Cold Smoke

Cold smoked bacon





cold smoker rig


We're heading to Columbus, and I like to bring an offering of bacon to the Buckeye.

A couple of weeks ago the New York Times had an article about Rock Star Butchers. It an annoying article about hipster foodies trying to obtain some earthy grittiness by watching some dude cut up a pig. I think you will get more enlightened (and get a better bang for your buck) by simply buying a whole chicken and cutting it up. Do it once a week for a month. Figure out how to use one bird for several meals. Seriously.

But wait a minute, one of these dudes get thirty bucks a head for a pig demo. A butcher shop charges $10,000 for an 8 week program. I gotta see what all the fuss is about.



I got some instruction books from the library and my mom talked to somebody at the Worthington farmer's market.

Put on your foodie helmets (chinstrap extra tight) we're going for a ride.


Oh and yeah it's official,



I don't have to take anymore guff.

Cheers

Belly Time

Have you been thinking about making bacon? Now is the perfect time; with the hint of fall in the air, the gentle wisps of hickory smoke should trigger tingling childhood memories like skipping stones on Lake Hope. The late tomatoes are now ripe on the vine. Make up some bread, some mayonnaise, and assemble BLT's. Serve the sandwiches with smoked corn chowder and now you are ready for the season. Maybe a nap first.



Before any napping there's work to be done. The hardest part of making bacon is finding the belly. Ok, if you live in town nick-named "Hog Butcher to the World," maybe it's not that hard. I get bellies at a meat packer about three miles from my house (say YEAH Southland), the problem is usually the ones in the case are pretty thin, they keep the nice ones in the back to make their own cured love. My friend Brian in New Jersey gets them from a Chinese market with the ribs attached. When searching for your own try to find a place where you can choose your piece, if you don't see one you like, ask if there are any others. Make sure you get a thick belly. If you are at a meat packing operation you'll have to buy a whole belly, they wont cut it, and you're gonna get 12 to 19 pounds of pork. But that's what you want. Get the biggest, thickest belly you can find, because we are not just making bacon, we are stocking the larder.



When you get you purchase home you may find one end is really thick with very little fat, and the other end thin and nothing but fat. In addition, an untrimmed pork belly with have fat and meat (a flap of sorts) that sits on top of our future bacon. Now you can simply cut it up into to manageable pieces a cure it, but why not make it look nice?

With my pork side I used the thick, lean portion of the belly and removed the lean flap to make couple of pounds of our house sausage. I used the fatty thin end and any trimmed fat to make lard. I also saved the skin from each of these sections and threw it in the freezer. Skin is useful to thicken soups, Cassoulet, or boiled and diced for a pâté.



I squared up the future bacon and rubbed it with a mixture of sugar, salt and curing salt. Curing salt is a special order item, I get mine at The Spice House in Chicago. I used the recipe from Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn, for the dry rub. On a smaller piece I poured on a little maple syrup in addition to the dry rub. The pieces go into ziploc bags and cure in the fridge for five days. In the past I have cured bacon in brine along with ham. I haven't noticed any big difference between the wet and dry cure, except that the wet cure only needs three days.

After the cure was complete, I rinsed off the bacon and let it rest in the fridge of 24 hours uncovered. I actually let it go for two days because I got busy with other stuff but the pork didn't mind.



I cold smoked both pieces of the belly for about four hours. The cold smoke rig consisted of a hot plate and stainless steel bowl inside my Bullet. The next day I hot smoked the larger slab for about two hours. While I had the smoker fired up I also threw on some eggplant (smoked baba ganouj) and I hot smoked a few ears of corn (shucked) for the smoky corn chowder. Bonne Femme made the soup.


Cold and hot smoked bacon


Cold smoked bacon

Either way its a winner.



My mom was here last week and she started her own bacon. She took it back to Columbus and she will smoke it on her kettle grill.

Bacon: A pantry staple that's fun for the whole family.



Cheers.

Smoked Trout

Like I was saying in a previous post, I brought some fish home from Rushing Waters Fisheries in Wisconsin. I was ready to try my hand at smoking some fish. Since I had never smoked fish before I consulted The Easy Art of Smoking Food, by Chris Dubbs and Dave Heberle. The book suggests curing fish such as trout for five to eight hours before smoking.

For the salt mixture I used the proportions from my Gravlax recipe, about 3 grams of salt and 5 grams of sugar for each 100 grams of weight. So I applied the cure, put it in the fridge and took the boys to the Museum of Science and Industry.

When we got back, we fired up the cold smoker. The cold smoker consists of my Weber Bullet, an electric burner from K-mart, and a stainless steel bowl in which heated hickory sawdust smolders.

However on this day instead of saw dust, I used the branches from a basil plant I had saved from the garden. I got the idea from The Herbfarm Cookbook, by Jerry Traunfeld, it's at the library go check it out.

I chopped the shrub into bits. By the handful, the basil burned for about an hour. Due to the cold outside temp, the smoker stayed around 100F. The basil had a light sweet smoke, an hour was all the smoke I wanted, so I took the fish inside.

I brushed them with a little canola oil then finished them to firm and flaky in a 250F oven, about 30 minutes.

Holy smokes is it good. Bonne Femme ate a whole filet during the taste test. The skin is very good too. Mix it up with some crème fraîche and some herbs or make rillettes and you got yourself a smoky canapé. But like I said most of this fish didn't even make it to the toast. To Conclude: You don't need to live near a fancy pants deli to live the high life, just fresh ingredients and something in your yard that can burn.

Cheers.

Ham Serial Part Four: Light em up

Cold Smoking and Hot Smoking Ham and Bacon.

This is yesterday about three. Three pieces of cured belly and a ham.

The idea here is to apply smoke by smoldering sawdust over an electric hot plate. The outside air temp (28 F) kept the main chamber below 90 F.

Six hours and two inches of snow later, it time to put these bits to bed.

Today I fired up the bullet and I did some minor tying to round out the joint. The smoker settled at 200F.

I placed the bacon on the lower level. After about an hour the bacon had reached 150F, so I took them out.

After a total of six hours smoking, the ham got to an internal temp of 155F. Done. Was all the fussing worth it? I dunno, we'll find out soon.

Cheers.

Sumtime

Summer Sausage

Hot 'nuff? when the going gets hot, the hot get smokin. As ritual for inhabitants of every great metropolis at the heights of summer, it is incumbent upon us to escape the grit for the country airs. What you don't have a summer home? Yeah, me neither. So one must ply great friends with sausage and mustard so that his family can share a woodsy hole for a quiet weekend in the country. Actually there wasn't much plying involved, just planning, and we were off for the wilds of Wisconsin.

The prep started the Monday before for summer sausage. I don't have any in-depth research to present on the origins of this particular sausage (during the summer the library only stocks romance novels and historical fiction, I finally broke down and checked out Heat, it was actually very good) but suffice to say, as any Midwesterner would, being the oft the recipient of the Hickory Hills gift boxes thus being very familiar with the cased meat, summer sausage strives (and succeeds) to be a heavily smoked fermented semi dry salami type sausage. Except instead of drying and curing for three weeks or three months, you can make it (at home!) in three days.

The recipe uses a few exotic ingredients: Fermento, dextrose and pink salt. Fermento is a dairy derived powder that provides a tang that takes fermentation months to achieve. I got mine from Sausage Maker. Dextrose is corn sugar. Pink salt is 6.25 percent sodium nitrite and is an ingredient used to keep botulism at bay when curing meat. I got mine at the Spice House. I adapted the recipe from Charcuterie:

Summer Sausage

631 g Pork shoulder, cubed

204 g Pork Fat (in this case from the shoulder), diced

835 g Chuck, trimmed and cubed.

30 g Salt

22 g dextrose

5 g pink salt

60 g Fermento

12 g whole black mustard seed

3 g coriander

1 g garlic powder

I combined the cubed meats (not the fat) with the salts and ran it through the large plate of the meat grinder.

Next I mixed the Fermento with about 100 ml of cold water making a thin paste. Then I ran the whole spices through the grinder and added them along with the garlic to the Fermento paste. Using the paddle attachment I mixed the paste with the meat mixture and continued to to mix until it started to come together, about one minute. Finally, using a really big spoon I folded in the diced fat. I put the mixture in a Ziploc, squeezed all the air out, then into the fridge for three days.


On Wednesday, I ran the mixture through the small plate of the meat grinder, and stuffed it into hog casings, then then let the links rest overnight on hooks. Sorry I didn't take any photos here, but you can look at last years summer sausage post to see what's going on.


On Thursday, ( wait I thought you said three days? Well yeah, if you are in a hurry, but things taste better when you don't rush) I set up the smoker. I wanted to smoke the sausage for as long as possible so cold smoke was the order. In the Spring when the neighbor and I did Sausage Mania, I bought and some hickory sawdust, a steel bowl and a hot plate, in an attempt to simplify the cold smoking process. I figured I could put the hot plate in the bottom of my bullet smoker and smolder the hickory dust for a fine cold smoke. Except it got too hot. Cold smoking (so I have read) is supposed to be done at temperatures below 100F. This time I wasn't as fussy, I was going to let the smoke take its own course. Besides it was already above 90F outside anyway.

The hood temp settled around 125F. My plan was to smoke them as low as possible for five hours then crank my K-Mart hot plate to white hot and finish the sausages to an internal temperature of 150F.

While that's cooking why not relax and make some sausage?

The boys cranked out four pounds of Bratwurst with marjoram and caraway.

Back to the summer sausage. After seven hours of smoking I couldn't get the internal temp past 135F, so I finished them in the oven(final internal temp 160F), then put them in and ice bath, then let them rest unwrapped in the fridge.

On Friday we drove to Wisconsin.

photo credit harryspiderman

photo credit harryspiderman

When weren't pursuing important activities such as sleeping in a hammock or hiking, we ate our summer sausage with cheese, specifically Pleasant Hill Reserve from the Uplands Cheese Company.

Sausage and Mustard?

Amerikanische Rostbratwurst in natural habitat (Wisconsin).

I hope you are making good food and enjoying beautiful Summer weekends.

Cheers.

Building a Cold Smoker: The summer sausage episode part 2

Dear Gentle Readers:

Sorry I have not updated you sooner. Didn't realize the summer sausage would become such a cliffhanger; a regular who shot J.R., huh? For all of you writing in clamoring for closure, I'll give you the short answer so that you can get back to work translating German or whatever it is you do between instant messages, everything turned out very nice. As for the long answer, well....

If August is the Fairest of Months, then September (October too) is the shank of the year. It is the beginning of the season for the art world, school, tv and, oh yes, OSU football. The garden is still plump with tomatoes, squash and eggplant, but the weather is starting to nip. It is simply a beautiful time I feel best enjoyed by sitting around a table with friends and family enjoying something good. To that end I have been cooking like crazy and I have a bunch of episodes ready to go. Future updates may include: Chorizo in the morning, My First Pate, Bacon Madness, and Jerry's Kielbasa. But as we are here on the last day of summer let's finish what we started.

The summer sausage episode part duex.

So we left off last time with sausages hanging to dry in the refrigerator. The recipe called for ten hours or drying, it ended up being two days. So after a couple of days I finally had time to set up the cold smoker.

3. The Rig

I didn't do a whole lot of research on this design, I needed to get the smoke out of my Weber smoker and into my other grill and reduce the smoke temp to under 100F. Me and the boys made a trip to Menard's.

We picked up a galvanized roof vent thingy and some aluminum dryer vent. I fashioned the roof vent to fit into the fire door access on the smoker. I secured it with toggle bolts.

Next I attached the dryer vent tubing. I first tried foil tape, but learned quickly that the adhesive fails at temperature. Some drywall screws solved that problem. Time to get the rig smokin.

4. The smoke

The cold smoke temperature stayed around 90F. I let it go about 4 hours then I hot smoked the sausages to an internal temp of 150F. To raise the temp I simply moved the meat. The hot smoking took about an hour.

For the fire I started with a little charcoal then used split hickory. Since I kept a small fire, I had to tend to it a lot. I suppose you could use the wood chunks that Weber makes but I would trim off the bark first.

So why cold smoke? For smoke you need fire, fire cooks things, so if you want to put a lot of smoke on something without overcooking it, cool the smoke. One of the concerns in holding meat in the 100F zone is that bacteria can thrive; the meat must be cured.

After the cold smoke, the sausages did not look much different but after the hot smoke..Now that looks like sausage.

special thanks to the boys for providing the risers.

5. The finish

So anyway the thuringer and the summer sausage were among the featured attractions for an office party S put together. The German guy from the Dubai office said he had never had thuringer cured and cooked like this but he thought it was good. The guy from the international sales department wanted to know what made the summer sausage spicy, I wasn't sure..Maybe the combination of pepper and the smoke? I had forgotten that I had put in a secret ingredient.

Secret ingredient.

As I mentioned in the previous post (I know, so long ago you forgot) The ingredients for both sausages are virtually identical except one is beef the other pork. Additionally, The pork thuringer had whole peppercorns while the summer sausage had no pepper at all. The spicy flavor came from ground mustard. In the thuringer I used plain old Coleman's mustard powder, but for the summer sausage, I ground up whole black mustard seeds (see photo). I picked it up at the Spice House. I think the mustard made a made the difference. While S thought both sausages were good, I thought the summer sausage was way better. The thuringer seemed rather one dimensional. The fermento was very interesting, both sausages had that salami "tang."

As for cold smoking, it idefinitely worth the trouble. I recently used the rig to smoke bacon and kielbasa. I'll have to do some research to maybe simply the process. A lot of cold smokers use hickory sawdust to create the smoke, maybe that's next. In the mean time I will try to keep you up to date on the state of the sausage in a more timely manner. As fall brings in the cool weather it is time to work on dry curing salami and maybe some guanciale.

Cheers.

P.S. Update on the Prickly Pear Episode: After a month in the basement we had a syrupy tart purple liquid which no one bothered to mix into margaritas. To drink it straight it was peppery, then floral, then a sweetart pucker followed by a hot breath that went through your throat out your shoulders then tingled down your back. Needless to say the entire liter was drunk in one night (the office party). All that was left was several plastic cocktail cups half full of maserated fruit. I said the fruit was too seedy to be eaten(like giant raspberries with seeds the size of Mini Chiclets) but once you start chasing the prickly pear, I guess you have to find out for yourself.