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