Cereal Killer on The Loose

This sounds like real trouble

“The Ug99 fungus, called stem rust, could wipe out more than 80% of the world’s wheat as it spreads from Africa, scientists fear. The race is on to breed resistant plants before it reaches the U.S.”

A ‘time bomb’ for world wheat crop – Los Angeles Times

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Corny Movie

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

This is a hoot

The Dark Side is closer than you think. (Thanks to Trig for bringing this to our attention.)

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

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, I can deal with it -after you take a look at two of the most recent graduates of the aging room.

The first is a beef salami that I dreamed up after, not wanting to turn all of a cow into bresaola,biltong, roasts, steaks and hamburger, I decided that some of it should be salami that incorporated more of the zeitgeist of the farm then what would naturally be included attending the fact that the cow had lived there for most of its’ life.

Since one of the principal products of the farm is cheese, and since the beef from the cow was very lean, I seized upon the idea (In all fairness, Trent Hendricks first proposed this idea of using cheese in salami months ago.) to add cheese to the forcemeat. Other seasonings are green peppercorns, allspice, garlic, red wine and black pepper. There’s whey to juke the fermentation (it’s loaded with lactobacilli) and Bactoferm (Lactobacillus curvatus and Staphylococcus carnosus) as well.

I won’t lie to you. I did not choose a choose a cheese based on anything other than convenience. The cheese I chose was trim that had been cut from a wheel that had been broken out into pound sized peices for retail sale. In other words, it was scrap. So it was serendipity that is to blame for the fact that the salami now has the name of “Colby Beef Salami.” It was totally not my fault.

The other item of charcuterie that was harvested today (and along with the salami appears in the slideshow below) is bacon made from the last of our Berkshire hogs. Cured with maple syrup, salt, cinnamon and black pepper, it appears as I shot it today prior to packaging. Enough said.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Be nice to cows & they will pay you back in milk

This is cool

“Higher heifer milk yields (≥ 200 liters) were found in herds where the stock manager thought it important to know every individual animal, although this was only a trend (p = 0.14). On farms where cows were called by name, milk yield was 258 liters higher than on farms where this was not the case (p < 0.001).”

IngentaConnect Exploring Stock Managers’ Perceptions of the HumanAnimal Relation

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

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 to pound exchange rate each time we dined in restaurants, we decided to take dinner in our rooms and fuel it, in part, with stuff we would pick up from shops around our hotel in Piccadilly. It was at Fortnum and Mason, just a few thousand feet from the hotel, that I discovered a fabulous charcuterie counter, and to my surprise (because I’d never heard of the stuff before and I’m supposed to know everything), a big case of biltong.

I’ll let wikipedia tell you the origin and history of this Dutch to Boer form of cured and air dried beef and cut to the quick and how it differs from the more familiar forms of dried meat from Europe and tell you how we make it.

With the exception of jerky, most of the forms of air dried meat that are available in North American markets are cured and dried over a relatively long period of time (e.g. country hams and prosciutto which cure for weeks and hang for months) while the curing and drying time for biltong is very short. I have read biltong recipes where the cure time anywhere from a few hours to a day depending on how thick the recipe specifies the meat be cut. Drying times range from one to four days, again depending on how thick the meat is cut and the ambient temperature, humidity and rate of air exchange in the drying space.

The preparation of biltong also involves a step that I have never seen in other preparations of air dried meat. Prior to dry rubbing the meat with the curing ingredients and after the meat emerges from the curing step, meat for biltong is rinsed in vinegar. This treatment with vinegar a appears to have the effect of causing the muscle fibers to tighten (I assume by lowering their pH and reducing their ability to hold water) and become shiny when the meat emerges from the air drying step. Some recipes specify the addition of baking soda to the curing step to “soften” the meat and make it easier to chew.

This last procedure is familiar to me and I think I understand the science. Baking soda, sodium bicarbonate is alkaline ( i.e. it has a pH greater than 7). When you raise the pH of the muscle proteins the effect is the opposite of lowering it: affinity for water is increased. So the addition of baking soda should in effect “soften” the meat by reducing water loss during drying -and it does, but not directly.

Because the baking soda is added to the recipe during the dry-rub step and after it has been rinsed in vinegar. The baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) reacts with the vinegar (acetic acid and water) to form carbon dioxide (you can see the bubbles on the surface of the meat) AND sodium acetate, a weak base that has a pH of 8.9
So it is not the baking soda that is softening the meat it’s one of the products (sodium acetate) of the reaction between the baking soda and the vinegar that’s doing the work. (A HA! It must be similarly alkaline chemicals that are responsible for the enhanced browning seen in some baked goods that are leavened with baking soda, as high pH enhances browning reactions. Cool).

Okay so how are we making biltong at Hendricks Farms and Dairy? First of all, we are writing our own recipes, but the process (which is incompletely illustrated in the slideshow) proceeds like this

1. Very, very lean, grass fed beef is cut into 10-12 inch lon 2.5 inch squared off strips(see photo above)
2. The meat is either soaked in vinegar for an hour or so or put into a flavored brine that contains vinegar and baking soda for a 3 to four hours
3. The meat is dry rubbed or brined with salt, pepper and various flavoring agents and cured 12 or more hours
4. The meat is rinsed in vinegar and hung in the drying room equipped with a fan that runs until the surface of the meat is dry and shiny (about 24 hours)
5. Meat hangs for about 4 days total

The following slide shows the final stages (Steps 4&5) of the production of a batch of biltong that was cured with soy, scallions, ginger, chili pepper, and liquid smoke. The photos were taken on Thursday by your’s truly; by Saturday the biltong was not quite dry enough to sell, but tasting amazing. Serious umami with a bouquet of dried mushrooms…

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

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 have little patience for hearth breads that are conventionally leavened with pure cultures of yeast over short periods of time (less than 24 hours). Sure, a bread that is made from good flour and is allowed to rise a couple of times over the course of a day before being baked can be very good. But to produce bread that has real character and deep flavor you need to ferment at least a portion of it for a very long time.

I like to start hearth breads three to four days before baking by fermenting a portion of the flour that will be used in the final loaf (or loaves). The basal reason for this is to produce a vigorous and diverse microflora that will breakdown the starches and proteins in the grain and leave behind a bunch of flavorful by-products. If I’m lucky, the starter ends up with enough live yeast to leaven the bread but I don’t count on it, neither do I care if it doesn’t work out that way. If the starter looks like it does not enough yeast to raise the bread, I just toss in come SAF yeast and move on.

Here is a slide show of a starter that I began yesterday morning (Sunday 1.18). The only yeast etc that is in there was what was present on the ingredients when they were combined and whatever rained in from the atmosphere of my kitchen.

Some photos of Trent’s mill in action on Saturday (1.17)

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Video Verite’

I’ve been working on a personal version of the message in this video for about a week and will post it when I’ve gotten rid of the many rhetorical bugs. In the meantime, consider it a primer on something from me that in all probability will be much ruder and with more finely convoluted reasoning.

I don’t know what prompted Gary Allen to send this to me. I suppose he knows me better than I imagined he did.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Video Verite’

I’ve been working on a personal version of the message in this video for about a week and will post it when I’ve gotten rid of the many rhetorical bugs. In the meantime, consider it a primer on something from me that in all probability will be much ruder and with more finely convoluted reasoning.

I don’t know what prompted Gary Allen to send this to me. I suppose he knows me better than I imagined he did.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.