It's so... beautiful

So I got the new (to me) buffalo chopper all cleaned up today and took it for it's innaugural spin. I chopped 3 # of back fat and 6# of lean leg meat, plus about 75 g salt, 10 g #2 salt and 40 g of a fennel/peppercorn corsely ground, plus about 4 g fennel pollen, 200 g of moscato wine and about 4 g fresh grated garlic, plus about 6 g of bactoferm. I froze the back fat and did a corse chop in the choper, then I also did the lean meat in the chopper, which I have not done before, but I think it had a nice texture. I hand stuffed it in a beef bung.

I then did a butcher's twine wrap on it and reinforced the hanging strings (since the sausage is about #10) and hung it up in the outside fridge. I am extremely proud of it and I hope it is as delicious as I think it will be!

I went and got a whole new load of meat today to make another batch of salumi. I only used 1/2 of one beef bung for the whole 10# sausage! So now I have to figure out what else I want to make? I really want to make mortadella since I now have the buffalo chopper and I have an event next week with a meat platter, but I also acutely feel that I should be putting in as much salumi to dry cure as I can now in case I do open my own place next year.

I also sarted 3 bellies for bacon, picked up two really cheap partial boneless beef shanks (I did a bresaola type cure on them, we will see how it turns out!) and I already have one 3 # capicola going and about 15 # of lonza in cure as well.

SO much has happened in the past few weeks...

I am working solidly along on my business plan and the more I do, the better I feel. AND in some very exciting developments... I was rummaging around in a used Restaurant supply store and found a buffalo chopper for $400, which Sue and Paul gave me as a gift!

This is so exciting as it's use in making sausage is absolutely priceless. The difference between chopped meat vs ground meat is substantial when it comes to the texture and color of the finished product!

Mary and I picked fresh fennel this weekend and gathered up the pollen so I can make Finocchinoa this weekend. I got my beef bungs in a few days ago and I am so so SO excited to use my new chopper.

I will blog the process this weekend!

Excited and Terrified

So it has been a busy year already; I am finishing school and exploring all of my options. I am scared of the future because I know the mainstream critical path to Chef glory; but I am not in a position to travel down that path. Working for free in some world famous place, then working 2 jobs while I get experience (making $10.00 and hour), then becoming a line cook, then purchasing or sous, then executive chef, where you might make 35k-60k and work 80 hour weeks. You know why a lot of women are not world famous chefs? You can't spend time with your family.

This has me anxious and exploring alternative routes to greatness. It just seems like there is no perfect path. If I wait two years to get more experience, I will be opening up my business with no safety net (I am still receiving child support and alimony currently, but that will be greatly reduced late next year). Ideally I would work in the industry for a couple more years, gather information and experience, then the money fairy would visit me miraculously and the perfect place would appear (cheaply) on the horizon and I would open my dream bar/pub.

So... with all that in mind... I found a small place in Martinez that was a coffee shop/cafe that is for lease inexpensively. The downtown is dead on the weekends and in the evenings, which is why the rent is so cheap.

BUT, the place is a block from the court house and the Thursday farmer's market. AND they have frequent weekend street fairs and festivals and the person who manages the downtown seems very serious about bringing business to the area. The clientele would be pretty blue collar (the Sheriff's office is two blocks away, plus jurors etc). I have a fellow student who works at the refinery who would be willing to promote the cafe to people who worked there.

Downside, it would have to be a cold kitchen. There is no hood/range/oven and to bring them in would be outside of my budget currently. But I would sous vide cook, plus most of my items would be dry cured etc, which doesn't use heat anyway. I would need to find out if I can use an electric smoker in the back alleyway.

The quiet nature of the weekend business would not be all bad for me too. I can use the kitchen to prep food for my catering events, plus as many of the items would be very labor intensive, I could prep on the weekends as well. Salumi and home made Mayonnaise etc.

I would also have to figure out the coffee thing. The morning coffee business would be really important. Brion will be talking with Weaver's coffee to secure the best coffee (IMO) money can buy and my friend April, who is a shift leader for Starbucks will help me set up and train to do this. I think quick serve will be really important for this place.

I also will have to put in a bunch of meat soon if I want to open the place in like 01/11. It is all so nebulous... but the numbers don't look too bad so far. I think I would need to really get some good word of mouth to get people out of their office buildings and into my shop. Free samples would likely be a good idea... I think my product is really good and will sell itself.

Where is the line between interest, passion...

and obsession?

My outside fridge is filling beautifully with meat.... meat... glorious meat.

I was getting low on product so I started 5 pork bellies for pancetta, they are almost dry. I have 15 lbs of salumi curing using the spice mixture from Scappi's "Mortadella"... so Italian... fennel, cinnamon, peppercorn, and nutmeg. Fresh herbs: mint, majoram and thyme. I also have about 20 lbs of modern Nduja cased and ready to cold smoke, drying in the outside fridge. I did not use so much hot spice and peppers, and I added blood and mace. I love the sweet earthiness the blood adds to sausage and I find myself craving it in the smokiness of Nduja. I also did this amazing Scappi recipe of raw chicken breast, parboiled pork belly, saffron, Parmesan, currants and Italian sweet spices. The last sausage was the Saveloy, veal, pork and liver, truffles, raisins, eggs, fresh cheese and Parmesan. I hot smoked them over cherry wood.

I also brined brisket for MY pastrami. It is drying in now and developing it's lovely pellicle. I am sad that most Americans will never try fresh home made pastrami. The sad pale overpeppered and dry piece of shit we are served on deli sandwiches is nothing like the honey and garlic and pepper and coriander wet cured meat that is air dried and then hot smoked for 8 hours to a deep red, like the inside of a beating heart, and then let to sit for three days, then steamed until it falls apart, it's fatty bits like slippery pieces of hot smoke and spice.

I have two small Capicolla started, plus a Lonza in dry cure now. They sit in their little half hotel pans with their bellies peeking up like little fat Feziwigs sleeping off a Christmas party hang over. I am almost done processing the salumi that needs to get to curing and drying. A massive amount of it has been done this past week, thanks to the help of my beloved meat loving friends.

I also picked up duck gizzards with Ariane and smoked them in cherry wood, and then confited them in goose fat. They are deep red from the smoke and I put star anise, peppercorn and garlic in the goose fat.

I feel like... a Pioneer mother ready for winter. Larder fat with pickles and preserves... the smell of meat and peppercorn and bay in my meat cooler. 75 lbs and counting of meat. Soon... the fish.

My Internship...

Last Tuesday I stared my internship at Perbacco. It is a anagogical space, which reminds me a little bit of what the Rabbit Hole must have been like. A long, tall narrow space with an open exhibition kitchen and off to the right a door opens to the back hallways and stairs that lead down to the salumeria and prep space. Winding concrete spaces lead to offices, storage, bathrooms, lockers... and other businesses. The shiny newness of Perbacco's lovely muted space giving way to the hodge podge of of a layered city built during Victorian times.

We go up and down the stairs many times a day... winding our way through the Rabbit Hole. Out the employee entrance is a McDonalds that reminds me, in a direct and stark way, that McDonalds are owned by individuals, Franchisees. This one looks like it's been owned for at least 60 years, by the same guy... who has not updated in anyway the decor. The harsh light and mumbling bag people mix innocuously with the business people on lunch break. I can see the prep chefs and The Boys smoking just outside Perbacco's employee entrance. They look at me dumbfounded when I come out of McDonalds... why didn't I just ask them to make me something!? WHO in the name of Lilith and Thor would eat at Mickey D's when they can eat at Perbacco? They are totally right. I really like The Boys.

My first day I worry I will be the only girl. I see so few of them in chef's scrubs. But I am relieved to find the Chef de Cuisine for the soon to be opened Barbacco is the tall and lovely Sarah and her tiny (but mighty) Sous Chef... Kathryn. Sarah has been the Salumi-Queen of Perbacco and we spend three glorious days down in the salumeria making all manner of things... duck mortadella with spanish olives, pork salumi with red wine and peppers... old time Italian ones with Spices that would have been found in Scappi... mace, cloves, nutmeg...

The Boys, Carl and Jaime, are the Sous Chefs for Perbacco. Young and much pierced, wise and gentle. I love the smart energy of the space. Even the youngest prep chef, speaking only a handful of English, grins incredulously at me while I tie up Cow Middles (yes, the large part of a Cow's intestines). I can tell he wishes he could say, "DO YOU KNOW WHAT THOSE ARE!?" and I only wish I could tell him, "Yes, I do! And This is what I do for FUN on my days OFF!" I am secretly glad I get to do this work, since he probably get stuck doing most of the time and obviously thinks it is freakishly special... and not in a good way.

My first week went well, but I can't help but wonder what do they see when they see me? The chefs d partie are almost all hispanic, but the executives are 4/5 Caucasian, with the Chef d Cuisine of Perbacco, Benjamin, being the only one who is not. The dynamic is not the rarefied Caucasial Fields of my Jr. College. No one my age is still a prep chef. In fact... no one my age is a Sous Chef. So there I am, blond, a woman and really really old. I sometimes feel like an alien in a strange world. I have my first serious self doubts about what I am doing. I feel like I should probably pare down to living in my car before I actually endeavor to live on what a Chef makes. It doesn't bother me that I am not going to strike it rich being a chef... it bothers me that trying to live on $10 an hour in the Bay Area means I will be homeless. Thank goodness work for Brion is going well!

So I will have to write up my goals for my internship after the semester starts. Three of them. I think these will be "the goals"

1. Learn how to make amazing Salumi
2. Learn some kitchen Spanish
3. Cook something

I know #3 seems weird, but the salumeria downstairs does not even have a range/oven/stove in the whole room. If I stay down there and don't come out, I won't do anything but prep. If I want to open my own restaurant, where I might be able to avoid being homeless, I need to learn so much more. And at (almost) 40, I feel like time is of the greatest importance.

Tomorrow is day #4 of my internship. I have also decided to do a personal project. The Ferry building is a couple of blocks from Perbacco and I have decided during my internship to eat at every eatery there and blog and photograph them all. I love to write. And I love to eat! I will do my first installation of the Ferry Building Eating Project This week :)

Porcine Dreams...

Today I will prep for a private Medieval event at a good friend's property in Sonora. It is probably my favorite SCA event of the year and within their close knit household they have an amazing number of capable and competent people. So I was pretty honored to be asked to make a food contribution.

I am reading Scappi a lot lately and delving ever more into medieval meat preservation methods... I am sure that sounds all very scientific and pretentious but I assure you, after your first bite of duck confit rillette you will agree it is to serve a base hedonistic desire... for good food.

So today I will go to the local Asian store and pick up pork belly and lean and fat meat and fresh spices for sausage making. I haven't made bacon in about a month and my last few batches have been overly salty, so I need to stop being lazy about pulling them out of the cure in a timely manner.

I am making the event's Friday night simple one pot meal and I was going to do a beef barley, but I think I will do my meatballs instead with some kind of starch, either pasta or bread (maybe make a slider bar?) so I need to pick up some ground beef and chorizo. I also need to spend some time today planning out my menu for the Esfenn Feast so it can start making it's way into that event's copy.

Back... found something intriguing at the market. Something labeled "pork chin" that has similar striation and meat/fat ratio as bacon...

I asked the guy behind the meat counter and he gesticulated to the jowl area, so I am going to try and make guiancale again.

I got four pork bellies this time, I will cut one or two up for the fat for the sausages and then make 2 new batches of bacon. I will likely make one sweet and one salty. It is getting to warm to hang meat for curing (this is the only depressing thing about the change to warmer weather for me), but I will hopefully have time over the summer to make a new sheath for my meat closet that is out of a natural fiber. The plastic-ish covering it has now is not breathable enough and if I close it all the way the sausages have more of a proclivity to mold. I also will cover the window in the curing room. It is really pretty dark in there as it is, but I would like even less light. Light can make the fat more opaque looking and rancid.

I am starting to collect my thought for my W/AT War class on medieval preserved meats. I will have to narrow it down a lot more than just "preserved meats" because depending on which climate you lived in and what your natural resources were, there was a prtty wide variety of preservation methods including salting, pickling, wet and dry curing, covering with oil, confit etc. Each of these methods could be an entire class. And different regions did them a little differently as well (mainly having to do with natural climate... you will see more drying and smoking in a cooler climate, more pickling and wet brining in a hotter climate... even tho you will generally see both almost everywhere).

The thing I like about it is even if it is kind of esoteric, if people wanted to learn some of these techniques, they could really add to their real life SCA camping experiences by preparing delicious food that was meant to keep without modern conveniences like a freezer/refrigerator. So it is really a pretty practical skill for your average person who regularly camps in the SCA, or really who camps period.

It is such a large mental shift tho, refridgeration and canning has totally revolutionaized how we think about food and managing our food products... I cannot stress that enough. I will use some of the information from my Food Safety and Sanitation class to highlight the differences... and the similarities. How PH effects food safety, and how they used acids and oils and removing moisture instead of refrideration to keep food in the "Safety zone".

Generally moisture, heat and mid level PH are the three things that can feed bad bacteria. So the medieval way to do that was to often salt something (either cover with salt, or cover with a salty brine) or cook it (killing bacteria) and then preserve it by either drying it (with smoke or air) or covering it with an acid (vinegar or citrus) or oil (like olive oil, which is alkeline). This retarded bacteria growth.

I also got the meat for the meatballs for next weekend. If I make those up today or tomorrow I will just freeze them for the weekend. I also got to geek out with some of the chefs at Wente last night. Two of them are playing with meat smoking and we all agreed to bring in some of our products for trying. I will bring in some of the next batch of bacon and some of the dry cured sausage. I had this terrible panic attack last night that I had used all of the Scappi mortadella at the St. Mary's feast and for Vittoria's Salon of Awesome. But I got up this morning and there is still a good four pounds of it in the freezer for Eirreanwood. WHEW!!!

Making 16th Century Sausages

I did some major good geekery yesterday with my friends Erzabeta and Vittoria. Vittoria is translating a more obscure Italian cookbook (well more obscure than Scappi) and they had a few sausage recipes, and since I am making some sausages for a Medieval event I am attending in May called Erinwood, and Vittoria wanted to serve some dishes from her translations at Beltane, I figured it might be fun to play with meat!



I did 3 different types of sausages:

"Yellow Sausage" which I interpreted as an emulsified sausage (this is going to be long and boring, but it's interesting to me!) and here is why. Here is the translated recipe:
[96r] Yellow Sausage.
Take twenty-five pounds of fat pork meat, and the thigh meat is best; pound it very well with your pestle, then take two pounds of grated piasentino cheese [this is an aged cheese from the town of Piacenza, which is how it gets its name, and apparently it’s like a modern grana padano: http://www.granapadano.com/ing/history/i

nizi_01.htm], and one-and-a-half ounces of ground black pepper, one ounce of ground cinnamon, half an ounce of ground cloves, one-eighth of an ounce of ground saffron, and incorporate all this together well with fifteen ounces of salt, and spugnegiala very well. Then take the intestines prepared in the same manner as for the yellow mortadella, and stuff your sausages, and they will be absolutely perfect.

Here is how the casings were prepared for the Yellow Mortadella:

Then take the intestines well cleaned in several washes, and salt them sufficiently, then take an eighth of an ounce of ground saffron diluted with a bit of white wine, enough that it is incorporated together, and throw them into the intestines, mixing them together in a pot such that they turn yellow, then make your mortadellas or sausages.

Here is why I interpreted it as an emulsified sausage... there are several different descriptions for how they process meat for sausage making and they include: "pound the meat with the back of your knife", "pound the meat well with your knife" and "take two knives and pound the meat well" and "pound very well in a mortar and pestle"... Since it is pound "very well" in a mortar and pestle, I am guessing they are making a type of paste from the meat, which is how emulsified sausages are made as well (think like the inside of a hotdog... as hot dog is a smoked emulsified sausage... bologne is a abomination of modern Mortadella, also emulisfied, with pork back fat added, but not smoked).

Additionally, the emulsification process dose the lighten the meat (making it likely hold the yellow color from the saffron better) because the lighter colored fat is evenly spread out in the meat. Another thing that happens with emulsified sausages is the addition of a milk product, in this case the hard cheese.

So I had obtained pork middles to make a larger Mortadella size sausage and I also had saffron soaking in wine to soak the middles. The middles smelled so bad that after washing them out several times, I took out my regular/smaller hog casings and added them to the wine mixture as well!

The rest... I toasted my spices and then processed the meat with cold water in my food processor, stuffed the middles and other casings and then simmered them until they were done. They were really really good!

The other ones I made were an amalgamation of these two:

[103r] Sausages.
Take two parts pork by weight and one part beef, and pound all these things together well, and for every pound of meat put in half an ounce of salt, and six grains of pepper cracked, and a bit of fennel according to your judgment, and spugneza everything together well, then stuff these things, and make sure they are well fitted into washed beef intestines, and cure them [103v], as the others aforementioned.
[103v] Zambudelli [I think this is kind of similar to French andouillette sausage]
Take the small intestines of pork or veal, and make sure they are well salted. Afterward open them lengthwise, and wash them well in several changes of water, and make sure the water is hot. Then have good vinegar, and throw it in the pot where you will place said intestines, and after they are well washed, you will throw fennel into them, and salt, and let them stand for a night and a day in said seasonings, and a bit of something sweet would not be unwelcome, then stuff them according to the usual way, and put them in smoke to dry.

And this was more of a rougher textured smoked sausage in my reading of it, so I put everything thru the largest die on my grinder and stuffed them in the smaller casings and smoked them on Cherry and Apple wood until they were done.

The dried sausages... I still have not seen a recipe for a dry cured sausage. We know they had them, and there are a few recipes for dry cured meats (like prosciutto) and there is a ton of modern lore about them that has been passed down in the sausage making community (please don't hesitate to point me in the direction of some dry cured sausage recipes!) so this is my educated guess on dry cured sausages in the middle ages...


The lore and the materials...

Pink (or curing salt)... this salt is dyed a pink color so that people don't accidentally ingest a ton of nitrates/nitrites but lore has it that (like some French Sea salt, which is also pink) curing salts were found in specific areas and were naturally higher in these substances, which is why we modernly still use the pink to denote curing salts. It is really salt-peter... yes that you can make explosives out of. I used to be able to get it at local pharmacies, but now you have to order it online pretty much (Lunardi's has #1 pink salt, but not #2).

Creating a bacteria free environment... bacteria loves moisture and a higher (well in the middle really) ph level. So what you want to do is create a low (around 4) ph environment that will last until the meat is dry inside the casing. How this is achieved modernly is by adding a bacterial fermented milk product called L. acidophilus, sugar, and #2 curing salt. This product was found naturally in milk/cheese products in period but we pasteurize milk now and this kills off the live cultures.

These cultures feed on sugar, either natural milk sugars or added sugar, this creates lactic acid. The lactic acid along with the salt, create an environment where bacteria cannot grow and spoil your salami.

In period, I would guess they added sugar and raw milk product to meat, plus special curing salts (there are salts mentioned by region in Vittoria's translation of the one semi-dried and smoked sausage listed, inferring that special salt was used, either fora specific flavor or because it had some special function. I am guessing it was a salt that lent itself better to curing) to achieve the desired effect.

By lore some sausages have been made since Medieval times including Tuscan Salami (the spices used are so common in Medieval Italian food, it would be hard to imagine this is not the case, especially since many Italian butchers have had buchery in the family for many many generations, one famous one has been in the family for 500 years and calls their salami the same one made in the court of Catherine Medici, which may be hubris... but it also may not), Landjeager (a completely dried salami that went on campaign with German soldiers) and Saucisson sec (a very simple dry salami with garlic and pepper).

I choose to use my favorite Italian dry sausage recipe because 1. all of the spices used are mentioned repeatedly in Vittoria's translations (Fennel, nutmeg, cinnamon, cracked pepper and cloves) and 2. The processes are all the same except the additional drying the sausage (which is mentioned "in smoke" in one recipe, but I am guessing this was a slowly dried sausage over a low heat/smoke over the course of two or three days, not a month... once again if anyone has a book or info on dry curing in period, I would be very happy to check it out).

Since I am not using raw milk, I purchased the milk culture to add to my sausage. I also an using dextrose, which is a very fine sugar that is easily incorporated into the meat. The salt is fine sea salt and the fat and the meat or ground on a large die separately, with Erzabeta finely chopping some larger bits of fat to incorporate. We did pack one 12 inch length of bung, but it will hung separately from the smaller (better smelling) casings (that the rest of the meat was hung it). I put them in slated water overnight to kill off bacteria and will hang them today to dry in my little make shift area for that.

Anyway, WHEW! The two we did already came out really well and I think Rowan is going to get a kick out of the saffron sausages for Erinwood, and they really are delicious. Very light with a complex sweet savory flavor. The color is a bit grey-yellow with is kind of off putting, but it looks actually pretty good when you put the sausages side by side... they are just totally different from both a flavor and texture perspective.