is a pain. This was a half picnic, weighing in at about 3 pounds. I figured I would just smoke it like a Boston Butt, and it would be fine. I read that it was less fatty than a Boston Butt, so I planned to baste it frequently. We used the same Mustard Slather from the day before, and put together a new rub from the Paul Kirk Book, called the “The Baron’s Cajun Rub” (see below for recipe) because we wanted something a little spicier. We tossed it on the smoker around 10 am. I let the rub set in for a few hours, and then started basting the picnic every 30-45 minutes, with the Memphis Basting Sauce from the previous post.

Meanwhile, Kat and Matt prepared their Ribs (see Ribs-a-la-Kat):

To make a long story short, I smoked that picnic for a good 7 hours and it did not appear to have gotten tender yet. I got out the left over ribs from the day before and heated them up so that we would have dinner, and just let the Picnic smoke on, thinking that my smoker was just too low of a temperature (around 200) and that it was gonna take a long time. We had a fine dinner with swiss chard, bbq beans, coleslaw, corn and ribs. And soon after, Kat and Matt were down with the 2nd course, finishing off their Stout-boiled ribs on the grill and then grilling up some seriously delicious red bell peppers stuffed with hominy and jack cheese and avacado. Nice job Matt! As for the ribs, I thought they were very good. Very tender, but not of the falling off the bone stew meat variety. The sauce was tangy and spicy. It was a good method, definitely worth experimenting with, although I must add, smoking is definitely my favorite way to go so far.

As for the picnic, we continued to smoke it and baste it. It ended up being quite dried out. We still pulled the meat apart and mixed it with the a BBQ sauce from the Paul Kirk book and a little apple sauce. It ended up being good for lunches during the week, but definitely not worth showing off to your friends.

Anyway, another 4 ribs brought me up to 67 ribs. Thanks to all the piggies, near and far!

**The Baron’s Cajun Rub
1/4 cup Cayenne Pepper
1/4 Sweet Hungarian Paprika
2 Tbs Chili Seasoning
2 Tbs Fresh Ground Black Pepper
1 Tsp White Pepper
1 Tsp Dry Mustard (I used Coleman’s)
1 Tsp Ground Thyme
1 Tsp Garlic Powder
1 Tsp Onion Powder
1/2 Tsp Rubbed Sage

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INGREDIENTS:
1 rack of spareribs, cut St. Louis Style
1 little can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce
a jar of clover honey from upstate ny
1 jar of chipotle mustard
some bourbon
a six-pack of stout beer
some tomato paste
brown sugar
chili powder
garlic powder
paprika
onion powder
salt & pepper to taste.

1. Clean your ribs – remove external fat and that funny little membrane that you see on the outside. To do that, grab as much as you can with your thumb and index finger of your left hand, and then use a short serrated knife to cut underneath the membrane while pulling the membrane back with your left hand. You should feel like you’re skinning an animal. ARGH!

2. Put your ribs in a wide pot, large enough to hold the ribs in one layer, maybe two. I like to use my Le Cruset pots, ‘cause they hold their heat really well.

3. Pour in your stout beer, enough to cover the ribs by an inch.

4. Bring to a boil, and then reduce to a slow, bubbly, simmer. Bloop….blooop.

5. Simmer for an hour or so, until the meat has pulled back from the rib ends about ¾ of an inch.

6. Remove the ribs from the beer, and place on a tray

MEANWHILE, prepare your sauce

1. Take a big squirt of your chipotle mustard sauce and put it in a medium size mixing bowl. If you don’t have chipotle mustard, use brown mustard.

2. Add half of your honey jar. Perhaps ¾ to 1 cups worth

3. Chop up 2 of the chipotle peppers really fine, and then add those, along with some of the adobo sauce. BE CAREFUL – HOT!

4. Add a few tablespoons of tomato paste, a couple shakes of pepper, salt, and what ever other dried flavorings you think will taste good.

5. Stir it with a fork, add some bourbon, drink some bourbon, add some stout, drink some stout., stir.

6. Put it down and let it sit for 20 minutes or so. Drink your beer.

7. Adjust flavorings to taste.

MEANWHILE, prepare your grill

You’re just re-warming the ribs and searing the outside, so you don’t want it too hot so that the ribs burn, but you want it hot enough so that you’re not waiting around forever to eat. Interpret that how you want.

Lather sauce on both sides of ribs – and deposit on grill. Grill for ten to a maximum of fifteen minutes, making sure to turn them to get those purty grill marks.

Enjoy!

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WOW. I feel that I have a lot to report on from this weekend, as there was a lot of Pig action. Let me start by mentioning that for the past couple weeks I have been reading Paul Kirk’s book “Championship Barbecue” which I got shortly after my review of his restaurant, R.U.B. (see the Ribulator, Entry #15). It’s a pretty great book with a lot of good information about barbecue, and a ton of recipes. It will make you dream about delicious smoked meat. Last week, I had busted out the smoker to try some of his suggestions for chicken and I was not disappointed, but this weekend it was time to smoke the real deal: RIBS.

***A BASIC WORD ABOUT MY SMOKER: First off, I have THIS SMOKER which is an electric “bullet” or “water” smoker. I think that review is pretty accurate. This smoker is ok, but definitely not awesome, so I wouldn’t run out and buy it. I may have to try some of the modifications that guy suggests, or just go for a Weber Smokey Mountain. That said, the advantage of this smoker is that it is damn easy and low maintenance. Turn it on and it basically keeps a constant temperature, and you can walk away and not worry about it. It certainly has its limitations, including the fact that it seems barely able to get up to the temperature it needs to be at. Also, I don’t think that it generates quite as much smoke as a a charcoal smoker would, but that said, it does a pretty nice job and is a good way to get started smoking. For those of you that don’t know, the electric “bullet” or “water” smoker is basically a little cylindrical tower that looks a little like R2-D2. Inside, it has a heating element in the bottom, around which you put your wood chips or chunks. This provides the heat and the smoke. Above that is a water pan, which helps to stabilze the temperature, and keeps the smoker moist. Above that are 2 18-inch racks, where the smokables go.

Anywho, I got up early on Saturday morning and got out the ribs I had bought the day before from the local supermarket. The ribs looked pretty good to me, trimmed St. Louis Style. Alissa and I did our best to remove the membrane from the bone side of the rack. It definitely takes a little skill and is annoying, but it’s a must. Once done, I followed a basic technique from the Paul Kirk book, coating the rack in a Mustard Slather (recipe below) and then sprinkling them with a basic leftover rub I had from last summer. After that, it was into the smoker. I put the ribs on the top rack, and under them I put a big bowl of pinto and kidney beans (mixed with onion, garlic, bell pepper, leftover mustard slather, and ketchup) to catch all the porky drippings. I put a mix of hickory, apple and oak chips in the smoker pan, and let it smoke.

It seemed like that temperature stayed around 210 or so, and I smoked it for a total of about 5 1/2 hours. For the last half of that time I basted the ribs with the “Memphis Basting Sauce” (see below).

We took the ribs out and I thought they were pretty damn good. They were tender and tasty. This is definitely on the track to my ideal cooking method for ribs. I mean, you just can’t beat smoking.

I think the rub could have been set a little more, and maybe been a little more assertive, but the actual meat was nice and tender, smokey and flavorful. We ate some for dinner–I had 4, bringing me up to 63 ribs–and wrapped the rest, about a half rack, in the plastic wrap and put them in the fridge. I would like to add the that beans were delicious. I think that smoking under pork is about the best way known to man to cook beans.

But that is just about half the story cause there was more to come on Sunday…stay tuned for part 2.

RECIPES
The Baron’s Special Sauce (aka Mustard Slather):
1 Generous Cup firmly packed light brown Sugar
1 Teaspoon Kosher Salt
1 Teaspoon White Pepper
1 12-ounce can beer, flat
1 32-ounce jar prepared yellow mustard
2 tablespoons Louisianna hot sauce

Memphis Basting Sauce
3 cups water
1 1/2 Cups red wine vinegar
3/4 cup Heinz 57 (I substituted KC Masterpiece BBQ Sauce)
1/2 cup + 2 Tablespoons Worcestershire
1/2 cup tomato ketchup
1/4 prepared yellow mustard
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1 Tablespoon Seasoned Salt
2 Teaspoons Liquid Smoke (optional)
***Combine and simmer over medium heat for 15 min. Use Baste warm.

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