Charcuterie

There was a very interesting Charcuterpalooza challenge on Facebook last year that I was only able to catch the tail end of, but what I did see thoroughly impressed me. After reading their blogs and seeing the entries I decided to try out my own challenge for 2012. I picked up a copy of Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn on Amazon thanks to Jake and Erron Depew for this specific purpose. It is only March 1st but we've already been able to try out many different things.

For January we tried out bacon. We cured it in kosher salt and honey for about a week and then brought the temp up to 152 degrees and then smoked it. We found that if we let the pork belly cure for longer than a week we end up with a slightly terriaki flavor to the bacon. Bacon was also our first attempt at smoking so we ended up with a very steep learning curve on how to make our barrel smoker work. Our friend Lisa brought over flavored honeys (one was basil and the other was tarragon) and we made a few pieces flavored with these honeys. In the future we would like to go ahead and flavor our bacon a bit more with additional spices just to see how it turns out.

February turned in a whole challenge all on its own. We were supposed to go to the Culinary Symposium but the van broke down so we ended up with a bunch of slaughtered ducks which we made into duck prosciutto and confit. We also had a weekend of sausage making where we made fresh and smoked sausages as well as salamis. We were also able to start some ham and ham hocks brining for later smoking.

At the start of March I can't help but look at the extra chickens in our yard and know that we'll be culling a few more. We'll have to try them brined or smoked or both. I'll also save the livers for pate and for some of the italian sauce recipes I keep reading about. I'm looking forward to a nummy March.

We'll follow with some recipes.

Sausage

We have finally gotten around to making some sausage from the remaining bits of Oreo. This was our second attempt at sausage making and was far more successful than our first. In the end we made around 60lbs of sausage including: Southern pork, kielbasa, linguica, garlic, two kinds of salami, chorizo, andouille, and some others I am forgetting. A friend was good enough to lend us her kitchen aide with a grinder and stuffer attachment and while I liked the way it worked Rosie and I would still like to get a manual stuffer to go along with our manual grinders. One thing we kind of knew but was re-enforced was that our kitchen is way too small for the amount of people and projects we tend to have here. On the sausage making night we had 10-12 people in the house with about half that number trying to work in the kitchen at one time, we made it work but I think this summer I will try to get started on our kitchen expansion. Over all the night was a success and I think every one had a good time despite the tight working quarters.

In the future we will need to see about prepping some of the meat prior to the stuffing day, we had to spend a lot of time boning the meat and getting it in to bags to semi-freeze (makes grinding work better) and because of that I was unable to do any smoking on the day we did the stuffing. Also some of the sausages seemed to be a little dry and in the future I may want to go with a higher fat content, we where using 1 lb of fat to every 5 lbs of meat. One thing that we figured out that really helped with loading the casing onto the stuffer tips was putting the casing on a pair of chopsticks while it was staged in t some cold water, the two chopsticks allowed us to quickly load the casing onto a tip without loosing the ends or tearing the casing. Kudos to Sean for coming up with that one. Like most of our meat processing parties it was a long day and we where still stuffing at 2am when we finally called it a night, maybe a sausage making weekend may be better next time rather than a sausage making day.