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.

Bull and Barrel

Feeling a bit sorry for the guy (Mike the Cows) who rents the fields next door because he only had a scrappy warning sign up (faded felt pen on old hardboard) I decided to do him a secret favour, nicked his sign and painted him a decent one. He won't know it's me, and I don't even know if a) he's putting his cows in there this year and b) running Felix the Bull with them. I have now sneaked the sign back up and we are wondering whether anyone will comment, or suss us, and if so how soon. Hee hee! 

The sign looks very smart and quite professional. The white is just some exterior woodwork undercoat. The red gloss was left over from painting the Utility Room door and the dark green was just a small tin of wood preserving stuff useful for the rabbit hutches. The red was dabbed on using a half inch gloss brush salvaged from my jar of old brushes. The finer stuff was done with a set of kiddies 'art' brushes got from a local shop for €1.99. No expense spared! The design was just scratched out in pencil and then lashed in free-hand; hence it is a bit wobbly in places. 

Mike, though, does need to attend to his fences if he is going to put Felix and the gang back in there. I don't think I've ever seen such a rat's nest of scrappy barbed wire, rotting posts and baler twine set to hold back 800 kg (or so) of Charolais bull (and his wives and children).

I have now made and installed the Mk 2 version of the goose bath. The geese, you will recall, were using a temporary arrangement made from 4 lengths of timber and old plastic sheeting. This worked OK and the geese enjoyed it, but geese, although they have webbed feet, do still have claws on the end of each toe, which are reasonably sharp. The geese eventually puncture the sheeting and the water drains away. 

All around here, in almost every field, the locals use a type of blue barrel cut in half as food bowls and drinkers for cattle, sometimes plumbed in with loo-cistern style float valves and standing in posh frames. I tracked a supply of these barrels down to a local agricultural supplies place in Castlerea. They are 25 gallon capacity and nice tough plastic. 

They are empty but sometimes have the last 'dregs' of what ever was in them, still in there. Unfortunately (and rather alarmingly) few still have their labels on them, so you have no idea what this might be. One barrel in 'our' pile said simply 'flouride' and the shop guy had no idea what was in them. His attitude seemed to be 'buyer beware - at your own risk'. We believe they may be 'food grade' as an embossed mark on the plastic says "Do not refill with Food Grade product". The huge number of them around the local farms made me wonder whether they might be an ingredient in the local animal-feed milling industry. 

Ours proved to have a small amount of a white, milky, odourless liquid in it which diluted down with my rinse-water and was 'lost' as safely as we could. The insides of the barrel also seem to have some kind of wax protection, presumably to stop the contents picking up plastic taints, or the contents attacking the plastic of the barrels and becoming contaminated with residues. We scrubbed this off as best we could with hot soapy water. It then remained just to sink the half barrel into the ground and fill with water - three buckets in the barrow three times. We have sited the new 'bath' near the bottom of the orchard so that when I have to bale it out to clean it the water can run off harmlessly under the hawthorn hedge, though this made for a long walk with the water-laden barrow. We then steered the geese down past it so that they'd know it was there. 

We will see how it goes. That was yesterday. Today I fed the geese some sprouted wheat close by the bath and saw them drinking and head-bathing in/from it but we have not actually seen them climb in for a paddle about. If they do, this will be, we think, the first time they have ever been in water deep enough to swim on so it might be a bit alarming for them. 


Finally, just a quick picture of me on the sofa surrounded by the dogs. Poppy is on my lap, Towser on my shoulder and Deefer sitting by my side. We'd lit the Living Room fire that day, so we were as warm as toast and recovering from the jolly gardening and dog-walking.