charcuterie

http://www.sausagemania.com/tutorial.html

hey JAQ did you make guanciale? also would you plz describe the process of 'having a whole hog butchered' for those of us who aren't doing that sort of thing yet?

in chicago i found this place, peoria packing co. that i plan to utilize:
http://www.lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=23813

btw first recipe in ruhlman/polcyn's charcuterie book: bacon

re: guanciale - I'm waiting until we move to a house (in a few months) before I start any meat projects. I've got my eye on a cold smoker and a meat-aging refrigerator for the new space.

describe the process of 'having a whole hog butchered'

Start by going to Eat Wild and finding a local farmer who raises the livestock, usually during the winter. Get in touch, and find out if they can raise one for you and how much $ you need to send. Usually it's under $200 and covers the cost of the animal and its feed and care until butchering. Most farmers have a local butcher they use and can generally quote your final costs in the amount per pound of "hanging weight", so you can have a rough idea of how much you'll need to come up with in Oct/Nov. If the farm's close enough, I try to go visit a few times - the people who've raised pigs for us have also done fruits and vegetables so I'd pick up 50 lbs of tomatoes to process or whatever was in season.

When your animal is at a marketable weight and it's butchering time, you might have the option of being there. Our farmers have used a mobile abbatoir that comes to the animal, rather than hauling the animals to the butcher (which greatly adds to their stress). The carcass has to hang and cool for a certain amount of time before it is cut, wrapped, and frozen. If you're right there, you might be able to bring home a certain amount of fresh meat. If you want bacon, hams, or hocks smoked, that adds time to the final processing and to the cost. But generally within two weeks of butchering, you go pick up all your meat and whatever other bits you specified you wanted (fat/trotters/ears/tail/liver/etc).

Another option is to go your county or state fair and bid on the 4-H livestock. You can usually get set up with a hauler and butcher at the auction by asking around.

There's another thread here somewhere where I spell out how many grocery bags of meat you get from various animals. A whole hog is about the same as a side of beef - 8 to 10 grocery bags I think, plus a tall kitchen bag (13 gallons?) of trimmed fat.

This one: Buying meat in bulk

Speaking of cold smoker I've had some great success with a soldering iron, an empty tin can and smoking pellets. I cold smoked the ham I mentioned upthread, scallops and mozzarella.

Obviously if you have your eye on a real cold smoker a soldering iron might seem a little dinky, but I was very pleased with the results.

I had some fair success converting our gas grill into a hot smoker at one point. The soldering iron idea would be perfect for a cold smoker - what did you use for the big container/racks?

I have a charoal hot smoker that I used. I set the tin can with the soldering iron onto the lowest rack. If I was smoking more food I probably would have removed the water pan and placed the can at the bottom where the charocal would go.

If you do place the can on the lowest rack be careful about what you place over the can on the upper rack. That soldering iron can still put off some heat.

yo rm- could you plz supply more details of this soldering iron smoker thing?

is like this?

Close to that. There are other links that I found but basically you take a tin can and open it about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way. Punch a hole for the soldering iron near the lip of the can in the middle of the remaining part of the lid that has not been opened. Then fill the can with pellets and insert the soldering iron through the hole in the can.

Here's a tutorial on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sivMMDnUEpc

they do not mention this technique in the charcuterie book by ruhlman and polcyn . . . .

but nonetheless i plan to utilize it

homespun! homeskillet. hometown. u my homey n shit

They probably don't mention it in Charcuterie because the Bradley smoker they recommend has a cold smoker attachment. While I would love to get a Bradley (and may do so one day) this method works very well.

so any of y'alls ever make a chicken gallantine? i think i might try that as my first foray into charcuterie

Haha. Really? First foray?

Seriously, if chicken galantine is your first foray into charcuterie and you pull it off, I am going to lobby for an "I Love Stone Soup" board because that is where I will belong.

How did your bacon go btw?

i haven't sourced pork bellies as of yet. but i can find chickens, yo
also payday is right around the corner
plus it's not like i'm going from working to master kraft mac n cheese to attempting fermented sausages here dude
i can do some culinary wizardry methinks
actually i was thinking tasso ham might be a good first curing project cuz it's less meat, right?

i dunno righteousmaelstrom, you seem incredulous. have you made the galantine and it's like too many pitfalls impossible?
it just seems like less equipment and ingredients i might already have, ya know? i dunno i still have to get a meat grinder

also have any of yunz ever spit roasted a whole pig? please provide details

I think I'd want some spare chickens to practice on, to make sure I got the "remove skin in one relatively neat piece" down. Otherwise, sounds like a labor-intensive but tasty project.

Nah, not saying you don't have the skills to pull off chicken galantine, jdchurchill. I've never made galantine. Just saying if you can do it then I suppose I am underestimating your skills and for that I do apologize.

Not certain where you live though where you can't get pork bellies easily. I guess I am spoiled. I live in Portland -- I used to live very close to an Asian supermart where you could literally get anything off of a pig -- snout to bungs and everything in between. It is there.

Tasso ham is hella easy. I remember the Ruhlman recipe being kind of heavy on cloves though. I'm not a big fan of cloves so I think I used less than called for and compensated with other spices

thanks for the tip about cloves i am not a hueg fan either. i have found a place where they is rumor to have the bellies, but i aint walked in there yet. see upthread: peoria packing co. link to some other forum

Pork belly is also called side pork. You might see it by that name, though it's usually sliced. Asian markets are excellent places to get all the pig parts you might need, but also Hispanic carnicerias can be good.

is pork belly really that hard to find in the usa? any butcher over here has it

it all gets turned into bacon in the usa iirc

its very easy to find in SF/NYC and MS ime. not sure about elsewhere tbh.

yo i got a duck who has made duck confit? will i get enough fat from cutting up the duck? gimme some tips y'all plz

I usually use the fat from 2-3 carcasses (reserve the legs, cook the breasts separately, flay the carcass and render all the fat from the skin) to confit just the legs.

you got a duck who has made duck confit??

you will definitely need extra fat tho

If you can't get enough fat off of the one or don't want to get more carcasses for fat, you can use lard (good quality though) or olive oil for the confit.

goose fat is the best iirc

sorry s1ocki i guess i should've made that first sentence into 2, cuz i have no idea if this duck had made duck confit before. i never had a chance to ask it.

so i will cut this thing up sometime this week and see how much fat i can get. amirite, Jaq, that you are suggesting to use all the trimmin skin bits and render them into fat? should i skin the leg/thigh? i guess i should try that duck breast ham with those or does someone have a nice tried and true method for using the duck breasts? this is my first duck, dudes.

righteousmaelstrom (here on i'm calling you RM) what brand of lard is good quality? this is totally gonna scare my gurl: me walking in with some lard, yo. what about bacon drippings? i have some of those, but they will probz give it a bacony flavor which might fite with the duck flavor, huh?

nah, don't skin the parts you are going to confit. But yeah, there's a thick layer of fat under the entire skin of a duck. I usually remove the breasts (w/skin and fat), use a sharp pointy knife to poke holes through all the skin (so the fat can render out more easily, then steam them skin down for 10 min. After steaming (which releases some of the fat), slap them skin-side down in a hot skillet to brown and crisp for just long enough - I like the meat on the rare side.

I render my own lard b/c most you can buy has been shelf-stabilized and has preservatives. I think the flavor of the lard could compete too much with the flavor of the duck fat, but that's me. I'd use a more neutral oil, or just buy some of this: http://www.dartagnan.com/51181/565789/Pantry-Goods/Duck-Fat.html?wt.srch=1&gclid=CL_IpNy53KECFSBaiAodKQJY0A

And here is another duck thread with some tasty ideas: Duck advice

I would stay away from the lard you can find in the baking section or in the Hispanic grocery section. The lard may have been rendered from other parts of the pig besides backfat or around the kidneys (leaf lard). Also, there may be other ingredients and the lard may have been partially hydrogentated to make it more shelf stable. I would stay away from bacon drippings too as you will likely wind up with bacon-flavored confit.

You could render your own however. In some Hispanic grocery stores, you can purchase back fat and render it yourself (Although this will probably also scare your girl). I did it for rillettes once. Kind of a pain in the butt since I did it on the stovetop, but thinking about it now I'm wondering why it couldn't be done in a low temp overn.

xpost

There is nothing better than duck fat fries with crispy sage crumbled on top.

did i ever tell u guys about the duck-fat-fried pancakes/beignets i ate recently, all covered with maple syrup?

My god that sounds incredibly, decadently, good. Restaurant, or home cooked?

restaurant, at the au pied de cochon sugar shack. i linked a thing about i did a little while ago... can repost if you like, but for now, here's a pic:

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l14zhf32PP1qav9v0.jpg

I read that when you posted it before and had a heart attack, like sympathetic labor pains but better.

http://www.lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=4991&hilit=duck+confit

http://www.wedlinydomowe.com/grinding-meat.htm

can't believe i hadn't linked that yet. probz gonna git me the #10 sometime soon. or does somebody have suggestions on the meat grinder that i should buy. it looks like the #10 here comes with the sausage stuffer tubes; bonus if those things really work. the link above goes on about using knives to cut the meat and stuffing the casings with yr thumbs like in olden times . . . not sure i wanna do that tho

I've used a #10 manual grinder and it is a hell of a lot of hard labor. If you're going to chop meat with knives, get some weighty cleavers and semi-freeze the meat. But that's also a shit-ton of work. I've got a meat grinder attachment for my Kitchenaid, and it works great for small amounts (up to about 10 lbs of raw or semi-frozen meat/fat). Have to stop and let it cool down for a few hours, but also clean all the sinews out of the blade assembly at the same time, so that's okay.

yea my mixer is not a kitchenaid (general slicing?) but it does have a thingy in the front that might run one of those grinder dealys i should check into it. i assumed making sausage was going to be lots of work, and seeing as how the #10 is only like $35 i think it'll have to do for the first couple batches.

Just be aware that whatever table or counter you clamp that manual grinder to is going to get messed up by the amount of force you are going to have to use. It also helps to put the grinder in the freezer so it is as cold as possible when you start (also have the meat very cold) - the friction causes things to heat up, which makes the meat mushy as well as can cause the metal parts to expand and have some interference. It can also help to have a cheater bar, a pipe about 2 feet long that fits tightly over the wooden handle on the crank, so you can use both hands to get more of your weight behind it.

btw, thingy on the front aka pto (power take-off)

yea the pto is the thingy fr shizy. is that a universal fitting for the kitchenaid attachments? i am suspicious that it is . . . however knowing capitalism i wouldn't be surprised if it isn't.