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.