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.

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.

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 of lubricity. I would have wrapped them 360 degrees but I did not have enough fat to do the job.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

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 output of the farm. Trent Hendricks, the farm’s founder and owner, is in charge of all the day to day operation of the farm and milk and cheese production. He has help, of course, yet I cannot quite get my head around how he does it. His job is 24/7/365. He rarely leaves the farm and when he isn’t building, fixing, sowing or reaping something he’s on the phone with whoever working out whatever.

The man is a force of nature whose devotion to his craft would make little sense to those who believe that the ultimate measure of success is cash-in-hand. I admit, there are moments when I think he is out of his mind to work as hard as he does to earn a comfortable, yet hardly lavish, living. But those moments are fleeting because even though we are superficially very different kinds of people, there is one thing that we both have in common: a deep and abiding love of the process of producing food and the concomitant feeling of aptitude that follows the realization that we know how to feed ourselves and our families.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

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 loin for dry aging, the tenderloins are steak and the rest is on the path to becoming cured and air-dried beef in the form of bresaola.

In the following slideshow you will see some of the meat being cleaned and cured. It will stay in the cure for about two weeks after which the herbs and spices will be scrubbed off prior to being tied and hung in the aging room. I suspect that it will take at least 4 weeks of aging before it is dry enough to be sold.

I think that this meat is going to yield the best air-dried beef imaginable. Just take a look at the color and you will know I’m right. That deep-red color equals deep beefy flavor that is not possible in an animal whose liberty and movement is restricted as is normally the case in cattle raised for beef. This is meat from a bull that has lived for more than two years in a large pasture and has spent its days chasing cows and well, you know, getting lots of exercise.

The color and texture is more typical of venison and the flavor is intensely beefy.Because there is almost no marbling to lubricate the meat, the only way to eat this stuff is raw or very rare. Cooking even the tenderloins above rare turns the meat hard and dry.

You know, seeing this meat for the first time last week “brought me back” to my first restaurant job. My chef, Rene Chardin, was a great cook who, like all great cooks, believed in doing almost everything from scratch. He used to smoke salmon in a converted early 20th century cabinet style electric clothes dryer that had been left behind by the original owner of the mansion (a daughter of Alexander Graham Bell) in which he built his restaurant. He raised pheasant and trout, was a great charcutier and a true believer in only using ingredients that were densely packed with flavor. For steak tartar he only used top round from a bull that had not been confined and finished on grain. In other words, a bull just like the one I butchered last week.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

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 had slaughtered as he begins the process of interbreeding his herd with a line of animals that do a better job of converting grass into milk. Shortly after the butcher dropped this off at the farm this past Saturday, another truck pulled in with the Devon bulls that will replace this once noble beast as the herd’s pater familias.

Taking this much meat apart is a pretty big task. The first thing we did was break the legs and loins into primal cuts and put them in the cooler to dry age. Then I took apart the ribs and forequarters and boxed the meat for grinding. The tenderloins will be “wet aged” and sold as steaks. I’m planning to grind 90-100 pounds and turn most of the loins and some of the rounds into Bresaola (cured and air dried beef) when I return to work tomorrow (Thursday).

Now that I look at this picture again, I realize that it does not do a very good job of conveying how big this thing was. The rib cage was big enough to turn into an office chair. The hind legs and loins were easily 140 pounds each. Suffice it to say that I have never butchered anything this big. By comparison, cutting up a hog is child’s play.

I’m not complaining, mind you -I love this stuff. It’s what I live for. (Wow, that sounds wrong.)

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

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. The mold was not anything that was going to contaminate the meat. But the ham was looking too much like something that one used to see in the subways of Manhattan during the Koch and Dinkins administrations or something in a Matthew Brady photo of civil war wounded.

Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating but it was seriously ugly and needed to be cleaned up. I estimate that it will be ready in 3-4 months.

Of course, now that the cold season is here and flies (and their miserable little flesh eating maggots) are no longer a threat, I could have done away with the cheesecloth altogether. But I chose to replace it because now that the air is very dry I’m hoping that the cloth will slow down dehydration of the meat enough to avoid over-drying of the “case” or first inch or so or surface muscle.

Also have a look at Mike Pardus’ new horse bone needle (above, left and at the end of the slideshow). The needle is used to determine the grade of prosciutto via olfaction. When the bone, which is porous enough to absorb the aroma of the meat yet strong enough to withstand the pressure of insertion, is withdrawn from the prosciutto it is sniffed to determine if the meat is good enough to be a prosciutto di Parma or something less. I suppose that it could also be used to determine the degree of ripening in prosciutto and other types of salumi/charcuterie.

Not that I’ll ever get a chance to use the thing since Pardus lives in NY and I live in Pennsylvania. But that’s okay, just knowing that he would probably let me use it is good enough for me! 🙂

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

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 birds.” Over the course of a day the flock would forage about 25 acres as it searched for food. Just like wild birds it flew into trees to roost and ran from and fought with predators. So, they became very muscular, very lean and, once dead and in the hands of a cook, very prone to turning into miserable, dried out, tough and gamey fare if not handled with great care.

There are many ways to render guinea fowl, and game birds in general, tender and moist.

One method is to hang them after they are killed (By wringing their necks and not cutting them to assure that their flesh ensanguinated and juicy.) for about a week as naturally occurring (endogenous) protein-digesting enzymes breakdown and tenderize the muscle tissue.

Another way of making sure that the final dish is tender and moist involves boning them, pounding out the breast to tenderize it, them stuffing the breast with a forcemeat made from the legs (which grinding renders very soft) then roasting the “ballotine.”

Barding the flesh by threading lardons (thin strips) of fat through the meat does a pretty good job of keeping the flesh moist without subjecting it to the black box treatment that produces the ballotine. But the high temperatures required to heat the fat to the point at which it begins to liquefy and lubricate the meat almost guarantees that the meat will be tough.

Then there is the “high tech” method of sous vide during which the bird is put into a plastic bag with aromatic ingredients. The bag is then vacuumed to restrict to flow of water and flavor from the meat while it is cooked in water at a very low temperature to limit the amount of coagulation of the muscle fibers (So that the flesh does not become hard.) and to inhibit the breakdown of the red-light -reflecting globular proteins (So the the meat looks rare even though it is fully cooked). Additionally, the hermetic, high humidity, environment of the bag assures that the collagenous connective tissue (which requires the presence of water to break down into gelatin.) becomes tender.

When I learned that the guinea fowl had been harvested, it did not occur to me to try to cook one until they had all been decapitated and plucked. So there was no way that I could hang them. The ballotine route was feeling like a “cop out” in that deals with the problem by turning the bird into a sausage, and I was not in the mood to take the easy way out. (If I wanted to do the easiest thing, I’d just stew them.) And sous vide was out of the question because I don’t have the equipment to pull it off (I cook in a barn for god’s sake.).

So I decided to do the job “old school” after reaching back into my memory where the classic repertoire of techniques are stored, and pulling out the ancient method of cooking game birds known as “en salmis.”

The basic method for preparing a wild bird “en salmis” (I don’t remember the etymology or literal meaning of the term.) involves two fundamental steps. The bird is

1. roasted or sauteed until it is browned but still very rare
2. cut up and finished in a sauce at low temperature in a pan with a tight fitting lid

Browning gives the skin color and enhances the flavor, while cooking it on a quiet fire in a moist environment assures that the muscle fibers will not dry out and over-tighten. The sauce for the dish, naturally, is made from whatever the bird is cooked with. ( The technique is fundamentally a conventional braise.)

Part 1
The harvest and the rub

In addition to drawing on this centuries-old method to cook the fowl, I added a few other techniques that are, in turn, based on practical experience and my understanding of food science.

The day before I cooked the birds (today actually) I dry rubbed them with salt, sugar, pepper and juniper berries. Salt, once it penetrates the meat is understood to break and weaken the muscle fibers while it enhances their attraction to water. The end result is that pre-salted meat emerges from the oven more tender and with more water. Sugar in meat holds onto water too, and may interfere with the ability of the muscle proteins to link up with each other as they heat (coagulate) and helps to tenderize the meat also. The juniper and pepper were added as simple flavorants.

After better than 16 hours in the dry rub, I browned one of the fowl in rendered veal fat, cut it up and cooked in a tightly sealed pan with aluminum foil in an oven set to 170 degrees Fahrenheit for a long time (1 hour & 45 minutes) . As you will see in the second slide show, I also added water above the meat to slow down the rate of heating even more. I suppose I could have simply placed the pan in water bath (bain marie) and gotten the same effect, but that did not occur to me until hours after the cooking was done.

The result was a bird with a fork-tender breast and legs that were as tender as medium-rare filet of beef.

You might notice in the second set of photographs that in the end, the meat appears to be very moist and pinkish (the breast) or reddish (legs). The results are very much like what you would expect from cooking sous vide: minimal coagulation, lots of denaturation of the connective tissue, yet less than expected destruction of red-light reflecting globular serum proteins. That’s my hypothesis anyway.

Finally, you will have to trust me when I say that it tasted great.

As always, please double click the slide showshows for a larger image.

Part 2

Making the salmis

The best sauce in the world is hunger.