Charcuterie_ The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing - Michael Ruhlman [14]
Brian arrived the following day to demonstrate for us butchering the whole hogs, something he does every couple weeks for his students. In addition to the education of working with steaming innards, which is exactly as disgusting as you would imagine, here’s what we had when we broke each hog down into its various cuts.
2 jowls (guanciale, page 47) for drying, about 1 pound/450 grams each
2 picnic hams, 8 1⁄2 pounds/3.86 kilograms each
2 shoulder butts, 11 pounds/5 kilograms each
2 hams, 23 pounds/10.5 kilograms each
2 bellies, 14 pounds/6.3 kilograms each
Two 30-pound/13.6-kilogram loin sections, which each included an 8-pound/3.6-kilogram loin roast, 2 tenderloins, and a good 10 pounds/4.5 kilograms of back fat
16 pounds/7.25 kilograms trimmings to grind for sausage
15 pounds/6.8 kilograms fat
10 pounds/4.5 kilograms skin
32 pounds/14.5 kilograms bones for stock
about 1 gallon/4 liters blood
In all, a little more than 200 pounds/93 kilograms of usable product per hog, or $1.35 per pound.
Beyond the good value and a better understanding of the whole animal, though, was seeing the difference in quality and size between this naturally grown hog, with its dark pink, well-marbled muscle, deep pork flavor, and copious smooth, supple fat, and commercial pork. The belly was a good three inches thick; none of us had seen one so fine.
Another great pleasure was making a proper blood sausage (see the recipe on page 145). We used the fresh hog intestines for this (cleaned as described on pages 104–105), which we felt was important. We diced and cooked apple and onion and seasoned it, blended it all in a large steel bowl, and added the blood. We funneled the pudding-like mixture into the hog’s intestine, marveling at the extraordinary lavender hue, then cooked it and ate it later that evening. It was mild and sweet from the onion and apple, the blood and egg acting as a binder, like the aspic in headcheese, and the blood a flavoring ingredient rather than a main item. But if you take a poetical view of the world, the triumph of the sausage was to fill the hog’s intestine with its own blood and with the food that was part of its natural diet (it had feasted on apples and onions and it continued to do so, in a manner of speaking). If you don’t take a poetical view, then this must do: it was delicious.
We ate the finer fresh cuts—tenderloin and loin—fairly quickly, but the garlic sausage we made lasted for many weeks, ready to be grilled or roasted or sliced into a white bean and escarole soup that fed scores of people at a Christmas party. I made bacon with part of the belly and confited the rest, slow-slow-roasted the shoulder for pulled pork. The hams (along with many other cuts) went to Mark and Giovanna, who cured them and hung them to dry for prosciutto.
For any home cook who has access to locally raised hogs, and a second refrigerator and freezer for storage, this is a great and exciting option.
The following recipes feature salt’s power to transform food into preparations of extraordinary flavor and texture. Salt appears in two forms in the recipes—dry, in which the salt is simply rubbed onto meat or fish, and wet, in which the salt is dissolved in water. All of the recipes are for foods once valued for their capacity to be preserved by salt, but which we now cherish because they’re so good to eat—things like bacon, cured salmon, and corned beef.
Dry Cures
Curing means to preserve meat or fish with salt. For dry-curing as opposed to curing in a brine, a salt mixture is simply rubbed over the meat or the meat is dredged in it.
An important note about salt measurements: It’s best to weigh salt rather than to measure by volume because salts differ in weight by volume. I use Morton’s Kosher Salt; a cup weighs almost 8 ounces. Brian uses Diamond Crystal kosher salt; a