FYI

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

New Stuff

You do not have to tell me that I’ve been remiss in my blogging, because as a lapsed Roman Catholic, I’m as much aware of my shortcomings as I am of my natural proclivity to lapse. Still, if you want to give me a hard time about the shabbiness of my blog, [...]

Biltong, This

From biltong

So we have added another form of carne seca (lit. dry meat) to our repertoire of air dried meat portfolio: South African Biltong.
My first experience with Biltong was during a trip to London in 2007. On our last night in town and fed up with being phelbotimized by the doubling effect of the dollar [...]

Bread Starter

When in September we began building our still incomplete masonry oven, Trent bought a grain mill. Suffice it to indicate that it has not seen much use since then. However, on Saturday I dragged the thing out to grind some wheat berries to mill in order to make bread starter (aka “poolish” and “biga”).
I [...]

Bull Roasts

These are rib eye roasts from the bull that we slaughtered two weeks ago. I’d originally intended to dry age the rib longer, but decided to sell it in response to lots of customer traffic. The roasts are barded with pork fat to moderate the rate of heat infiltration and provide a bit [...]

The Cheese Maker

The other day I realized that I rarely post anything about what is the major part of the business of the farm where I make my salumi and other stuff. Hendricks Farms and Dairy is fundamentally a raw milk and cheese producing operation, whereas what I do counts as only a fraction of the [...]

The Bull Becomes Bresaola

It took almost three days to cut the bull (some will argue that I never stopped) that came back from the slaughterhouse last week. About 300 pounds of it was ground into hamburger, the bones have thus far yielded about 20 gallons of stock (there are more than half to be processed), I reserved a [...]

The bull in the kitchen

No, not the guy with the beard. It’s on the table.
If you have ever wondered what almost 700 pounds of beef look like, wonder no more. This is a photo of most of what remained (at this point there was still another section of rib on the delivery truck) of a Aryshire bull that Trent [...]

Prosciutto bandage change

From Prosciutto

Here is a look (below) at a prosciutto di Parma style ham that is still in the process of maturing. I decided to take it down and wrap it in a new skein of cheesecloth after months of walking by it and being disgusted by the mold that was growing on the original wrapper. [...]

Game Birds make Slow Food

As I reported in my previous post, Trent -the owner of the farm where I work- decided that it was time to harvest the guinea fowls.
Since the day in May that Trent shooed them from their coop, these guinea fowl have became so “free range” that at the harvest they were wild or “game [...]