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.

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.

The Pork Fat’s Tale

Okay, so the title is a reference to Canterbury Tales and probably indicative of nothing more or less than I do not know what to call this post about one of the many acts of charcuterie that I committed this early summer week. Time to move on…

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

A Quickie

I am just about to blow out the door to catch a train to NYC to meet up with Mike Pardus, Kris Ray and a bunch of other culinarians for a walking tour through the markets and eateries of China Town, so I am not going to spend too many words on this post.

Here is a slide show of some of the work I did at the farm last week.

And some follow up shots of the same product the way they looked this week.

LATER!

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

The state of the oven

My aging mind is such a blur of past events that I really don’t remember when Jerl Pino took over the completion of the Tuscan style wood fired oven that Trent Hendricks and I began in September of 2008. The date he took charge doesn’t matter anyway. What’s important is that he took over the job, because unlike me, he’s actually going to get it done.

I took these photos last Saturday (6.20.09). I’m guessing that working at his usual rate of 1 or 2 days per week, Jerl is two weeks away from completing it to the point where we can begin to fire it up to baking temperature. He needs to build the chimney, build the outer wall (with block) then fill in the gap with insulation (mortar and vermiculite). When that’s done, we will build a series of increasingly hot fires to temper the masonry before firing it up for baking.

I have no doubt that baking in this thing is going to be like learning to bake all over again.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Nicholas Kristoff takes up the cause

As the newly released documentary Food Inc. makes its way through the movie theaters of the nation, it seems to be churning up a wake of outrage over the way that food is treated within the black box of the gastro-industrial complex.

Op-Ed Columnist – Lettuce From the Garden, With Worms – NYTimes.com

Here is a trailer for Food Inc.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

A gift of Globe

Jearl Pino, one of the guys who likes to come around to the farm and help with various projects, bought a Globe slicer from some guy who advertized it on Craigslist. I suppose the machine was too big to keep at Jearl’s house because he asked if he could leave it at the farm. We are free to use it at will and I’ve already begun breaking it in. And check this out: he paid $75.00 for the thing! It’s probably thirty years old but it’s in perfect condition.

Today I used it to slice up a prosciutto made from Berkshire pork. I hung this about 12 months ago. It’s cured only with salt (sodium chloride) nothing else, and tastes just like the real thing -I suppose because it is the real thing.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

This Morning

When I pulled in to the farm this morning, the air was thick with fog. The fog made everything look fuzzy. It was like I was looking through the lens of a camera that was covered by a shear nylon stocking.

Even though I was sure that I was not observing the world through a nylon stocking. I got so worked up that I became really hungry. So, I dragged out a prosciutto from the aging room and pulled off its cheesecloth clothing. Then I tidied it up by scrubbing off the mold from its skin and cutting off areas where the fat had turned rancid and made myself a proper breakfast.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

More Bull

Farmer Trent Hendricks, my butchery and charcuterie enabler, has been steadily increasing his stock of cattle over the winter months and now has a pretty healthy herd of grass fed animals whose ultimate fate is to become food. Almost all of the animals have been bought or traded into the farm as heifers, while a smaller number were born on the farm. He’s raising black and red Angus, Devons and Limousin bulls (see slideshow below).

None of the males are castrated (i.e. there are no steers) so they are more or less free to have their way with the females. It is a hoot to watch the three huge angus bulls in the field just below the kitchen window vying for dominance and not at all unlike watching a trio of high school football players playing smackdown in front of a bunch of cheerleaders.

To date we have butchered about a half dozen bulls and cows. This week we are taking apart a Limosin (pronounced more or less as Lim-ou-zan) bull that came back from the slaughterhouse weighing 1070 pounds. Once the bones are removed and turned into beef stock, we will be left with about 650 pounds of meat (maybe more) for roasts, steaks, sausage, hamburger, biltong and dog chews.

Yes, that’s right, dog chews.

A few weeks ago I realized that the tendons and other tough trim that would not got through the grinder and were not especially useful for stock, could be fashioned into treats for dogs. So I am now proud to say that I can add pet food manufacture to my curriculum vitae.

Life gets curiouser and curiouser.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

FYI

The best sauce in the world is hunger.