Canadian Bacon in a Hurry

I was going to make a batch of Canadian Bacon (really, back bacon; it got the Canadian Bacon name during WW2) and I forgot to get it in the cure earlier in the week. So here's a try at doing it faster. This could also be Kassler Rippchen - there's not a huge difference between a pork loin and pork chops - a bit different place on the pig. 

In any event, it's a basic cured pork loin (with some aromatics) that is then smoked to cook it at the end (so you can eat it cold, although it's awfully good warmed up).  Normally, it's a 3-4 day curing process to let the brine diffuse into the center of the meat.  I did it in slices so that the time to cure would be shorter. Cure time is all about the distance from brine to meat and sliced, the longest distance from "brine" to "meat" is more like 1/2" instead of "inches".

 

Trim and slice

Untrimmed Loin

I started with a 2 1/4 lb pork loin from the supermarket. They typically come with a layer of fat (and connective tissue) on one side which I trim off.  The fat just gets in the way of the curing, and nobody really likes eating sinew.
After the trim, I sliced it into 6 chunks a bit more than an inch thick.  One doesn't want to mix up more of the curing brine than you have to, so I did a quick check of the volume of the slices and decided that 2 quarts would be about right. 

Trimmed Loin

Fit Check

Sliced

Brine Mix

 

Into the brine

The standard recipe in Ruhlman's book makes a gallon, so I cut it in half:

• 1.5 cups kosher salt
• 1 cup sugar
• 4 Tablespoons pink salt

This is a really useful basic ratio for things - you can cure anything with this mix. There's nothing special about the sugar - you could replace it with molasses or brown sugar or maple syrup if you want a different flavor.


Then all the seasonings - which is where it gets interesting.  Traditional Canadian Bacon is basically thyme and garlic and that's about it.  I like a more pancetta-like flavor and I decided to go a bit tropical this time - so I used (clockwise around the picture: garlic,  juniper berries, black pepper, thyme, bay leaves, nutmeg, and allspice. (That's a huge piece of nutmeg there, I grated a tiny bit off for this).

Seasoning for the Cure

Ice to chill the brine

I boiled 2 quarts of water in the electric kettle and dissolved the brine components, but I made a mistake - usually, I boil about 1/2 to 3/4 of what I need, dissolve the salt and sugar, and then dump ice in to cool it down.  You don't want to dump boiling hot brine on your meat or it will cook the meat.  You can let it cool, but since I was in a hurry, the ice bath seemed to be the way to fix this particular problem.

Then, spices in the bottom of the container (I smashed the allspice, garlic, pepper, and juniper up before), dump the pork in, then the brine.   I had some leftover pork shoulder from earlier this week, so I just threw it in (cured pork, how can you go wrong?). Something on top to push the floating meat down below the surface, and it's into the refrigerator for a day or so.

 

 

Now we wait

Now we wait....

How Gary Hepler changed my life (for the better)

How Gary Hepler Changed My Life

Today is the memorial for Gary Hepler, one of my high school science teachers.  Unfortunately, I was unable to attend, so here's the comments I would have made, had I been there.

If I were asked “who were your most influential teachers?”, there is no question that Gary Hepler is right up there at the top of the list.  I see by reading the comments of others that I’m not the only one who feels that way. And I’m glad for my daughters that they had science teachers in the same mold, because in these times of populist anti-science, teachers like Gary make the difference – science is fun and useful, even if you’re not going to have a career in science, here’s just a few recollections of how Gary Hepler was an inspiring teacher, and things that he did affect me to this day.

Geology Class

My summer school class before 9^th grade was Gary’s geology class at Poway High.  I think anyone who took those classes can fairly say they were life changing, and probably never to be repeated.  The geology was fun (a lifetime of camping in Yosemite helps create that interest), the field trips were memorable, especially that week long odyssey up to Yosemite and back. And an odyssey it truly was, because we went back and forth along our path never directly to our eventual destination – oh, we need to make a side trip to see this, or, we need to go back here to camp, or, I think this road is a shortcut (on the map, not in real life). 

To this day, I wind up using the knowledge I gained in that class and subsequently in his other classes.  I remember going down to a lecture at San Diego State to hear about this new “plate tectonics” theory that was revolutionizing the science. I’ve commented to my kids (when they would tolerate it) about how the oil rigs in the Santa Barbara channel follow the Ventura anticline.  When I’ve traveled around the world, I’m always paying attention to the geology, and the fascinating history behind the development of the science. This was all inspired by Gary’s class – sure I had a casual interest in geology before, but the idea of going somewhere just because it was geologically interesting is something that has stuck with me through the years.

I stare out the window on plane flights, looking at the geology below, and when I got my pilots license, I used to fly out over the desert and see the geological features, just like in Shelton’s Geology Illustrated, which Gary showed us in class.

Climbing

Gary was probably the reason I started rock climbing.  On the (in)famous geology field trips and in slide shows in class, he showed what fun it was.  That copy of Galen Rowell’s The Vertical World of Yosemite (out of print now) was inspirational: who would have known that eventually I’d take climbing lessons from someone whose picture is in that book. I was already into camping and backpacking – our family made regular trips to Tuolumne Meadows, Boy Scout Troop 680 was hardcore into backpacking, but climbing was something different. 

I never got that good (5.7 on a good day) – it takes serious time and pain to get good, and other things seemed to get in the way. I viewed climbing as a way to get to places you couldn’t otherwise get to, and I think that was part of Gary’s motivation too: we sure saw lots of pictures of mountain top registers and Gary and climbing partners standing on peaks.  I think he secretly longed to outdo Norman Clyde – who is probably the ultimate peak bagger.

I still have a fondness for climbing – particularly trad climbing. Seeing the pictures of Gary using goldline really takes me back. I still have all my gear from 40 years ago. It probably hasn’t been used in 10 years and I doubt the EBs still fit, but when my kids were born, they got rope slings to teeth on, web slings with hexcentrics and stoppers to play with, and I built a climbing wall in the back yard.

Physics & Science classes

I had Gary for Physics in 9^th grade and Chemistry in 10th (I think.. that was long ago, and I'm not going to hunt for my HS transcript).  There’s a lot of lessons learned in class beyond the obvious F=ma. One that sticks in my mind is the lab with the paper tape falling through the modified doorbell which makes dots at regular intervals.  You measure the spacing of the dots (pentaticks, actually), turn that into velocity and, in theory, calculate the acceleration due to gravity.   We did the lab, but the data seemed a bit wonky, so using my math skills, I built a mathematical model of the data to “correct the errors” – but when my data was a little too good, compared to everyone else’s, I got the public lecture on the evils of dry labbing.  Of course, today I make my living, in part, building computer models of physical phenomena, so maybe that experience wasn’t all to the bad – I do make sure, though, that the model outputs are labeled as such.

All through high school, Gary always had extra projects for us science oriented students to do: Whether helping prep for labs, building projects, or otherwise, it was always fun – and what we did at school was almost certainly safer than the experiments we did at home.  I was already interesting in science and engineering, but Gary (and the rest of the science department as well) kept that interest alive, to the point where it’s what I’ve done for pretty much my entire life.

Jim Lux, Gary’s student from 1973-1977

More Charcuterie

Preparing for the holidays

I got a pork belly and some shoulder from Costco.  The belly is for bacon, the shoulder for sausage.  Three kinds of sausage this time: Andouille, a citrus italian (Actually a sicilian recipe called salsicicca greca: Greek Sausage..) and a porcini-red wine sausage from a Jacque Pepin recipe.  Finally, I did another rosemary-garlic "city ham" - that's with a nice shank end from Ventura Meat Company

Bacon

The bacon was done in my usual brown sugar, juniper berry, thyme sort of cure - much like what you'd use for pancetta
. Last time I experimented with the maple or molasses flavors, and I'm just not as wild about it. After a week in the refrigerator curing, it comes out and goes into the smoker - I used apple wood this time - it's a mild smoke flavor. 

Then get it good and cold, and go to town with the slicer. 

Finally, vacuum pack it in shingles.

 

Sausage

 Out of a 8-9 pound shoulder, you lose about a pound to the shoulder bone and some of the fat.  You want the nice firm fat on the outside, but that sort of mushy stuff you want to get rid of.  This is the bone.


Here's the trimmed shoulder.  I've not cut the soft fat off that you can see in the left center, and right side. The stuff that looks like marbling is good, and the surface fat is best.   When you cut it into 1" cubes, it's easy to tell what fat to keep (the stuff that's stiff when cutting) and what fat to get rid of (the stuff that's like marshmallow).

I find that if I freeze the pork before grinding, then let it slightly thaw, I get the best results.  If the pork gets too hot in the grinder, the fat melts and gets greasy, and that's bad.  So here's 8 pounds of cut up shoulder in the freezer.

It takes about an hour to grind all that meat using the trusty KitchenAid grinder attachment.  It's shown here with the medium plate.   I added a bit of fatback to get the fat content up. In theory, you want about 20% fat, but I don't know how you would measure it, so I go by appearance.  If your fat content is too low, your sausage will be grainy and poor texture. If your fat content is too high, the fat all cooks out.  Fat content management is where it's at for sausage making.


Some sausage needs to dry a bit before further processing.  This is Andouille, spending a couple hours drying before going into the smoker.

Ham

Ham is pretty simple, assuming you have a good chunk of meat to start with. Last time, I did it with a boned out shank, which winds up in chunks.  This time, I did it with the whole thing.  You mix up the cure - a standard brown sugar, sald, curing salt mix, and add a bunch of garlic and rosemary.   This was about a whole supermarket bunch of rosemary for the gallon of cure.   That's a bit much, as it happens. 










 When it comes out of the cure, this is what it looks like.  If you didn't trim off the fat, it gets kind of loose and flabby, and is easily trimmed.

Last time, I did half the ham in Sous Vide and half in the smoker.  The smoky flavor kind of overpowered the rosemary/garlic flavor, so this time, it was all done Sous Vide.  Put it in a bag, suck out the air, put it in a cooler with the heater/circulator, and wait a day. I went to 65C, which is about 150F.



And then, it's all about slicing and eating.  Unlike a storebought ham, your home cured ham is going to have a lot of weird shaped pieces.  So I trim those into "roughly cubes" about 3/8" 1/2" on a side and save them for putting in things like soup or beans.