Salted Ham

This is what hams can look like after they have sat in salt (sodium chloride) for 3.5 weeks. During that time they lost close to 14% of their weights as serum moved from the flash into the embedding salt. As I write they are sitting in the refrigerator for a “burning off” period (1 week) during which the concentration of salt will equalize throughout the muscle.
By Friday they should be ready to wrap and hang for at least one year.
Because the foot has been cut off, I will also coat the end of the shank with lard to prevent infection by bacteria and fungus.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

The Umami of Tomatoes

As most of you know, umami or the savory taste, has only recently been accepted as a basic taste by the scientific community that concerns itself with matters of human neurology. Umami is generally considered to be caused by glutamic acid and it’s salts e.g., monosodium glutamate or MSG (And YOU thought MSG stood for Madison Square Garden. C’mon admit it!:-)

Now that tomatoes are starting to come into season in the Northern Hemisphere, I thought it worth mentioning that they contain quite a bit of glutamic acid, especially in the “jelly” that surrounds and suspends the seeds.

So don’t waste those tomato guts. I don’t want to stir up any trouble but years ago, I heard Julia Child advise throwing out the pulp because it was tasteless. I suspect that she made the remark under pressure and said the opposite of what she meant to say because I can find no such advice in any of her books that I own. However, I am slightly chagrined to admit that at the time I believed her and began to toss out the pulp whenever I made tomato concasse or dice.

I suppose it is never a good idea to suspend disbelief because someone with authority tells you that what you thought was true or false is otherwise.

Source of histogram Umami Information Center

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Coffee fetish

I’m sure coffee made from beans that have traveled through the intestines of a civet is wonderful. Although I am not sure why anyone would care so much about drinking it that they’d trundle around the bush looking for civet turds.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Bread Starter Test Update no. 2

After 47 hours of incubation the samples were all actively fermenting and beginning to show signs of exhaustion of starch supply. All of them had separated into a mat of gaseous foamy starch on top of a layer of relatively clear water and a layer of stringy, insoluble gluten on the bottom.

None of the samples containing rinsed and not-rinsed red cabbage appeared to be bubbling (evidence of the growth and respiration of yeast and bacteria) any more vigorously than any other. And none of the samples with cabbage were bubbling more vigorously than the control made with only flour and water.

All of the samples with cabbage had an “off” odor suggesting the presence of either bacteria or yeast that is either not desirable in bread starter or a desirable form of yeast that had begun to produce a noxious aroma (e.g. butyric acid). By comparison the control smelled like a typical batch of fermenting (proofing) bread dough.

All, except one of the samples with cabbage were slightly more acidic than the control. Cabbage starter samples ranged in pH from 4.5-4.75 with one sample testing at pH 4.90. By contrast the control tested at pH 4.8.

It is still too early in my investigation to draw any conclusions about the efficacy of making sourdough bread starter with cabbage. Nothing that I have seen so far suggests that the method does or does not work. However, the preliminary results of my little test suggest that adding cabbage to the starter may be introducing a microbe that can produce an “off aroma.”

Since so many people have reported that starter made with a cabbage leaf produces great bread, I suspect that at some point during the build, the colony of microbes that is responsible for the “off” smell dies off.

As I wrote above, I’m a long way away from drawing any conclusions. I still don’t know why or how this method works or, for that matter, if it works any better than more traditional ways of building bread starter.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

How to make pasta con filetti di pomodori

It’s almost the whole process. I didn’t show how to cook the spaghetti. The sauce is minimally cooked. Really it’s only the pulp that cooks (10-12 minutes) while the filetti (made from the skinless outer flesh) and the basil are merely warmed through.

Caveat: Don’t watch it if you don’t like tomatoes!

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Bread Starter Update

This morning (8.13.09) at 5:00 I checked the bread starter samples and took a bunch of photos. Unfortunately, I cannot post the pictures because the camera’s battery fizzled out before I could download them to my computer (When is someone going to build a high quality camera that can do direct uploads?). So until the battery is recharged words will have to suffice.

Here is the skinny

• After 35 hours of incubation, all of the samples are showing signs of fermentation.
• No one sample appears to be any gassier than any other. Even the control (flour and water only, no cabbage) is fermenting
• None of the samples stink, which I take as an indication that although there is probably leuconostoc bacteria in all of the samples with cabbage, the bacteria, which is naturally present on cabbage and is responsible for sauerkraut fermentation requires anaerobic conditions to grow well, is not thriving in the open sample glasses.

While it is too early in the game to draw any conclusions, I think that it is pretty obvious that the cabbage is not introducing large numbers of yeast cells into the starter. If the cabbage was adding yeast, the samples with cabbage should be fermenting more rapidly.

I think that if from hereon, we see any increase in the rate of fermentation in the samples with cabbage it is likely that it will be caused by the breakdown of the leaves into sugars to be consumed by the yeast and bacteria. Or it is the partial result of wild yeast introduced by the cabbage undergoing a growth spurt following a reduction in pH (many types of yeast require acidic conditions for optimum growth).

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Bread Starter Test

Way back in July (7/21 to be precise) Michael Ruhlman posted about a method of kick starting sourdough starter. The method, which he learned from Carri Thurman of Two Sisters Bakery in Homer, Alaska called for the addition of a red cabbage leaf to a mixture of flour and water.

Both Ruhlman and Thurman, as well as several of the former’s readers, reported remarkable results. Yet no one could explain why the cabbage had the reported effects.

Some speculated that the cabbage was loaded with wild yeast, while others (myself included) thought that bacteria might be responsible for the uptick in microbial activity and signs of fermentation (gas bubbles). Since no one could provide a plausible explanation for what might be occurring, I decided to test the idea with a series of tests.

Last night I conducted the first test. The purpose of this particular test was to answer the question “Will adding rinsed and un-rinsed organic red cabbage to a mixture of flour and water make any difference in the rate at which the mixtures ferment?”

Test Design

I made up 7 samples. Each sample contained 20 g of unbleached non-organic bread flour (I wanted as little as possible yeast in the flour) and 50 g of unchlorinated tap water.

• In three of the glasses I put 5 g each of red cabbage that had been rinsed (as per Carri’s method) under luke warm water.
• In three glasses I put 5 g each of red cabbage that had not been rinsed
• In one (Control) glass I put only flour and water

Each sample was mixed with a spoon which was washed with hot water and soap to avoid cross-contamination of the samples. The I left the samples uncovered on the counter in my (68 degree F) kitchen overnight before checking them 13 hours later.

By 7 Am this morning, none of the samples, not even the control have shown any signs of fermentation. Even now (almost 14 hours after mixing) there are no obvious signs of fermentation.

Ruhlman and Thurman suggest that additional flour (a “feeding”) and 48 hours of incubation is required to produce vigorous bubbling. I will let my sample go at least that long before drawing any conclusions. (I will not add more flour.) If after 48 hours, two or more of the samples with cabbage appear to be fermenting more rapidly than the control, I will assume that the cabbage is contributing something to the process and move to the next phase of the testing which will be designed to answer the question

“Will limiting the supply of oxygen have an effect on how the flour cabbage mixture ferments?”

This question is designed to begin to get a handle on what (if any) microbe on the cabbage is responsible for the enhanced fermentation reported by Ruhlman, Thurman and others.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Brine Dilution

A couple of weeks ago I told you how I started a batch of pickled onions. At the time I expected the onions to be ready in about 10 to 14 days. Well, I am happy to report that after about 16 days in the aging room they were almost done. On the day that these pictures were taken the onions had softened to the texture of a peeled Macintosh or Macoun apple and were almost sour enough to be considered a proper pickle ( I’m guessing pH 4.0; my pH meter is dead.).

They were, however, too salty so I diluted the brine from 5 to 3.5% salinity.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

The Charcutier’s Best Freind

Bloody curr more or less can say sausages.

Our thanks to Trig for suggesting the post.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Bresaola

Here are two stages in the life of air dried beef in the style of the bresaola of Lombardy. The piece in the foreground was taken out of the cure today, rinsed and tied, and hung in the aging room where it will dry and mature for 4-6 weeks. The two specimens in the background were hung at the beginning of July and are ready to be sold. All three are made from whole eye rounds from our grassfed cows (foreground) and bulls (background).

The best sauce in the world is hunger.