Here I sat all content with
the best bacon we’ve found in decades (Stoney Point Farm Market’s smoked bacon)
and along comes the evil woman (that homesteader, Diane) telling me about salt
cured meats. Diane has acquired a few pigs and taken up turning them into
roasts, chops and sausages the like of which can’t be found, at a price we can
afford, around here without raising the critters ourselves. Her German-Italian
partner in homesteading has challenged her to attempt an American version of Tyrolean Speck, a cured meat from
his native land. Both of them are urging me to take up the art of curing meats.
I believe the French call the craft charcuterie? I’ve come to call it a gift
from the gods! Done properly, the flavors and mouth feel are divine, and done
wrong, a spoiled meat will take you to Hell, possibly in fact as well as in perception.
I’ve yet to stray far into
this world of savory meats. Being a well-conditioned little sheep, I’m scared
to step out of the FDA and USDA guidelines for food safety. Not that having
poisoned myself a time or two hasn’t had a role in my being cautious. (Do NOT
eat mayonnaise that has turned brown! DW can’t believe I did that more than
once.) A couple of the safer traditional sausages Diane recommended, to get me
addicted, were my first mistakes. Oh my, the breakfast sausage recipe she sent
me was so good DW, Raiza and younger Jack asked me to make it again.
Having stepped into the charcuterie
highway, I was sideswiped by a truck, a metaphorical pig truck. Diane suggested
a nice, safe bacon recipe for my first attempt as salt curing pig fat. I hemmed
and hawed, procrastinated and whined until the smoked bacon we adore went from
$5 a pound (on sale) to $7. I’d been buying leaf fat and rendering lard from
that at $1 a pound. What is bacon but fat and a bit of meat? Pork bellies
shouldn’t be too expensive. Turns out pork bellies fetch $4 a pound. Hmmm $4 or
$7?
DW said, “Why don’t you try
curing bacon.”
She wasn’t pleased when I
ordered a slab of pig belly for nearly $40, but she didn’t bang her head ag’in
a wall either.
I had the butcher cut the
belly into three, more or less, equal sized pieces and froze two of them while
I sort of followed a recipe Diane found at saveur.com (I’ll be rooting through
their recipe collection for more than bacon recipes!) I didn’t grind the spices
and herbs as required, just crushed them. Odd, how much a difference that makes
in the final product.
Even with the belly meat safely
in the fridge, I hesitated to begin the cure. The recipe called for kosher
salt, not the pink salt (sodium nitrite and/or sodium nitrate) the FDA and USDA
recommends for curing meats. Diane reminded me that humans have been curing meat
for thousands of years without the government approved pink salt. I sighed and
mixed the cure after several people with doctorates in medicine assured me a
week in a dry cure wasn’t going to bring about a case of botulism unless the
meat was tainted to begin with. (Gods! Dad and Mom’s elders are roiling in
their graves over the ignorant, cowardly thing that descended from them. I half
expected Dad to leave his grave in Florida and
come here to have another talk with me. The last time he visited started me on
the long road to sobriety, which I’ve yet to reach the end of.)
The first chunk of cured
bacon was interesting, but not the delight I’d half expected. I didn’t care for
it sliced and fried at all. DW wasn’t wild about it either and seemed a bit
perturbed by the thought of two more chunks of pig in the freezer being wasted
if I continued with the recipe I had. I told her I had everything under
control. To show her faith in me she only banged her head ag’in the wall a
couple of times.
That first attempt at home
cured bacon was cut into small pieces and dumped into a pot of pinto beans.
Voila! Best beans and pork I ever made and I’ve made some fine pots of them
over the years! Middle Brother used to slam through the door and declare, “I
smelled the beans cooking and drove from Florida for
a bowl of them! Got any onions?” (I doubt he actually knew I was cooking beans
and pork, but he did turn up without warning every time I set a pot to
simmering back in the alcohol haze days. Except that one time him and Dad were
lost in Texas.)
The next two chunks of pig
belly were cured at the same time, using the ground herbs and spices called for.
One with sugar, one without. Not that I meant to leave out the sugar, I simply
forgot to add it. Though I’m not one for sweet meats, I now see the reason for
using sugar in curing. Duh. Both bacons turned out beyond my greatest
expectations! Saveur indeed!
Everyone who sampled the cured slabs asked how I’d made them and all were surprised I hadn’t smoked the bacon.
When I explained how easy this home cure was and how anyone could do it I got
that look I’ve come to expect, followed by the words that depress me. “I don’t
have the time. But I’ll buy…” the bacon, mead, bread, wine, or whatever it is
I’m playing at.
While hanging around butcher
shops waiting for my “unusual” order to be filled I get to talking to the
elders, mostly men who use to cure various meats on their farms. While they all
encourage me to learn the art of curing, they have given it up for “good
enough” as they refer to the meats the butcher shops offer these days.
Having tasted the
possibilities opening before me, as I gingerly step into the world of
handcrafted foods, I’m having trouble understanding this attitude of “good
enough”. Fortunately, there are evil women around here, also elders, who seem
delighted some young gray beard is taking up the art of good food. They wink at
me. “It isn’t that difficult is it?”
Well no, and yes, it is.
Learning to make good bread and sippable wine left me wanting something to eat
with them of as good, or better a quality as they were. That would not be what
I find in the supermarkets, which means I have to grow it or create it myself.
Having moved from curing bacon to corning beef I now need a dead hog and a cow
to work with!
Diane laughs as she sends me
pictures of the pigs she recently butchered and is curing or making sausages
from. “Jack, you can also brine fish, duck and turkey as well as cabbages, cucumbers,
turnips- Well just about everything you eat. You’ve just got to try kimchee!
Hurry little one. You’re still so far behind.”
“And no. Store bought foods
are not ‘good enough’.”
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