Makin' Bacon

Something new to try out and another 'cookery' adventure for us; we decided to try making our own dry-cured bacon rashers. Armed with the inevitable internet recipe we set to work on a chunk of the belly pork from our recently 'won' Gloucester Old Spot carcass. People have been salting down pork for centuries but it still makes me a bit nervous; I may have been paying too much attention on the Intermediate Food Hygiene Certificate training I went through whilst at work. I almost certainly had Liz thinking grumbly thoughts at the number of questions I asked and "are you sure?" queries.

Hung out to dry in the muslin bag

In short, the slab of pork belly is well coated in a dry mixture of salt, demerara sugar and chopped rosemary, thyme and crushed juniper berries, patted on all over, all 6 'sides'. It is then put (in our case) in a plastic bag on a plate in the fridge for 5 days while the salt mixture draws moisture out of the meat. Each day you pour off the brine which has come out, turn the meat over and pat any dislodged salt back over it. Over the 5 days the slab of meat shrinks and darkens in colour, especially around the outside, so that it feels harder and tougher than did the original raw pork. The salt diffuses all the way into the meat and more water is pulled out by the salt.

After 5 days you take the slab of belly out of its bag and rinse off all the remaining excess salt (there isn't much by then) from the outside, you pat the meat dry with paper towels and then you need to hang it in a cool but well ventilated place to dry for at least 48 hours. We wrapped it in a clean muslin sheet knotted at the 4 corners and hung it from one of the baler twines which we have been using for our strings of onions, in the Tígín. At that point it is ready to use but goes on improving for a while, so you are advised to cut off the rashers you need and then put it back to hang some more till, presumably, you have used it all up.

Big excitement today, then, as we came to the Ready Date and were able to try out some of our bacon. We have to pronounce it a success. The bacon cut beautifully into rashers and fried well with, as you'd expect, NONE of that grey/white water that comes out of supermarket rashers causing them to braise rather than fry. This was, after all, a carcass with no brine injected into it which we had then salt-cured to extract a lot of the naturally occurring fluid. It was, if anything, a tad fatty, coming from the belly rather than the back or loin. At first contact it also struck possibly a little salty to our taste but this only seemed to affect the first 'taster' mouthful samples. By the time we had the rashers in a full-on bacon butty with bread, butter and ketchup it was gorgeous and very more-ish.

Incidentally we have also now had some sausage meat from this pig, in that case made by Carolyn and wrapped around two of her home made Scotch Eggs, so we can vouch for that use too and tonight we eat our first roast pork joint, the lower shoulder (the butchers call it "Hand of Pork") which is looking very promising so far. Tomorrow, maybe a minced up pork Chinese recipe involving spring roll wrappers, but tomorrow our attention turns really to lambs - we get our 5 carcasses back from Ignatius G and try to squeeze our share (2 animals) into the bulging freezers.

Pork, pork and MOAR POARK!

A good vet could get it back on its feet?

Thursday 28th saw us having yet another new experience, getting our pork cut up by the abattoir guys and bringing it home to sort through, make decisions on and pack away. I have been saying in these posts that we were doing a carcass for carcass swap with one of our lambs but we have re-crunched our various numbers since then and that would be massively unfair in our favour. Our lambs feed on "free" green Roscommon grass, where a pig has to be fed pricey, paid for ration and barley its whole life which, in this case was January right round to now.

Liz Soprano disposes of the body?

Farm gate prices for a whole pig carcass and a whole lamb can be tricky to compare because your 'carcass' might actually be somewhat processed into sausages or salted for bacon, but even so it was clear that a lamb is 'worth' only half what a pig would price at, so we settled with Carolyn that we'd just take a half carcass plus the 'odd bits' that we'll use but which Carolyn does not - the head for example, trotters and any kidneys we could get our hands on.

Growers "slap mark" (actually a tattoo)

So we arranged to meet at 3 pm at the meat factory where we'd be allowed into the big stainless steel walled cutting rooms to watch our carcasses being jointed up and to choose from options like boned or un-boned, chops or joints and so on. This was nothing like going into our little lamb-butcher in Castlerea with his old fashioned butcher's chopping block and one band saw. This was an industrial space with ten or so guys wearing white plastic aprons and chain-mail gloves, working away at steel tables, the carcasses rolling in hanging from overhead steel railway tracks, noisy circular saws you pull down from the ceiling to cut out the spines, band saws that zip through trotters in a trice and hydraulic rigs that brace themselves against the back of the meat and pull out shoulder blades with no need to cut.

Shoulder and neck joints

We were treated to a Master Class of butchery. Our guy worked away with effortless skill and dexterity. Ask him to 'tunnel bone' a leg and watch the flash of the blade and a blur of wrist twisting and wriggling as he delved down into either end of the joint freeing up the main bone before slipping it out of one end almost clean of meat. Ask him to bone out the ribs and you'd watch again as with a couple of knife strokes he was able to peel up the whole rack of ribs intact. We actually had one for our tea. In under the hour we had our meat in bags in our car and Carloyn's three half-pigs in bags in hers.

Home then to sort out what we'd got - the simplest way seemed to be to spread it out on our big table and reassemble the animal so that we could bag and label our bits, decide which bits to try salt-curing, work out what to do with the head and the cheek meat for brawn, separate out trotters, tails and other off-cut bits. We also decided, as I said, that supper was going to be a taster of this Gloucester Old Spot (Purebred, pedigree) meat, so Liz roasted the rack of ribs smeared with a little of our homemade spicy tomato 'jam', and very nice it was too, served with cous-cous, fried mushrooms and a tomato and feta salad. Very porky and succulent. Filling too - these were the full length chest ribs, 12 inches or so long, spine to sternum, not the short cut-up bits you normally buy.

Rack of whole ribs.

Today, with our meat safely stashed, we headed down to Carolyn to help her sort her batch, which was three times the size of our own job. Also Carolyn already does a lot more salt curing and making sausages, so she was pleased to have the extra manpower cutting away big sheets of skin from the loin/flank/belly slabs and cutting up big lumps for going in the sausage mincer. Liz got stuck into bagging and labeling and in 2 hours we were celebrating the last lump 'processed' and Carolyn was frying us a pork steak each as a reward - delicious folded into a heel (crust) of brown bread as a substantial sandwich.

Greek style pork?

Finally just for a laugh (forgive me). Liz and Diamond were amused by the way pig carcasses were sometimes displayed in the butchers shops on the island of Poros in Greece, so here is our 'homage' to Greek style pork, complete with shades and fag on. I don't know if it improves the flavour. We are not actually going to be able to smoke any of this meat but there is no reason why we might not construct a cold-smoker in the future if we do get into rearing these fascinating animals for ourselves.

"Our" Pig

Regular readers will know that, so far, we have not got involved in pigs. Never say never; it is an idea that flickers away in the back of our minds and we have the perfect place to 'do' them should we decide to. It is the escapist skills of pigs and the fact that they do not graze our nice free grass, but need actually 'feeding' which have put us off so far. The perfect place is the area known as the 'secret garden' which is already well wooded and actually has fencing to sheep proof standards down either side.

Meanwhile, as we dilly dally over deciding to keep a couple of our own (or even pregnant female with piglets due) we have gone into an informal partnership with our friend Carolyn down the lane (she of the miniature horses) who had decided to rear 2 Gloucester Old Spot pigs this year as we decided to 'do' 5 store lambs. The plan was to simply swap carcass for carcass after slaughter so that they could have a pig and a lamb, and we'd have 2 lambs and a pig. We actually have 5 lambs, but 2 of these are already spoken for by hungry in-laws.

Carolyn has done pigs in previous years and, as well as the frozen joints, belly pork and so on, has started to explore into making sausages, salting some of the pig for bacon and even got a bit into the dry cured foods like chorizo sausage and 'Parma' style ham. We may well try out some of these processes and have started to pick Carolyn's brains on such specialist subjects as 'covers' (skins) for the sausages and 'starter cultures' for the Lactobacillus that goes into chorizo.

Excellent, then to receive from UK friend Mazy a book on this very subject as an early Christmas present. This came to us via our excellent local couriers, wrapped in its Amazon packet, so we had to contact Mazy and see whether it was a Christmas gift and should not therefore be opened till the 25th Dec. Mazy, though, had been clued in on the fact that these pigs are due to be slaughtered on Monday next (25th Nov), so told us to open it early. Thank you very much, Mazy, you are a present buying Genius!

Our own contributions to this meat fest, the lambs are easily 'ready' now and possibly even over-fat, but we have had a slight hiccup in the proceedings, in that sheep mentor (and plasterer), Kenny O'C fractured his collar bone 5 weeks ago and has been out of the picture in terms of sheep wrangling. In theory we need him to come and check the sheep and clear us for booking them in for their final journey, and this needs to be soon, because our slaughterhouse and butcher, Ignatius G gets very busy come early December with Christmas meat. In the absence of Kenny we may need to blag a local neighbour with access to a stock trailer who doesn't mind doing a bit of haulage for us or, failing that, keep the sheep through Christmas and 'finish' them in January. Watch this space.

Talking of button-holing the locals and persuading them to work for us, we got a nice result with the local hedges and verges trimming contractor on his big red tractor. Alerted to his presence in the lane by the dogs barking, I sprinted out and found him stopped chatting to John Deere Bob. Asked to do our hedges for a small fee, he agreed that "Sure, I'll give them a lick for you!" Not only did he top and face our privet hedge along the front of the house, he also trimmed the hedge of the East Field and, swapping attachments on his hydraulic arm, mowed the verges on both sides of the lane all along out frontage. It's very tidy we look now, out front, as well as being able to see cars coming as we nose out of the gate.

In terms of food, we are definitely going over to autumnal veg. We love that we change our vegs round the seasons rather than just going with Supermarket style, everything-all-round-the-year produce. Tonight I cut the penultimate Romanesco cauliflower head (all be it, very tiny!), pulled another red beet and cut a few more of our nice fat sprouts. We are currently in egg glut mode after spending spring and early summer scrounging around for eggs. One of our adult female geese is, amazingly, still in lay, giving us an egg every other day and this morning we had half a dozen goose eggs and over a dozen chicken eggs in the kitchen. Liz's response to an egg glut is usually to start baking, but today she has gone all adventurous with a chocolate mousse dessert, and a salmon kedgeree with hard-boiled goose eggs. Life's tough in austerity Ireland, but we'll manage!