One of the guys who ate up Colonel Nancy’s Kentucky ham recently said that it reminded him of something he had eaten growing up in Switzerland: bündnerfleisch.

For those of you, like me, who had never heard of it, bündnerfleisch (or buendnerfleisch) is a traditional, dry-cured beef product that has been made in the Graubünden valleys of Switzerland time out of mind. Made from the top round muscle, it sounds very similar to the Italian bresaola made just over the border from the smaller eye of round muscle. But presumably bündnerfleisch uses a different mix of herbs and spices in the cure, and I need to know what they are, because now I’ve got a request to try and reproduce it!

Any help out there? Anyone?!

In addition to what goes into the cure, bündnerfleisch is also distinguished by its shape. As you can see, over the period of drying, it gets pressed until it takes on this loaf-like shape. Much as this appeals to the woodworker in me who has just about every variety of clamp and vise (that’s viSe, with an “S,” not a “C”), I have to wonder what reason there could be for pressing the flesh like this. Some say it’s to squeeze moisture out. (Not buying that one.) Most say that it helps to redistribute moisture evenly within the meat. Is there any evidence for this?

Shaping the meat this way is similar to what the Germans and Austrians do with their dry-cured landjaeger sausages. So, at the risk of falling back on a regional stereotype, is there more going on here than some Germanic compulsiveness? Is there any reason to press the flesh other than to reduce it to a regular, rectangular shape and alles in ordnung machen?

Hunger and desperation are sometimes the greatest spurs to imagination.

I cooked up this crazy recipe this past summer, in the Oregon Cascades, when I found myself called upon to grill burgers for a household of people who’d been out in the mountain air, swiming, kayaking, and hiking all day. I had some nice, organic beef from a cow that had been raised on pasture, but, as I knew from experience, however flavorful it was, the beef was going to be pretty lean. Fortunately we’d brought some pâté for our hosts, so inspiration struck, and I sliced up the pâté and secreted une petite tranche at the heart of each burger. No one picked out the flavor of the pâté, but they all commented on the great, rich flavor of the burgers.

The burger pictured just came off the grill and was made with some of the ground meat from the sacred bull. Two slices of pâté at the heart, some of Cabot Creamery’s habanero cheddar melted on top, some grilled onion rings to crown the whole, a few Sungold tomatoes on the side, and we had a feast worthy of a Tuesday.

Now back to the slave pits!

Usually attributed to Otto Von Bismark, there’s an old saying that there are two things you never want to see: the making of legislation and the making of sausages.  If you’ve ever read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, you know what he was talking about, at least when it comes to sausages.  As the meatpacking business became industrialized, the sausage casing became little more than a garbage can into which all the nasty bits were thrown, masked, and fobbed off on the unsuspecting consumer.

In the face of this, I think I’m not alone in wanting to rediscover how good sausages can be if we make them out of the best materials instead of the worst.  This past weekend, two other people came over to help me make a batch of sausage and see how it was done.  Since I had some whole chickens, fresh from the farm, that I planned to hot-smoke in the Bradley, I chose a fermented sausage recipe that called for cold-smoking; this would give me a chance to try out the new, cold-smoking box that I had built to sit on top of the Bradley.

Moscow sausage is a semi-dry, Russian beef sausage from the Marianskis book, The Art of Making Fermented Sausages.  I used beef from the sacred bull that I put in the freezer this fall, and once again it did not disappoint.  In addition to giving it a rich, beefy taste and an incredibly deep, purplish-red color, bull meat is particularly high in the myosin protein that gives you a good bind in the sausage.  We made up this batch in a couple hours, and then left it in the Bradley overnight to ferment.  The next day, after brining, the chickens went into the Bradley, and these fermented sausages were bumped upstairs, to the cold-smoking box.  My cold-smoking box worked even better than I had hoped. With the Bradley at 170º F, my cold smoking box stayed at about 100º F or 25º F above the ambient temperature.  Even when I heated up the Bradley to 240º F to finish cooking the chickens, the temperature in the box above only rose slightly, to 125º F.  In the end, once the chickens were done, I actually had to move the sausages back down to the Bradley just to heat them through to 140º F.

Slightly smoky, and with just a little tang from the fermentation, this is a nice, clean beef sausage, with just enough black pepper and nutmeg to give it some spice notes.  After fermenting and cooking, it will hang for a week to dry out slightly, leaving a sausage that’s still nice and moist.  A pre-cooked sausage like this is the most versatile: take it on a picnic, add it at the last minute to scrambled eggs or anything else you’re cooking, or enjoy it by itself with a German rauchbier.  I cut into one early and ate it out of hand with some whole grain bread we baked this weekend and a little Colman’s mustard.

What better way to spend your birthday than breaking down a side of beef? Or–just as good–watching a master butcher carve up a cow that he has carefully left hanging in the back of his cooler for almost 2 months?

This past fall, I wrote about the titanic struggle to get a local butcher to hang a Dexter bull for a measly 3 weeks. (In the end, I had to butcher and finish aging the rib and loin sections myself.) Every so often (about once every 2 years), a cow passes under Chuck Stites knife that he recognizes as truly superior, as having the fine marbling and the cap of fat to make it worthy and capable of aging for a good long while. Then he gives us a call, sticks the carcass in the back and forgets about it until it has hung for 3 times longer than any local meat locker would consider.

My buddy Jerry emails me: “Chuck has a cow for us.” “What kind of cow?” I write back, pestering him with all kinds of questions about the age, the breed, the feed, the marbling, etc. “Chuck says he has a cow,” Jerry replies, as if I’m being singularly dense, implying “how much more do you need to know?” He’s quite right, of course; after 25 years, Chuck has a pretty good idea what he’s doing.

So on the appointed day, we show up, watch Chuck break down a side of beef in next to no time, divide up the spoils (“one for you, and two for me”), and then immediately retire to the grill to assess how sacred cow III compares to cows I and II. Jerry seared the hell out of a 2″ thick porterhouse steak on his Hibachi (at which point, the interior is just beginning to warm up), and then stuck it in a 300º oven to finish warming through (we like to take it out when the internal temperature hits 120º). When we cut into it, it was a beautiful, bright rosy pink all the way through. With just a little salt and pepper, and a dusting of shaved Parmigiano, it was beefy perfection. Jerry worried that a steak that thick would be too big for just the two of us, but we gnawed it right down to the bone.

So how did this cow compare? It might not have been quite as sublime as Sacred Cow I, and the meat did not have the same brothy depth and iron tang of the Sacred Bull, but, damn, it’s mighty fine. Since I don’t eat a whole lot of beef, I’m very fortunate that the only beef I eat is probably better than most people ever taste in a lifetime. And the price for the luxury of dry-aged, prime beef, for which you have to look high and low just to find anymore?  A mere $2 a pound, since a group of us bought the whole side. Many thanks, Chuck and Jerry, for reminding me just how good we have it here!

The process of curing meat is part science, part craft, and part inspiration or imagination, but sometimes the results seem more like the work of alchemy or magic. When I shaved off the first slice of this bresaola and held it up to the light, it no longer looked like meat at all; it looked like stained glass of the deepest crimson. Even in the mouth, it seemed as if this beef had been transformed or transubstantiated: earthily meaty, minerally, and chewy, yes, but somehow as if it had become so concentrated or reduced to its essence that it had become ethereal, otherworldly.

I can only take so much credit for the magic. First, it takes a healthy, happy, grass-fed animal in the prime of life, in this case a Dexter bull. After slaughter came the epic Battle of the Beef (parts I, II, III, and IV), in which we fought to get the meat properly hung and ended up butchering it ourselves. Then the eye of the round muscle (a lean cut from this lean animal) went into the cure for two and a half weeks, where salt, pepper, sugar, rosemary, thyme, and juniper all contributed their flavors. Finally, it was hung up to dry for more than a month, harmonizing and further concentrating the already rich flavors. The end of all this time and labor is this little snapshot of beauty, a small taste of magic. It’s good to feel that I did alright by this bull, that its life and sacrifice have been properly honored.

Some of this bresaola will be going out to Morsel of the Month Club members, but there is a little extra to offer to regular Club members. It comes in two-ounce packages (approximately 20-30 slices). Not so much sliced as shaven. Must be 18 or older to order. I took a plate to the wine-tasting on Friday, and it simply evaporated. As his pupils dilated, all Doug had to say is, “That was one happy cow!” Serve as an antipasto, drizzled with just a little good olive oil. Accompany with a salad of rich baby greens (including Bull’s Blood beet greens, of course) with shavings of Parmigiano. Mop up the oil with good bread; lick your fingers clean. You will not taste its like again.

Here’s a recap for those of you who just tuned in. About six months ago, I announced that I was setting off on a quest to round up some great beef. Not OK beef, not just good beef, but great beef, beef as flavorful as possible. This means meat from a beef (not dairy) breed, a mature animal, raised only on natural pasture, and hung for as long as possible. Six weeks and two days ago, a three-year old Dexter bull went to slaughter. Three weeks ago, the butcher at the locker, Chuck Crupper, was shitting his pants about how long we had left our side of beef hanging and basically refused to have anything more to do with it. A little more than two weeks ago, we butchered the beef ourselves (with some much appreciated help), but left both the rib section and the loin (from which the ribeye, t-bone, and porterhouse steaks come) intact to age further.

It was T-day: Taste Day. The night we butchered it, we treated ourselves to the tenderloin or filet. Now it was time to cut off a nice, honking steak and see if we were approaching the pinnacle of beefiness or, as Chuck had warned, I had only managed to ruin a perfectly good (and expensive) piece of meat. Our third musketeer just got back into town, and the three of us were getting together for lunch, so it was a perfect occasion to pull out a 15-pound primal cut of beef and ponder, “How thick would we like to cut that?”

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And now, for the little piggies on your gift list who already have everything to do with bacon, there is the beef jerky handbag. I kid you not. Beautifully handstitched to look like a Chanel original. I’m sure Coco would be proud. And it’s so more than just style. Just think: if your private plane should happen to go down in remote Nevada, you can sustain yourself by gnawing on your handbag as you hike your way back to Saks and Neiman Marcus.

Another extraordinary find by Suzanne. If the rest of you are not finding this stuff on the web, what are you doing with your time?!

Like corned beef (which, by the by, has nothing to do with corn), pastrami is made from beef brisket or “plate” (the next cut down the rib cage from the breastbone), which is cured in a brine, flavored with sugars and spices, as well as a little garlic. But, while corned beef is ready to be cooked, pastrami is coated with a mixture of crushed peppercorns and coriander seeds and given a thorough smoking until the meat is cooked.

Although the pastrami is cured and cooked, it’s not ready to eat yet. To moisten it and dissolve all the connective tissue in this cut of meat it will need some braising or slow, moist cooking. I cooked mine like corn beef: put it in a pot with some beef stock (made from the bones of the same bull of course), cut up onions and cabbage, covered it up and put it in a 300F oven. After several hours, I stirred everything around, added some peeled potatoes, and put it back to cook for another couple hours. When the meat was falling-apart tender, we dished it all up, and mashed the potatoes right into the sauce in our bowls. Definitely one of the best things I’ve eaten this month.

After it’s been cooked, you can slice up the leftover pastrami for sandwiches. That’s not an option in our household, because we had no leftovers. I have three pieces left, one about a pound, and the other two about a pound and a half.

Cervelat is a common name for a mildly-seasoned, fermented sausage from northern Europe. Summer is the season when it is usually produced, hence it’s also referred to simply as “summer sausage.” The name doesn’t suggest that one should only eat it in the summer, but rather that it’s production methods (a rapid fermentation, followed by a warm and then a hot smoking that cooks the sausage) are adapted to summer, when a slower fermentation would not be possible.

I made this sausage now because I wanted to use some of the beef from the Dexter bull that we cut up this week. AND because this sausage seemed perfectly suited to a new smoking wood that I was hankering to try out: oak from the barrels that are used to age Jim Beam bourbon. The sausage is mostly beef (80% to 20% pork) and is seasoned with just salt, pepper, and a little paprika, coriander, and ginger, and then studded with whole peppercorns and mustard seeds.

In contrast to fresh sausages, this one is pretty lean (only 10% fat), but not lean on flavor. The rich flavor of the beef is only beefed up (if that’s possible) by the oaky, bourbon smoke, but the acidity produced by the fermentation and the bite of the peppercorns and mustard seeds slice right through and refresh your palate for the next bite. We ate a whole one of these last night, watching the Bears try to lose to the Packers. (The guys in blue, Kyle! You’re supposed to throw the ball to the guys in blue!). Serve with beer, mustard, pretzels, and you’ll be all set for holiday bowling.

When you have a whole side of beef that you need help cutting up, you really find out who your friends are. Some people tell you, “Dude, this is what I live for! I’m like totally there!” yet at the appointed time and place they are in fact nowhere to be found, and their cell phone has been conveniently turned off. It’s like my neighbor and good friend tells me every time he gives me a hand with one of my crazy projects: “Anytime you need a hand, just be sure and forget my phone number!” So, many thanks to the kind and adventurous souls who came through last night to lend their expertise, their workspace, their muscle, and, in the end, their hungry maws to this project.

Bob said it was the first time he had butchered beef in about 20 years, but he got right to work and broke the carcass down in what seemed like no time. Working with a whole side, and cutting it down with just a hand saw and knives reminded him of the old days, when he started out meatcutting. By the time he retired, he said, it was all “box beef”: beef already broken down to the primal cuts at the slaughterhouse, boxed up, and delivered for final cutting on the store’s power saws.

The whole experience reminded me of what I used to witness, when we would go to England for the summer to visit my grandfather, who was the butcher for his small village in the Cotswolds. When the delivery truck came, I remember men hefting hundreds of pounds of meat onto their shoulders, hauling the carcasses into the butcher shop (which was a converted 16-century stone spring house), and hanging it up in the cooler. When someone came in for a cut, they would get out the appropriate piece of meat, lay it on a massive butcher block, and cut it to order. It was a small revelation that a pork chop was called that because they literally chopped them off the loin with a cleaver. But I was too young then to ever be allowed behind the counter. My summer job was clearing all stinging nettles from the apple orchard. Ugh.

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