I love Jason Brechin’s recent write-up of offal as “the magical ‘fifth-quarter’ of the animal.” Offal is what literally “falls-off” or falls out during processing at the slaughterhouse, and so mainly refers to everything from the central body cavity: stomach, intestines, spleen, liver, heart, lungs, kidneys, but also include sweetbreads (the thymus gland), brains, tongues, as well as all the extremities such as trotters, tails, and ears – basically all the bits we’re too squeamish or uppity to mess with anymore.  But limiting ourselves to steaks and chops from the loin – living “high on the hog” so to speak – we’re missing out on a whole, wide world of different flavors and textures, not to mention that these pieces can often be had free for the asking.

Since both my parents were English, I was exposed to offal growing up – steak and kidney pie, fried liver and onions, fried lamb’s kidneys – but the unimaginative way they were prepared did not endear me to them.  Lamb’s kidneys simply chucked in a pan and fried until done all the way through come out tasting rubbery and, well, exactly what I imagine lamb’s piss tastes like.  My brother actually liked fried liver and onions enough to request it for his birthday meal, but, being the younger, I was always secretly convinced that he only requested this dish in order to watch me gag on it.

But having got the great gift of Fergus Henderson’s The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating a few years back and having had the chance to dine on roasted bone marrow salad and grilled ox heart at his restaurant St. John last year, I’ve been expanding my horizons and giving offal a second chance.  Buying a whole pig and wanting to make the most of her gave me the opportunity to plunge in and try my hand at some offal creations.

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I first encountered the wonderful, offbeat work of Jillian Nickell at January’s Pecha Kucha, where we were both presenters.  The animals she draws immediately reminded me of classic children’s illustrators from a hundred years’ ago, like Leslie Brookes and Johnny Crow, and by the time her 6 minutes and 40 seconds were up, I realized that she would be the perfect artist to illustrate This Little Piggy.  This Little Piggy steps out of the Mother Goose nursery rhyme, and I always imagined was either the one who “went to market” or the one who “had roast beef for his dinner.”  All this classic character needed was a little ‘tude to go with the food.  Jillian’s drawings have a whimsical quality, bordering on the absurd sometimes, so she immediately took to the concept of a peg-legged, pirate pig, bringing home the bacon (while showing plenty of ham bone).

I could go on at great length about the motto on the flag, “Charcuterie et mon droit,” which is a parody of the motto of the English monarch.  Let’s just say that it asserts both a right to charcuterie and a willingness to defend it if necessary (first and foremost, with humor!).

Now is your chance to fly the pirate flag and show your colors when it comes to local foods!  Jillian will make a limited edition of this poster (she silk screens them herself in her basement), and I plan on ordering t-shirts and canvas tote bags as well, if enough orders come in.  You’ll find all these items listed in the Club section of the website, and I love the idea of adding a local artist to the local food artisans already listed.  Personally, I love Jillian’s design so much that I’m sorely tempted to get a tattoo of her rendition of my totem animal, but my spouse would never stop gagging, so I’ll have to settle for a poster as well.

A good friend of mine who’s a social worker has been hankering after a poster she saw in a head shop months ago.  It showed a goofy white kid with the caption “Got a little gansta in you?”  Now is your chance to answer the question, “Got a little pirate pig in you?”

While dabbling with the blood of sacrifice, don’t think I haven’t been feasting as well!

I’ve wanted to make blood sausage ever since I read Jeffrey Steingarten’s essay, “It Takes a Village to Kill a Pig,” where he places boudin noir in his pantheon of “the hundred greatest foods of the world” (de-throning the frozen Milky Way bar!).  I had a chance to eat some last spring, when I was in London and came across a shop selling charcuterie from organic, English meats.  It was ghastly – mealy in texture, with no redeeming flavor.  To get a good boudin, it seemed, I was going to have to make it myself.

Which is not as easy as you might think.  Although it is legal to sell pig’s blood in the US, the slaughterhouse has to have special equipment and has to be specially certified, which almost nobody bothers to do.  As a result, about the only place you can find pig’s blood is at an Asian market, where it will be frozen.  But I wanted fresh blood.  Following the centuries-old tradition of French farmhouses (which you can also find beautifully documented in the opening pages of Stéphane Reynaud’s cookbook, Pork & Sons), I wanted to make boudin on the same day that the pig was slaughtered and encase it in the pig’s own intestines.

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Although only just listed in the Club section, I made this finocchiona salame back in November.  Since then, it’s been slowly fermenting and drying.  I donated some to Dan Schreiber’s tasting of 1000-year-old foods a couple weeks ago, and people ate it up and clamored for more, so it must be ready!  I loved Armandino Batali’s finocchiona, which we used to get at Persimmon, so when that was no longer available, I had to make my own.  Made with Triple S Farm’s pork, it’s simply seasoned, with salt, white pepper, black pepper, and just a little garlic and chianti.

And, of course, fennel.  I used to think fennel was fennel, until I tried the “wild mountains fennel” that Scott sells, imported from Italy.  These seeds are small and intensely licorish-y, but while conventional fennel has a caustic bite that gets you in the back of the throat, these have a mild, toasted nuttiness that makes them a perfect partner for meat.

And, thanks to the generosity of others!, I finally have some venison to work with again.  First, I combined some with more of Stan’s pork to make these venison bratwursts.  Mildly seasoned with white pepper, coriander, a hint of garlic, and a splash of white wine, then hot-smoked until fully cooked, this is a versatile sausage, like a Polish kielbasa.  You could grill it and eat it as is, but this time of year, I enjoy it mixed in with a heartier dish.  I took the broth I had left over from steaming pastrami and cooked a huge pan of cabbage, onions, carrots, and potatoes that I served with slices of the bratwurst.

It’s hard to know what to call my other venison sausage.  It’s loosely based on a sausage that’s considered the national sausage of Switzerland, where it’s called Cervelat in the German-speaking part (cervelas in French and zervelada or cervelato in Italian).  Switzerland produces 160 million of them a year, which works out to just over 20 sausages per person.

Originally made with pork brains (the name comes from the Latin cerebrum), it’s now made with a mixture of beef and pork, and sometimes bacon.  The recipe I have makes a firm, lean salame, like what we call a Summer Sausage, and so I substituted venison for most of the beef.  Studded with whole peppercorns and mustard seeds, fermented, and then smoked for the better part of a day over hickory, this is a dense, meaty, and flavorful sausage.  It’s fully cooked, so just eat it out of hand, as I’ve been doing!

Now I have to clear the decks and prepare for a 400-pound sow who’s coming this weekend (and I don’t mean any relatives)!

Just call me a hopeless romantic, but nothing to me says love like pork fat.  For my wife’s Jewish grandmother, it was chicken fat.  She kept a jar of “schmaltz” in the fridge, and every night she would rub some on her hands.  In all seriousness, she told my wife that this was one of the (Jewish) secrets to keeping your husband happy, but we never figured out if it was because it kept her hands soft or because it made them smell deliciously like roast chicken!

So as a special romantic morsel to all Morsel of the Month Club members, I’m offering some Lardo this month.

Lardo, as you might guess from the name, is cured pork fat.  Chunks of back fat are rubbed with fresh herbs and spices and then packed in salt and left to cure for six months or more.  In the Tuscan hill town of Colonnata, where lardo has been made for a thousand years or so, they cure the back fat in small casks of marble, from the nearby quarries of Carrara. Yep, that’s the same marble that Michelangelo carved for his statue of David. Ya use what ya got, you know?  My buddy in meat madness, Scott over at the Sausage Debauchery, is talking to someone in Carrara about importing some lardo-curing casks.  When that ship comes in, we can all die happy!

How are you supposed to eat cured back fat?  For the quarrymen, this was simple, inexpensive, calorie-rich food to sustain them in a long day of physical labor.  Now, lardo is shaved super thin, like a fine, aged ham, and you don’t need to eat a lot of it to enjoy it’s superb flavor and silky texture.  Toast a hunk of bread, like one of Stewart’s great bagels, and, while it’s still hot, spread a few shavings of lardo on top.  Watch them turn translucent and melt.  Inhale the heady aromas of garlic, rosemary, thyme, pepper, and just a whiff of juniper.  Then devour with gusto!  Just writing this is more than I can stand; I’m gonna go eat some right now, and then shovel snow for the next hour!

Bonus points to all who noticed that if you just turn the “d” around, Lardo spells Larbo!

For all you tired, you poor winter-weary masses, yearning to breathe fire, I bring you tidings of great joy: you can make your nduja and enjoy it in the same day!

“And-Do-Your-Worst!” means many things.  It’s the Retort Courteous, a riposte to my good friends Scott and Porsha, who have turned up the heat once again in the nduja wars.  (Where would we be without friends to challenge us to try new things, to egg us on, to say “You think that was crazy?  Just watch this!!”)  Over at his Sausage Debauchery blog, Scott posted this past week about his latest batch of nduja, in which a full one-third of the mix consisted of hot chilis.  No slouch, Porsha cut into her nduja, whipped up an nduja burger, and has now unleashed upon an unsuspecting world the nduja chocolate truffle.

“And-Do-Your-Worst!” also tells you how to pronounce my new creation, my secret weapon: nduja-wurst.  Dat’s right, I’m dropping da bomb, unleashing the weapon to make all other weapons obsolete.  While a traditional nduja salame can take days to ferment and then the better part of a year to smoke and slowly dry out, imagine an nduja sausage that is ready to eat the same day you mix it up and that tastes every bit as good or, dare I say it?, even better! 

This is not my first attempt at a meatier and mellower version of nduja.  Back in the spring, I created an nduja pâté, which got rave reviews, and just a couple weeks ago Scott inspired me to make a mortadella with the same Calabrian chilis that go into nduja.  I liked this emulsion-sausage version, which we christened ndujadella, but missed the liver and the garnish of sweet, roasted red peppers that went into the pâté as well as the deep smokiness of the original, slow-cured salame.  Then inspiration struck (or full-blown insanity descended, depending on your point of view): why not make a liverwurst, which traditionally gets hot-smoked, but season it with the Calabrian hot chilis Scott has in his store and garnish it with the sweet peppers? 

Such a chimera might indeed seem like a case of doing my worst, taking a mild, inoffensive sausage like liverwurst and dousing it with hot chilis.  But having been baptized in fire, this liverwurst is reborn as a glorious new creation that outshines its parents.  It has the intense, smoldering heat and smokiness of nduja, with all its rough edges smoothed over by the silky richness of liver, brightened and lightened by the sweet red peppers.

This ain’t your grandfather’s liverwurst, but then he probably didn’t listen to rock ‘n’ roll either!  Spread on one of Stewart’s bagels and bathe in the glow of the Calabrian heat.

I’ve got a t-shirt that announces “Bacon is meat candy,” and, in addition to my maple-syrup cured bacon, Bali Bacon is another one that proves the truth of this dictum.  In addition to being cured with generous amounts of Big Tree’s palm sugar with ground ginger, it gets coated with more of it when it comes hot out of the smoker. But it’s not sickly or cloyingly sweet.  Ginger is a natural partner for pork, and it gives it a subtle spiciness, while Big Tree’s long pepper also brightens and punches up the flavor.  The result is a mildly sweet and spicy bacon, coming to you from the South Pacific.

Here’s my recipe:

one, 5-pound chunk of pork belly
40 g salt
5 g cure #1
70 g Big Tree palm sugar with ground ginger
10 g Big Tree long pepper

For me, this this bacon makes Sunday morning.  It’s great with pancakes, but the perfect accompaniment is Sharon Kramis’ buttermilk scone recipe from the Fannie Farmer Baking Book (page 582).  Just substitute candied ginger for the currants.

Scott, over at Sausage Debauchery, has been my supplier, my dealer, my main man, for all things Calabrian (and, with his new, virtual store has now become my go-to-guy for all hard-to-find Italian food items).  He recently got a crazy request from the owner of Coluccio’s, where he gets the chili peppers that go into nduja.  The owner gave him some lardo, some pancetta, and some guanciale, and told Scott to make him some nduja with those.  Fuoco! As Scott asked in his appeal for help, what kind of clusterf**k of a salame was he supposed to make with all of that?!

Then inspiration struck: he wants crazy? He came to the right guys; we can show him crazy!  If nduja is known as the “the red nutella” because it’s often spread on grilled bread, then why not come up with an ndujatella, a cooked version that would be ready to eat right away?  Since I enjoy making emulsified sausages, like mortadella, while Scott has sworn off them, he put me in charge, and this is what I came up with: the same, basic procedures as mortadella, only Calabrian chilis (both concentrate and powder) substituted for the usual, delicate spices.  Ndujadella was born!  And, as if all those “picantissimo” chilis weren’t enough, why not add some cubes of pork tongue, marinated in my Thai chili fire water?

So, while my nduja di buffala (made with bison meat) ferments, dries, and mellows for a few more weeks, and while my nduja classico (the latest batch made with 50% more hot peppers than the previous one!) needs a few more months, this lighter, less spicy, intro or “gateway” version of nduja is ready to eat now.  It’s soft enough that you can still spread it on toast.  (Try it with some of Stewart’s chipotle and sun-dried tomato bread!)  Fry it up with some scrambled eggs.  Or just cut it into chunks and eat it as an appetizer – you’ll find, surprisingly, that the hot chilis actually accentuate the fruit in red wine!

My last post about a new bacon, cured in Hogshead Scotch, was the perfect segue to this post, about what to do with an actual hog’s head – or two!  (How hogshead came to be the name for a 63-gallon barrel, I have no idea!)

In English, brawn, from the Middle French word braon, meaning “muscle” (from which we get our word brawny) also refers to the flesh of a boar and, in cookery, a potted meat made from the pig’s head.  It’s what the French call fromage de tête or “headcheese” as it’s commonly called in this country.  If you’ve ever had this treat down South, you’ll have heard it called “souse,” from the same root as “sauce,” which means to pickle or immerse in brine (hence the term “soused” for someone who’s had too much to drink).

Brawn is my latest attempt effort, following in Fergus Henderson’s offal footsteps, and it’s especially appealing to me because it does literally include both head and feet.  Like the Trotter Gear I made last month, it’s another dish featuring “giving nodules” of meat, suspended in a rich, meaty gelatin. (more…)

In addition to restocking the Club with all the kinds of bacon I’ve made before – maple-syrup cured bacon, black pepper-coated bacon, Bali bacon, and black bacon – I’m experimenting with one totally new one: a bacon cured in Scotch Whisky.  This is for my good friend, Pompom, who (for better and for worse) has introduced me to the pleasures of good Scotch.

Hogshead is not the piece of meat I’m trying to cure; it’s the name of a good, blended malt Scotch.  When I heard the name and saw this picture on the label, I knew this is the Scotch to use.  But first the alcohol needs to be cooked off.  (In her cookbook, The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen, Paula Wolfert quotes Thomas Keller to the effect that alcohol will denature and “cook” the proteins in meat, sealing the surface and preventing absorption of a marinade or cure.  Since acids have the same effect, as in ceviche, this makes sense to me.)  So I warm the Scotch up in a pan, light it, and when the flames die out (which takes a couple minutes!), then I add puréed golden raisins, Lyle’s Golden Syrup, and take it off the heat.  When this mix cools down, I add salt, cure #1, and just a wee bit of mace and long pepper.

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