First Volunteers of the Year and Other News

Spring is not quite here and already volunteers through the WWOOF program are beating down our doors.  So far we have three young people scheduled to join us in March.  I was a bit hesitant to take them on so early in the year, thinking that it's really not the best time to teach much about what we do here.  But I decided I would just give them fair warning about weather, and the lack of many growing things, and take whatever volunteer help still wanted to show up.

What I've learned about the WWOOF program is that I have to be on my game when volunteers turn up.  I do more work when they're here than otherwise, and not just because it's much like having house guests.  I want to keep them busy for the agreed upon half-day of work, sure.  There's no sense accepting volunteers and not making good use of the help.  But I also feel a sense of responsibility to teach these volunteers.  Maybe they don't expect as much as that, but I can't help myself.  And in order to teach, I have to be out there, showing, talking, demonstrating.  Projects have to be ready to tackle.  And in order to do that, well, I've got to do my homework.

Such as ordering some new hens.  You see, in the last month an egg eating habit has developed in the hen house.  This is a bad habit, one of the worst that hens can have, from my perspective.  I'm not sentimental about my hens.  I value them and treat them well, but they're not pets.  They're here to provide us with eggs to eat and to barter, and to produce manure and help control insect pests.  When they eat their own eggs, they're not adding value.  I don't know how the habit developed, but I've seen evidence of at least five eggs eaten this month.  I don't know if it's one hen doing all the damage or if they've all learned that eggs are good to eat.  To me, it's immaterial.  Repercussions will be positively Old Testament; punishment will be meted out collectively.  So this batch of hens is going as soon as I can replace them with new layers.

Which brings me back to the volunteers showing up early next week.  One of the young men we'll be hosting specifically wanted to learn about chickens, and another about slaughtering.  I didn't think we'd be able to accommodate the second interest, since our layers are still relatively young.  But a bad case of egg eating changes things.  So I think we'll not only be slaughtering, and processing chickens, but also pressure canning some tough birds and making chicken stock too.  Good things for strapping young lads to know, I'd say.

If we get another run of bad weather, there will be minor DIY projects for the garden to pursue in the garage, and bread baking in the kitchen.  Otherwise, we'll start the early spring tasks in the garden.  I've also ordered a couple slabs of pork belly from one of my farmers, to turn into bacon.  So I'll be able to teach a bit about curing while the lads are here. Somehow I suspect that if the guys think canning and bread baking is sissy work, they'll take a different view of makin' bacon.  (And yes, I checked; they're carnivores.)  It's exciting to me too; I've never made bacon at home before.  I know that as WWOOF host sites go, our homestead is not the norm, and so neither are the activities that our volunteers pitch in with.  Most WWOOF hosts are proper farms.  Sometimes I feel a bit apologetic about this, but in the end I think what we have to teach are good, practical skills.

In other news, seed starting has begun.   So far it's just the early stuff indoors, and some experimental frost sowing outdoors.  I've been working on breaking down all the branches pruned from our apple tree early this year.  It finally struck me as absurd that we haul our branches down to the yard waste facility, and then haul back finished compost and mulch.  We'll still go for the free soil building materials, but I've decided not to part with the soil building materials we've got onsite.  So I've been cutting up the very small branches with hand pruners, and spreading the bits all around our fruit trees.  It's a slow job, but it's just nice to be outside for an hour or two this time of year.  And the spring overload hasn't yet begun, so I've got the time.

Okay, final bit of news is a heads up for you readers.  I've ordered a few copies of Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen's book, The Urban Homestead.  I'll be giving away two copies here when the books arrive, but it looks as though I ordered the expanded and revised version, which won't ship out until mid-March.  As soon as the order ships, I'll post a giveaway here.  So check back later for a chance to win a new and improved copy of the book.  In the meantime, you can check out their great urban homesteading blog.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Working Guanciale Recipe and Methodology

 I've got a batch of guanciale in progress, so it seems a good time to present my working recipe and methodology for this delicacy.  I say "working" because, while I've had some experience in taking raw jowls and turning them into cured and smoked guanciale, I'm still tweaking the seasonings, timing, and methodology as I go along.  With this post I'm going to venture into a topic that carries some risk.  My methods almost certainly will not meet USDA guidelines for food safety or sanitation.  Although my husband and I have eaten several jowls' worth of this guanciale and lived to tell the tale, you are hereby warned that the procedures outlined here may result in food-born illness.  So follow them at your own risk.

When beginning to experiment with home curing meat, it's important to start with meat you can trust in the first place.  Clean meat.  If you wish to try a batch of guanciale, sourcing the jowls will probably be the most difficult thing for many of you.  I'm lucky to have one friend who raises hogs, and an established acquaintance with another hog farmer, both of whom keep their animals on pasture and eschew hormones and unnecessary antibiotics.  These people raise hogs the way I would raise them if I had the acreage, and the chain from farm to butcher to customer is short, well known, and transparent. So I'm very comfortable with using their meat, and confident that this is clean food.   Your best bet will likely be a small scale local farmer who sells pork by the whole or half animal.  Quite often the jowls are not wanted by the customers, so the butcher often salvages this cut for head cheese, scrapple, or sausage.  If you order a half or whole animal, by all means request the jowls.  Once you've established a working relationship with the farmer, you may be able to acquire the jowls other customers don't want either very cheaply or entirely free.

Despite my caveats at the beginning of this post, which you should consider seriously, I want to reassure you somewhat.  When curing pork jowls, you are starting with a solid piece of meat, as opposed to ground or even cubed meat.  This means you are inherently starting from a safer position.  Meat with no cuts into it presents few opportunities for contamination.  When you can thoroughly cover all exposed surfaces with a curing mix, the risk of any pathogen establishing itself is vanishingly small.  Furthermore, I'm going to recommend that all beginners work with small enough batches that the initial stages of curing can be done in the refrigerator.  Practice exemplary sanitation when working with meats you will be curing.  Make sure your hands, knives, cutting board and food containers - anything the meat comes into contact with - are spotlessly clean.  When you add to good sanitation the precaution of starting with clean meat in the first place, and the protection of refrigeration, you can be confident that your curing process is going to produce something safe to eat.  When I started home curing I even began the air drying process in the refrigerator.  I now do it in our root cellar or even the garage when the temperatures are appropriate.

For additional insurance against spoilage, I tend to smoke the meats I cure at home.  Wood smoke is a natural means of preservation and it happens to add a wonderful flavor.  If you have a smoker, plan to use it for your first few runs through the curing process.  By building in these multiple layers of safety, you will enjoy your finished cured meats without misgivings and learn how easy it really is.  Leave sausage preparation for later, after you've taken a few batches of solid cuts through the entire process.

So.  On to the details of guanciale.  You will need: a metric scale capable of handling fractions of grams, and a scale capable of weighing the jowls you will work with.  You can weigh in imperial and convert pounds to metric if need be.  Also, a cutting board, a sharp fillet or butcher's knife, salt, sugar, spices, a spice grinder, a container large enough to hold the jowls, metal skewers or racks, newspaper, and optionally, a smoker.

I'm indicating a large salivary gland, but there are many others below my finger as well

Trimming the jowls
Ideally, you will do the trimming of the jowls yourself, and with a sharp knife of course, so that as little fat is removed as possible.  Some butchers remove almost all the fat, assuming that customers want as lean a cut as possible.  Fat protects lean tissue from excessive drying during the curing process, so it's worthwhile to do the job yourself if you can.  You will need to remove the salivary glands from the jowls.  These usually have a characteristic, light brownish coloration to them, in contrast to the reddish muscle tissue.  But I have on at least one occasion seen salivary glands almost identical in color to the muscle.  Fortunately, they are further distinguished by shape, which tends to be round, sort of like a bubble surrounded by fat.  And the fatty tissue around these glands is also grainy or bubbly, for want of a better word.  This fat should also be removed, since it can conceal small salivary glands.  The fat you want to leave on the jowl has a smooth, solid texture.  Also remove any skin that adheres to the jowls, and wash off any stray bristles or other material.  The trimmings can be given to other livestock or pets, either cooked or raw as you prefer.

Two detail images of salivary glands and the different colors they can be.  (Click to biggify.)




Weigh the jowls and prepare the curing mix - sample calculations in blue
Once your jowls are cleaned, trimmed, and patted dry, weigh them and convert the weight into grams.  A conversion calculator can be found here, or simply multiply the weight in pounds (in decimal form, such as 8.475 lbs) by 453.6.  This gives you the weight in grams (8.475 x 453.6 = 3844.26).  Using the number you derive, make the following calculations:

[Meat in grams]  x  0.025  =  kosher salt in grams  (3844.3 g x 0.025 = 96.1 g of salt)
[Meat in grams]  x  0.015  =  cane sugar in grams  (3844.3 g x 0.015 = 57.7 g of sugar)

-This is a basic curing mix, the active ingredients that will extract moisture and do most of the preservation.  The remaining ingredients will contribute extra flavor, and their weights are derived not directly from the weight of the meat, but from the weight of the salt.

[Salt in grams] ÷ 14 = dried juniper berries in grams (96.1 ÷ 14 = 6.9 g juniper)
[Salt in grams] ÷ 7 = fresh thyme in grams (96.1 ÷ 7 = 13.7 g fresh thyme)
[Salt in grams] ÷ 16 = white peppercorns in grams (96.1 ÷ 16 = 6 g white pepper)
[Salt in grams] ÷ 50 = black peppercorns in grams (96.1 ÷ 50 = 1.9 g black pepper)
[Salt in grams] ÷ 200 = dried bay leaves in grams (96.1 ÷ 200 = 0.5 g bay leaf)

Be sure to make the first two calculations based on the weight of the meat, and all subsequent calculations based on the weight of the salt.  This is done simply in order to work with fewer digits.  If you need to make substitutions for any of these seasonings, keep in mind that dried herbs are much more concentrated in flavor than fresh herbs.  So, for instance, if you use dried thyme in place of fresh, reduce the weight by at least 2/3.  If substituting fresh juniper or bay leaves for the dried, multiply the weight by 3 to 5.  Other flavorings that I have tried in the past and may continue to experiment with include fresh rosemary, allspice, fennel, and star anise. 

Combine the salt and sugar in a bowl. Finely chop the fresh thyme and mix it into the salt mixture.  Grind the remaining spices until very fine.  Mix these into the salt mixture until the curing mix is homogeneous.

Curing
Into the bottom of a non-reactive container large enough to hold all the jowls, scatter a heaping tablespoon of the curing mix.  Holding each jowl over the container, coat all surfaces of each jowl thoroughly with the curing mixture, working it into any folds in the meat.  When laying one jowl on top of another, sprinkle extra curing mix between them.  Scatter any leftover mix over the top layer of jowls.  Cover the container tightly with a lid or plastic wrap, and place it in the refrigerator or a root cellar at refrigerator temperature.

Curing mix, freshly applied

Let the jowls cure in the refrigerator for ten days, marking the start and end dates on your calendar when you begin. Check the jowls at least every other day.  Turn them over and bring the ones on the bottom to the top. The meat and curing mix will naturally form a brine.  You may pour this off after the fifth day if it is excessive, but this is not necessary if you keep rotating the meat.  Cover the jowls well after each rotation.  By the end of this initial curing stage, the meat should have become noticeably stiffer, but remain somewhat flexible.

Air-drying
On the tenth day, pour off all liquid from the jowls and pat them dry.  Either hang them from skewers suspended in the refrigerator, or spread them out on racks to air dry in the refrigerator for another seven days.  (If the outdoor air temperature at this time is below 50 F/10 C, you can allow the jowls to dry in a dark, sheltered spot with good air flow.) Mark the beginning and end dates of this period on your calendar when you begin.  They will release moisture during this stage, so you may want something to catch the drips.  After drying for one week in a cool area, brush off any excess dried curing mix that remains on the meat.  If necessary, you can rinse the jowls off under running water.  Pat them dry as soon as the curing mix is removed.

Guanciale on skewers in the fridge

Smoking and additional air drying
You may now smoke the jowls if you wish.  I like a medium smoking temperature for about 4 hours, using apple wood chips, but maple, oak, hickory and other woods could be used.  According to strict tradition, guanciale is not a smoked meat.  But guanciale affumicata is not unknown in Italy, and I strongly prefer the addition of real smoke flavor.  I also prefer the advantage of an additional preservative to the salt and sugar.

Skewers are handy for the smoking process too.

Additional air curing after smoking.  Good air circulation is important.

After the initial air drying and optional smoking, the guanciale can be eaten, or it can continue to air dry for an additional 2-4 weeks, depending on air temperature and humidity.  Good temperatures for air curing range from 40-55 F (4-13 C).  Humidity should be no higher than 75% and no less than 50%.  The jowls will continue to lose moisture in this stage, and it will likely be enough to drip slowly from the meat.  You may wish to lay down newspaper under the jowls to save cleanup.  When the guanciale is fully air cured, it will no longer release enough liquid to drip.  It will have lost more flexibility and become noticeably stiff.  In theory, you can dry the meat as much as you like.  I find that I prefer guanciale that is still a little flexible and moist.  Over drying makes the muscle tissue tougher and causes both the lean and fatty tissue to burn more quickly when cooking.  Leaving some moisture in the jowls makes them slower to burn.  You will likely want to experiment with the length of the final air curing stage to see what you prefer.

At no time during the curing process should any off odors be present.  If you have smoked your guanciale, the smoke should be the only prominent scent.  Unsmoked guanciale should have very little odor at all.  If you detect an odor of spoilage, trust your nose and discard the meat.  If this should happen, it will probably be accompanied by visible signs of contamination.

If you wish to experiment with different flavorings or techniques from one batch to another, it is invaluable to keep a notebook with a record of how you prepared each batch, with tasting notes on the final product, and your ideas for modifications in future batches.

Although the finished guanciale may be eaten raw, I tend to cook it and use it sparingly as a flavoring ingredient.  I like it sliced as thinly as possible, laid on top of a pizza just as it goes into the oven.  I like to cut it into lardons and render the fat to cook my onions in when preparing a pasta sauce or risotto.  Of course it's incomparable in spaghetti alla carbonara, which is its best known use.  It can serve as a substitute for bacon in most recipes.

Hope you've enjoyed this overview of my approach to guanciale, and that it encourages you to try some home curing yourself.

Dispatches from the Curing Front

I spent yesterday in a kitchen with three farmers and several hundred pounds of pork and beef. We worked on curing pork bellies, fatback, and preparing sausages in real casings. We also regularly sampled finished specimens of lomo (Spanish, cured pork tenderloin), pepperoni, basturma (Lebanese, cured beef), bresaola (Italian, loin cured with red wine), and several other delicacies. As I had no meat of my own to contribute, I brought along a dish of pork organ paprikash, and some of my homegrown potatoes for lunch.

It was hard work, but it was also fun. I personally prepared about 45 pounds of bacon, 30 pounds of tesa, and about 15 pounds of salo, Ukrainian cured fatback. (The picture above shows a bus tub with three of the whole pork bellies I prepared. The liquid in the tub isn't blood; it's maple syrup.) The simple repetition of the steps gives me a reassuring sense of familiarity with the process. I came home with six pork jowls from pasture-raised hogs to cure at home. I'm very glad of this as I really miss having home-cured guanciale on hand in my larder. I will either pay for the jowls or give some of them back to the farmer for payment. These jowls are much, much leaner and meatier than the two I previously cured, but I look forward to seeing how they turn out. I plan to start them curing today.

The batch of lardo I started at home has taken a detour. As soon as I took them out of the cure and hung them up in our root cellar to dry down, we had a heavy, multi-day rainstorm. The humidity in the root cellar got as high as 90%, and the pieces of lardo were all wet to the touch. I panicked and decided to get them out of the damp and add a little more preservation to the mix. I smoked all of them. Smoke is itself a preservative, and has the nice side benefit of adding a flavor I love. So that batch of fatback is no longer really lardo; I have no idea what to call it. It's drying down now in the refrigerator, though I could just as well put it back in the root cellar. I've used bits of it for cooking so far, and it gives a really lovely flavor to dishes. I may start over with another batch of lardo.

I also learned yesterday that I probably could have just let the lardo go in the high humidity brought on by the storm. As long as the temperature stayed cool, the temporarily excessive humidity probably wouldn't have been a problem. I should be able to use the root cellar for drying cured meats year-round so long as the temperature stays below 60 F (15 C). Since the root cellar is on the northwest corner of our home and mostly below grade, I think there's a fair chance it will remain cool enough all through the summer. Humidity of 70-75% is considered ideal for hanging cured meats, but higher levels are not problematic unless they persist for a long time or are accompanied by high temperatures. In the case of dried sausages, even higher humidity is desirable during hanging, since low humidity results in case hardening, a condition in which the outer surface of the sausage dries so quickly and thoroughly that it becomes an impermeable barrier to the moisture in the center of the sausage. In that case the center stays very soft. Contrasted with the hard outer surface, this results in a sausage that is ruined so far as texture is concerned.


Most of all, what I took away from both yesterday's cure-fest and my own fumbling experiments with home-curing is that this is really a very easy method of food preservation. Cavemen did it; there's just very little that can go awry with a salt cure. It makes no sense that curing meat is regarded as such a dangerous and arcane practice. This is a revelation to me; I was as much under the impression that meat needs to be handled with a level of caution approaching paranoia as anyone else in American society. But I now think that if you're beginning with meat that has been cleanly raised, slaughtered, and butchered, (in other words, no industrial meat) you'd be hard pressed to go wrong. It's ridiculously easy and there's hardly anything to it, beyond a measure of hygiene and common sense.

If you live where humidity is reasonably high and temperatures reasonably low for at least part of the year (or if you can arrange those conditions), and if you can get locally produced meat that hasn't gone through an industrial meat processing plant, you could safely cure meats at home. Very little equipment is needed for a beginner who just wants to cure whole cuts of meat, especially if you're working with small quantities. A scale is helpful, but not absolutely necessary. If you want to make sausage, the equipment needs go up, as does the need for stricter sanitary controls. With whole cuts of meat, there are far fewer opportunities for contamination. All you need is a supply of salt, perhaps some sugar, spices or herbs, a container for the curing, and a suitable place for hanging the meat to dry. You can easily improvise equipment for the hanging, either skewers, or butcher's twine, or a saved net bag that onions are sold in. It certainly helped my confidence to begin curing during the winter months when outside air temperatures pretty well precluded spoilage. But so long as you have an area that remains cool enough, you can do it anytime of year.

If you want to learn about home-curing through reading, there are many books out there. I got a few recommendations yesterday which I'll be requesting through my local library. The few books I have personally read and can recommend are:

The River Cottage Meat Book
Cooking by Hand
Home Sausage Making

As I have the chance to read more titles on charcuterie, I may update this list of recommended titles. In the meantime, explore and experiment! There's a whole world of home-cured deliciousness out there!

Bits of News

Once again, I have snippets of news to share, but no one item meriting a post of its own.

I'm attending a three-session class on soils given by the Extension Office in my area. Last night was the second class meeting. I'm learning some interesting things. I was surprised to learn, for instance, that the county I live in has 183 different soil types as defined by the US Soil Survey, a higher number than any other county in Pennsylvania. That's a lot of diversity! I also learned that visiting the website of the Soil Survey will give you a fairly detailed report of the attributes of soils in nearly any part of the US, for free. (Even though it's got a "shopping cart" - it's really free.) You can look up parcels by address or by navigating to them by a map. I also learned about Sudax, a cover crop I'd never even heard of. It's some sort of cross between varieties of Sudan grass, and it loves heat. The idea is to mow it several times during the season, so that it sloughs off parts of its extensive root system into the soil, adding organic matter each time. If it's not mowed, it gets tall and almost woody, like corn (maize). We get a free soil test with the class enrollment. Just as soon as the snow cover melts away from the garden, I'll get in there for some samples.

I've started some seedlings indoors. Let me tell you, this is a challenging endeavor with two young cats in the house. I've already chucked a couple of cell packs of tatsoi in the cold frame, figuring they had even odds on surviving the cold nights versus the depredations of two rampaging young felines.

It's that tantalizing time of year when the air is full of promises of spring. Birdsong has returned, the bulb flowers are pushing up leaves, and the dawn is coming earlier each day. As much work as spring is, it's stunningly beautiful, and well worth the wait, in my part of the world.

I've begun my second experiment with home curing. Really, I think I've caught some sort of cured pork bug - the ease and the success of the guanciale drives me to do more. I bought ten pounds of fat back from a grass-based farmer in my area, and I started a batch of lardo last Friday. That's pretty much what it sounds like: cured pork fat. Though in some circles, the euphemism "white prosciutto" is used. Lardo is not rendered fat, despite the similarity with the English word "lard." Lardo di Colonnata is a centuries old traditional product, which was eaten like a lunch meat by quarry workers at the source of Italy's finest marble. In fact, lardo di Colonnata is traditionally salted down in rough hewn marble troughs. Sadly, all our rough hewn marble troughs were spoken for. My lardo is progressing nicely in a ceramic crock pot. I went heavy on the seasonings, with fresh thyme, fresh rosemary, sliced garlic, black pepper, and dried bay leaves. It smells really good. In a few more days I'll remove it from the curing mix and find somewhere to hang it to dry down. I plan to use it in place of cooking oil for certain dishes, especially pastas. As a cooking medium, it will have the benefit of adding a great deal of flavor. It'll probably also grace the occasional homemade pizza. If the lardo works out well, I may try salo next, which is a more simply spiced Ukrainian/Hungarian version of lardo. I'll keep you posted.

Guanciale Report: Awesome!

After a lovely Saturday marked by a January thaw, and filled with local foods bought at an on-farm market, seed swapping with other gardeners, and the chance to further our acquaintance with Kelly & Meg of Future House Farm, Sunday dawned grey and forbidding. A freezing drizzle soon set in. An indoor sort of day. I decided it was time to check on the guanciale ("gwan-CHA-lay").

This project started back just before Thanksgiving, and I was due to check on its progress earlier this month. For a variety of reasons, I didn't get around to it until yesterday. The five weeks of air-curing left the pork jowls quite stiff. The apple-wood-smoked jowl had a lovely light smoke aroma, and the unsmoked one still barely any scent at all. Authentic guanciale is only cured, not smoked, so the smoked jowl probably shouldn't be called guanciale at all. What can I say? I like smoked foods, and I've got that handy homemade garbage can smoker. I couldn't resist.


I brought both jowls inside and weighed them. Unfortunately I didn't weigh the raw jowls before starting the curing experiment, but the finished pieces weighed in together at 3 lbs, 2.4 oz. Then I sliced off a few thin pieces from the real guanciale. The texture was noticeably different from any sort of bacon I've ever handled. The slice itself was quite stiff, not floppy and flexible like a slice of normal bacon would be, even though it was easy enough to cut the slice with a sharp knife. These slices released plenty of fat as they cooked in a skillet. They took less time to cook than bacon would, probably because they contained a lot less moisture than conventional bacon.

The flavor of these slices was intense! Extremely meaty and quite salty is how I would describe it, though the sweetness of the sugar in the curing mix was also there in the profile. The flavors of the thyme, black pepper, and juniper berry added to the curing mix were not very pronounced. Having sampled the real guanciale, we next tried the smoked jowl. It too was much more intensely flavored than any bacon we'd ever tried, but the smokiness really took it to another level. I think the amount of smoke on this jowl was just about perfect, neither overpowering nor faint. We liked them both. But I think if we're honest, we liked the smoky one better. Guanciale affumicato, perhaps?

Because we found both samples quite salty, I brushed the excess salt and sugar off of both jowls before storing them in the refrigerator, though the salt content is likely already set. These cured meats are probably not going to be eaten straight up, the way we sampled them, but more likely mixed into sauces, pastas and other dishes. In those contexts, the saltiness probably won't be an issue since other ingredients will balance the salt. In the future though, I might let the jowls air cure for a week and then brush off the excess salt to limit the saltiness in the finished guanciale.


I didn't use any nitrites in the curing mix, only salt, a little sugar, and herbs and spices. Nitrites are usually added to preserve a nice rosy pink color in cured meats. We found that the meat in the unsmoked guanciale was quite pink anyway. The smoked one has more of a brownish tinge, but looking at this photo (smoked jowl on the right) I suspect the center of the smoked one is going to look more pink and less brown. In any case, I don't care enough about the color to add a potentially unhealthy chemical to my curing mix.

This experiment was exceptionally easy to carry out. It took me about the same amount of time to go pick up the jowls and come home with them as it did for me to complete the necessary hands-on work of trimming out the jowls, mixing and applying the curing mix, smoking one of them, and then hanging the jowls to air dry. Of course, the timing was critical. The air drying stage of the curing process wouldn't work without the cold temperatures of winter. But I am very pleased with how this initial attempt at home curing went. I didn't even have a book to consult, just used what resources I could find online.

We're going to try to corral a few friends for a dinner of spaghetti alla carbonara, made with our own eggs and garlic, this home-cured guanciale, a local "Asiago" grating cheese, and some boughten organic pasta and black pepper. A mostly local dinner in the depths of winter! If that dinner materializes, I'll let you know how it goes.

Guanciale Update

I thought an in-progress report would be appropriate for my first home curing experiment. After removing the guanciale from the refrigerator, I succumbed to temptation and smoked one of them in my homemade garbage can smoker, with wood chips from our own apple tree. This is entirely inauthentic, and I'm not even sure I should continue to call that jowl guanciale. But what can I say? We like smoked pork products, and I thought a side-by-side comparison would be interesting. I smoked the one jowl for about four hours. The smoker was quite warm during that time, but not what I would call truly hot.

The jowls have now been air curing for over two weeks. I rigged up a pretty crude hanging system in the unheated garage, using a tomato cage plucked from the garden supplies. I just wanted to make sure no critters could climb up to them. If rats were a concern, this simple design wouldn't cut it. But all we've ever seen evidence of in the garage is mice, and none lately. So this should be fine.

I was surprised to find that the jowls started dripping again after bringing them into the garage. When they hung in the refrigerator, they lost enough moisture to drip for a day or two, and then stopped for three or four days. I suppose the slightly higher temperature of the garage changed things. Even with very low overnight temperatures, the garage has been consistently in the low- to mid-40's F. I keep them over newspaper so that salty meat goo doesn't fall on the garage floor.

The smell of the jowls is nice. The smoked one obviously smells smoky and delicious. The unsmoked one has very little smell at all, just a faint meaty scent like what you'd get from a very firm hard salami. I can see that both of the cuts are getting smaller as they lose moisture. Unfortunately, I didn't weigh them before I started the curing process, so I have no idea what the figures are. They are also becoming noticeably stiffer as they cure.

The plan is to let the jowls cure for at least two more weeks. After that, it's carbonara time, baby! I recently picked up a couple good sized hunks of Asiago-style grating cheese from a local grass-based dairy. I'd prefer a pecorino for carbonara, but I'll take what I can find in my own area. Since the cheese is so well aged, it'll hold for months in the refrigerator. Not that it's likely to last that long.

First Foray Into Home Curing: Guanciale

Let me tell you why it pays to know your farmer. That farmer friend I've mentioned a few times? The one who raises her animals on pasture, including our Thanksgiving turkey, and who occasionally throws some bones my way for free? She called me up on the Friday before Thanksgiving to ask if I wanted some random pork bits. Seems a few of her customers that bought whole or half hogs didn't want some of the less choice cuts, even though they had paid for the entire animal. So I was being offered pork jowls, organs, and possibly some other trimmings or offal as well. Of course I thought of Hank, and of course I said I was interested. My policy is not to turn down free handouts unless what's being offered would really present problems. Free pasture-raised local pork does not present any problems. The need for a little research, yes; problems, no.

We got to the butcher's shop on Sunday morning. It wasn't clear exactly what bits were unclaimed, and it was clear that the butcher would put whatever he was permitted to keep into scrapple or headcheese, and render down any fat into lard. Not being a paying customer, I didn't want to seem too acquisitive. I left with two pork jowls, a liver, heart and a tongue.

We're headed into the perfect time of year for curing meat - the dry, cold months of winter. And I've long wanted to try making my own guanciale (say: gwan CHA lay) - cured pork jowls prized in southern Italy and eaten like bacon. It's the authentic ingredient in several traditional pasta sauces, including spaghetti alla carbonara, for which I've always substituted American bacon. Traditional carbonara only has a handful of ingredients: eggs, garlic, cured pork, black pepper, noodles, and a good aged grating cheese. We produce our own eggs and garlic. I can get a surprisingly good grating cheese locally made from pasture-raised raw milk. Being able to source locally and then cure pork jowls into guanciale, and therefore to prepare a truly local carbonara or Amatriciana would be nothing to sneeze at. So starting about ten days ago I embarked on my first home curing project.

I cannot tell you how thrilled I was to trim out a pair of hog jowls, scatter a mixture of salt, sugar, black pepper, other spices and some herbs from our garden over them, weight it all down in a bowl, and stash them in the fridge. I felt like the cat that ate the canary, with a free pork experiment in the fridge. It almost didn't matter how it turned out. Almost. As the meat sat in the salt-sugar mixture over the past week, it released a fair amount of liquid which I poured off from time to time. I added some more of the curing mix and turned the jowls over each time I did this. After just over a week I took the meat out of the bowl. It had a noticeably stiffer feeling than when I first salted it. I reapplied the curing mix wherever the meat seemed to need it, and hung it up in our refrigerator to begin the drying process. I managed the hanging by cutting up a wooden dowel into two pieces to fit in the shelf supports inside the fridge, and then piercing the jowls with two metal skewers which rest across the dowels. I've got a plate underneath to catch any drips as the drying process begins.

Fortunately, my husband is away on a business trip, so it's only me rummaging through the fridge this week. I plan to find a place to finish the curing process in our garage after he gets back. That will allow the outdoor temperatures to settle a little more fully into true winter, and let me monitor the beginning of the drying stage quite carefully. If there's any risk of spoilage, it would be right now, when the meat is out of its brine but still pretty moist. So starting the drying process in the refrigerator seems like a good compromise. All told, the guanciale will probably dry down for 4-6 weeks.

The organ meats were a little more challenging to deal with. I have not been a fan of organ meats over the years. The whole idea of eating a chunk of flesh designed either to clean the blood or produce urine somehow lacks a certain appeal. But I'm trying hard to cure myself of food prejudices, and this is certainly an opportunity to put my resolve to the test. I like haggis, so I'm trying to work my way into things from that angle. Hank recommended an Umbrian sausage called mazzafegati, and a dish of pounded pork heart schnitzel with spaetzle. Those Germans, Italians, and Spaniards, good pork eaters that they've been over the centuries - they're the ones who would know how to eat everything but the squeal. Both of Hank's suggestions sounded good to me, but I didn't have time to deal with making them in the days leading up to Thanksgiving. So all the organs got thrown in the freezer. When I get hold of some pork fat and regular pork to bulk out the liver, I'll take a stab at that mazzafegati. And yes, I'll keep you posted on such efforts, as well as how the guanciale progresses.

Wish me luck in my new food preservation endeavor!