Sauerkraut

Yesterday was a day of starts. I started batches of salami, salt pork, pancetta, bresaola and sauerkraut. The batch of sauerkraut I began was a small one, made from eight humongous heads of cabbage from the garden of the parents of Trent Hendricks. In a few weeks when the cabbage at the farm is ready, it's going to be pedal to the metal shredding.

The hardest part of making sauerkraut is cleaning (which in the case of this no-pesticide stuff means picking out worms and slugs) and shredding the cabbage. The rest is easy:

Salt it at a rate of 0.02 (or 2g salt per 100g cabbage or 2oz salt per 100 oz cabbage etc.); place the cabbage in a non-reactive vessel; put a weighted non-reactive plate on top so that the cabbage gets pressed under the juice that is released via osmosis (It is important for the cabbage to be submerged to assure an anaerobic environment for fermentation; put the vessel in a cool place (like any where that I am baby) and wait.

Study finds that Pigs are Smart

I'm not going to jump on the "Why does science waste time and money attempting to prove/disprove common knowledge?" bandwagon. However, it is obvious to anyone who has ever raised one that the beasts are very clever.


Basics - In Pig Cognition Studies, Reflections on Parallels With Humans - NYTimes.com

Baconian Science

This past week I butchered a hog in what felt like record time (about 2 hours) and it didn't even hurt. At first I thought the reason it went so quickly was the combined result of a good night's sleep, sharp knives, a new saw blade and, well, rock star butchers don't dawdle for god's sake. However, I later realized that part of what made the work go so fast was the relatively huge amount of soft intramuscular and extramuscular fat. The fat was so soft that the knife just whizzed through like striped bass fry through a school of bluefish.

Too bad soft pork fat makes the meat no good for aging more than a couple of months. The unsaturated fatty acids that make up the bulk of the fat molecules in soft fat oxidize and become rancid more rapidly than saturated fatty acids. So none of the hog that I cut last week is going into anything that needs to age for a long time and most of it became chops, roasts and fresh sausage.

Here is a slide show of me taking off some of the bacon.




This group of pictures shows pork bellies being prepared for hanging in the aging room.

Truth is Stranger than Fiction, Again.

Pancakes in a can! And they are organic!




Batter Blaster Organic Pancake and Waffle Batter - The best home videos are here

Happy Anniversary Mousquetaire

When my friend Lily Hodge wrote me asking if I could write a few words in honor of the 25th Anniversary of D'Artagnan for whom she works as director of public relations, I thought something on the order of Sheesh, has it only been 25 years since there was virtually no fresh foie gras or magret to be had in the United States?

In 1981 when I was beginning my career as a professional cook I knew a few things for sure: I wanted to cook something like the classical French cooking that my paternal grandfather cooked when he was working at The Hotel Pierre and I wanted to specialize in charcuterie.

I also knew that cooking was going to be hard work but I never imagined how difficult it was going to be to find the ingredients required to reproduce the dishes that my grandfather described and that populated the pages of the books that chose for my crash course in the haute cuisine (You know, the usual suspects Escoffier, Pellaprat, Larousse Gastronomique et al.)

There was plenty of things like high quality imported foie gras and dried and canned wild mushrooms that could be ordered from now defunct companies like Amazon de Choix and and S.S. Pierce. High end Manhattan based meat suppliers like Debragga and Spitler had beautiful veal and lamb but there was no fresh foie gras, quail, squab, venison, rabbit were all difficult to find in the urban and suburban markets.

Then around 1983 it all began to change. Farmed salmon started coming in from Norway. There hadn't been decent wild salmon in the markets for years- it was a god send. Vacuum packed foie gras d'oie from Israel was a great improvement over the canned stuff but proved to be useless for cooking because it had been pasteurized and became gritty when heated for too long. When D'Artagnan showed up on the scene in 1985 with quail and rabbit and fresh foie gras and magret it felt like things had really changed and that we were finally going to be able to cook like the chefs we had been trying to emulate so badly, for so many years.


Happy Birthday D'Artagnan and thanks!


Please note: I have not been writng much lately in part because my computer has been acting funny by choosing to occasionally ignore different key strokes on dfferent days. Today it s ignore the letter "i." Yesterday it was "m," the day before "f." So, wrtng s very tedious indeed!