Salame Toscano - First Attempt - From pile 'o pork to cured goodness

Welcome back meat fans..

Well, here it is.. PCP's first attempt at salume.. for my first time, I'm making Salame Toscano ( hopefully not Salume Salmonella ), with the recipe based on one I got from the god of cured meat Scott at The Sausage Debauchery.  I've modified it a bit, but here's the recipe:

4,155Grams Pork and Fat ( about 70-30 meat to fat ratio)

72 grams Salt

9 grams cure #2

29 grams bacto ferm F-RM-52

1/3 cup water

44 grams dextrose

15 grams black pepper ( ground)

7 grams crushed fresh garlic

6 oz dry red wine ( dago red )

10 grams cayenne powder

15 grams red pepper flakes

After mixing together ( using frozen bowls ), i got my grinder cleaned up, put the meat in the freezer to solidify a bit, as well as the stuffer, and started putting my mis en place together.

Here are the first links I've ever stuffed.. obviously rookie style, as they're all varying lengths.

All of the stuffing and tying took me about 2 hours, which seems like a lot, but I was a bit overzealous in sqeezing the meat and split many links.. good thing I bought 30 feet of hog middles.

After cleaning up, the fresh salume went into my ghetto fermenter.  A simple tupperware container in my oven, leaving the light on, and covered with a towel ( this kept the temp at about 89-91 degrees the entire time.

Here's a shot of my oven (aka "ghetto fermenter" ) My wife is a trooper to keep it like that for 2 days wasn't she?

Here is the fresh salume hanging next to my proscuitti and lonzino.. 3 or 4 weeks and i'll be very happy ( or dead ).

Here they are after hanging for a week.. luckily we escaped to mexico

 or I would have been out there molesting and squeezing them everyday.

Oh.. here's the finished Tails and Trotters Lardo I started this summer.  It's absolutely delicious and I'll be giving this one to my new friend Rick from the food cart Lardo which is in Portland at SE43rd and Belmont.  Check it out!!

Stay tuned for tasting notes in about 2-3 weeks.  I'm hoping to have my friends Morgan Brownlow of Tails and Trotters, Vincent Fritzche of Vincent Wine Company, and my good friend and neighbors JDUB ( no website.. he's an overpaid and underworked teacher ) and John Pence Caprial and John's Kitchen come over to try the Salume, Lonzino, and do a blind tasting of an Oregon Pinot Noir I've committed to writing tasting notes for.

Have a great day.. headed to Mt. Hood for a long weekend snowboarding and relaxing with good friends and no kids :)

Tasting Notes - Tails and Trotter Coppa and Spicy Basturma

Greetings meat fans.

I'm sure you've all been hanging on the edge of your seat, wondering when I was going to finally slice into my Tails and Trotters hazlenut finished coppa, and my spicy basturma.

Well, stop wondering.. I just cut them open last night, and let me tell you.... the 10 month wait was more than worth it.

First up.. the Basturma.. this was 2-2lb Eye of Round Roasts I procured from Fubonn for about $4lb.  Check out the blog post from last April for details on how I prepared them.

The flavor is out of this world.. Mild, but beefy, with a very slight yet noticeable spicy background.  All in all, a very fine piece of dried meat.

The only thing I would do differently next time is to use one piece of meat per casing.. there was about 1/8 to 1/4 lb on each end that I had to cut off because they dried out too much. ( imagine the two ends touching each other in the case ). 

check out the photos below for some awesome meat goodness.

Next up is my Coppa.   I want to send a special thanks to my homeboy Morgan Brownlow of Tails and Trotters for procuring me what must have been the finest and largest Coppa in the history of meat. 7.5lbs of pure hazlenut finished Neck!!

Again, check out the blog entry from last April for details on how I prepped it.

I cut into it last night, and WOW... absolute deliciousness.  Look at the beautiful fat and color of the meat.

This thing was heavily spiced, but only displays a slight hint of the heat.

Being really honest, some of the things I've made don't always taste as good to me as "store bought" charcuterie.  However, this is one time that I absolutely hit it out of the park. ( and the proscuitto )

I'll be calling Morgan for another coppa or two next week.

This was a huge hit at my friend JDub's Holiday party last night.

Stay tuned for more blogs next week.  I'll be bottling the Nocino, and then before heading to Mexico with my lady friend and little nugget, will be taking my two T&T legs out of the cure and hanging them for their 12 and 24 month slumbers.

Happy New Year to you all, especially to our Marines and lesser services across the globe.

Proscuitto - Part 1, Turning a T&T hunk of pig into something salty and beautiful

Sorry for taking so long between posts, but things at work have been busier than usual.  Luckily for us, that doesn't mean I haven't been making good stuff, it just means I haven't made the time to blog about it.

Since the end of September y'all have missed about 6 whole salmon that I cured and smoked, at least 20 lb's of bacon, as well as a lonzino and basturma.   I'll do a better job of keeping up with the posts in the new year ( early resolution ).

Now on to my current project.  Proscuitto:

Proscuitto is one of the simplest charcuterie to make, yet one of the most intimidating to the home charcutier. I don't feel the trepidation that some of my peers do with this, but I still have yet to make a salume.. which needs to be rectified over the holiday season.

Whole muscle charcuterie to me is simple, and provided you follow the basic steps, relatively foolproof.  If they could do it one thousand years ago.. I can most likely do it today.

On to it.

On November 27th, I started with 2 legs, approximately 30lb's each from my good friend and pork dealer, Morgan Brownlow of Tails and Trotters.   For something as pure as proscuitto, nothing but the best pork will do and for me that's the hazlenut finished goodness that Morgan brings to the table.

This is a simple curing recipe:

( for each 30lb leg )

4lb's kosher salt

1tbsp Sodium Nitrite

That's it.

Rub the salt in as good as you can, without going crazy.  don't forget the slits cut into the pig foot (trotter ).. make sure you get the salt in every nook and cranny.

let it sit for a week, then come back and salt it again.

let it sit for 4-6 weeks more in your fridge ( anywhere the temp is lower than 45 degrees is fine ), and then it's ready for step 2 - The hanging. ( this is where it gets really complicated :-)

Some people press their proscuitto when curing, but I'm not bothering with it.  Also, this time I have the hams carved spanish style, which means the aitch bone is in and it's a flatter cut on the bottom, as well as having the full trotter on.  This not only looks "neater" when serving.. it allows for full use of the leg.

Stay tuned for part two, sometime in Mid to Late January.

Update on September Projects

So once again, it's been an incredibly busy month with work and family, but of course, it's prime harvesting time even with the bad garden year.

Here are a few of the projects I've been working on this month.

1. Bacon ( naturally ).  13lbs of Tails and Trotters  pork belly is now on it's way to becoming PCP bacon.

2.  Pickling - 100lbs of cucumbers ( most from Kruger's on Sauvie Island ) - were turned into awesome hot dill pickles.

3. Beets - 6 lbs of nice baby golden beets were turned into Hot Indian Beets ( the Indian part is the cardamom, star anise, cinnamon, and clove ).

 

4.  Smoked Salmon - This is prime salmon smoking season, but I'm pretty far behind.  I've only done about 5-10 lb's total, and I usually need about 40lb's to get me through to the following summer ( what with gifts and parties and nights in front of the fire ).

5.  BlueBerry Jam - 10lb's of awesome Oregon BB's are on their way to becoming PCP jam!!

6.  Yellow Tomato Jam - I've gotten about 2-3lbs of beautiful yellow pear tomotoes in the past week and I decided to makea  Yellow Tomato and Onion Jam.. I won't get a lot, but it will be great on burgers.

7. Canning Tomatoes - I have about 5lb's of San Marzano's ready to go, and another 15-20lb's sitting on the vine soaking up this late sunlight... sometime in the next week I'll can them with basil, garlic, and hot peppers from our garden.

8. Fennel - I've been waiting for the seeds to finish developing so I can make fennelcello... my fennel liqueur.. and when I've harvested the seeds, then I'll take the tenderest part of the bulbs and make fennel onion bacon jam.. stay tuned for this one, it's going to be good!

9.  Sometime around the end of October I'll be getting 4 whole pork legs from my friend Morgan at Tails and Trotters, which I'll be turning into PCP Proscuitto.... the last one we made with John Pence (Caprial and Johns Kitchen ) turned out freaking awesome ( see pic )

Oh, I also splurged and used a week of PTO to backpack around Mt Rainier with two old friends ( ~100 miles, 54,000 feet total elevation gain and loss ).   Absolutely beautiful!!

Our Chocolate Lab pup is sort of maintaining her size.. she's only grown about 5lbs in the past month.. she's now 5 months old, and just about 45lb's.

 All of this work has made me thirsty.  Time for a cold one.  If you're in the neighborhood, stop by for a cold beer and we'll talk pickles and charcuterie.

Summer Projects ( Now that it's just about over )

This has been one of the best summers of my life, even as it's been one of the worst gardening seasons due to the vagaries of global warming and climate change we've experienced this year.

I've been busy having lots of fun outside the world of charcuterie and pickling,.. but here are a few projects I've put together in the past month since my last posting.

1.  Bacon-- 20 more lbs of schweet Tails and Trotters pork belly has now become beautiful PCP bacon.

2.  Pickling - Approximately 80lbs of cukes ( mostly from Farmers Mkt ) squash, and beans ( from my garden ) have been turned into xtra hot dilly pickles.

 

As they say in making wine "it takes a lot of beer to make pickles"

3.  Smoked Salmon - About 20lbs of beautiful wild Alaskan salmon has made the journey from dead fish to awesome PCP smoked salmon.

Here are some pics of the fresh salmon being rubbed in the cure (1cup kosher salt, 1 cup brown sugar, 1/4 tsp pink salt, spices to taste.. I used black pepper and crushed red pepper flakes )

Here's a good look at the salmon fillets after being in the cure for 3 full days... note the beautiful color has deepened in the cure )

Here are the fillets after about 6 hours of smoking... I pulled a whole fillet out for a bbq at the Pences.. then left the other half ( cut into 3 pieces ) to smoke for another 3 hours.

As usual, there were no leftovers to be found :-)

4.  And of course, I had a lot of fun with friends and family.

Bottling wine with my new friends Vincent and Jan Marc, and old(er) friend Anne, at the Portland Wine Project on one of the rare 90+ days this summer.  I also made some new friends, including a longtime reader of this blog who happens to live a block away and can truly drink even the Pences under the table ( hi Nate ).. and Trent Thomas, owner of  Rewine , which reconditions wine barrels for re-use by winemakers.

And I even found time to backpack the Timberline Trail around Mt Hood with some Old friends.

Happy Hour at 6,000 feet never tasted better!!

And of course, our mutant dog continues to grow at a mind numbing pace.

(she just turned 4 months Sept 1st.  Gone from 5lbs June 12th, to about 45 now )

In a nutshell, that's what's been going on in our world this past month.

I'm heading out later this week for another around the mountain backpacking trip, this time the 100 mile Wonderland Trail around Mt Rainier.  Stay tuned, it should be a doozy.

When I get back, we'll be doing some mass pickling and canning, as most of my tomatoes will be ready for canning, as will beans, squash, and more cukes.

The month of October will bring me 4 whole pork legs from Tails and Trotters, and we'll go into detail on how to cure them.  JDub and I will also be getting in deep with fresh sausage and various Salume, as well as pate and other terrines.