Salame della Musica – Tasting
I mentioned in the last post that this was a salame I really wanted to try and make but had trouble finding solid references around ratios and level of spicing. As one might expect, this has the potential to go one of two ways, a surprising success or a blazing failure. ”Blazing failure” is probably a bit strong, but the salame wasn’t a huge success in my book. This is true for a couple of reasons.
Making Lard
One of the most important things to me about butchery and cooking in general is the respect for the animal and minimizing waste at all opportunity. Second to that is making absolutely delicious food that reflects pure ingredients and as natural as possible when ever I’m able. Lard is one of those things, it’s pure, it’s unadulterated and most of all, it’s fantasticly delicious.
Read MoreThe Wonderful Pig Head
As I’ve mentioned a number of times before, I do love nose to tail cooking and loathe wasting anything from an animal that I’ve taken the life of. When I picked up my pig previously I had asked if I could please have the head, organs and leaf lard. As we’ve come to expect in the states, people do not want these things and I was offered all that I wanted for free from the 16 hogs they were taking in for slaughter.
Read MoreGuanciale – Version 2
The previous post talked of my trip to Kinikin Natural Foods down in Montrose,CO where I picked up a pastured Duroc hog. While down there I also was given a number of different Offal and Heads because no one uses them and they just get wasted, which is a shame.
Here in Colorado it is seeming that many processors do skinning, which should be ok, however it seems on the head, they go down to the meat and don’t leave a ton of fat cover. This makes for a very different guanciale processing process and results in a significantly smaller jowl to work with.
Read MoreGuanciale – Butcher and Beginning Cure
Guanciale is amazing, lets just start there. Not quite sure if mine will be, but this is my first time making it, including the boning out of the pigs head to harvest it. It went “OK” but by no means was horrible. It’ll only get better, but without the skin, it was a little hard to get my bearings to be honest. I do have 5 more heads coming at the end of the month, so I’ll have plenty of practice over the next couple of months.
Read MoreNose to Tail
I’m a big proponent of nose to tail cooking, especially when you finally start to learn how much it is that people throw away each day, not to mention how wasteful restaurants can be.
Today we began to cure the first products that are going into our curing chamber, and after butchering our pig’s head for guanciale, we roasted the head and made some beautiful stock. The skin from what became pancetta became pork rinds cooked fresh, and as such, nothing during the process, even the trimmings, has gone to waste.
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