While I’ve been preoccupied in the woodshop this week, I’ve been making my way through Maynard Davis’ second little book, Secrets of a Bacon Curer. While there isn’t much in the way of “secrets” given away here (I’m guessing there’s more of that in his latest book, Manual of a Traditional Bacon Curer), it’s still a great read.

One thing that struck a chord with me is his insistence that a variety of different sugars and different salts are a traditional part of the craft and are part of what used to make the bacon from one part of the country different from the bacon produced elsewhere. As he writes on page 24 of this book, “different salts give different tastes. Whether rock salt, sea salt, lump salt, dairy salt, bay or roman salt; they all give a different flavor to the bacon. The skill is in mixing the right sugar with the right salt and they are all different grades and impurities to give the desired taste.” He goes on to talk about “all the main sugars: muscovados light and dark; molasses; all the treacles and all the herbs which give bacon its distinctive flavour.”

Like most newly-converted meatheads, I got my start with Ruhlman and Polcyn’s Charcuterie book, and one of the strengths of this book for a beginner is that they keep it simple (stupid!) by sticking to only one salt (Kosher Diamond) and just a few sugars (white and brown). But if you really want to explore the wonderful possibilities of bacon, it’s time to take off the training wheels and explore some more flavorful possibilities.

(more…)

Many thanks to Ari Weinzweig and his Guide to Better Bacon for championing this book. I had heard of it before, and looked it up, but (like Ari initially) took one look at the two-color cover, saw recipes still calling for saltpeter, and dismissed it as irrelevant, as hopelessly out of date. What a mistake!

While, as Ari points out, the story of his life would hardly qualify as “adventures” by TV standards, with food programming that’s more about adventures, risk-taking, and thrills than about real food, I found the book hard to put down once I started. Maynard’s account of his life reminded me of an interview that I was fortunate enough to have a few years back with the master cabintetmaker James Krenov. After talking about the “studio furniture” scene, which was full of arty pretensions and more flash than substance, James Krenov said that his main hope for his life’s work – his furniture, his books, his teaching – was that it would help to make more of a place for “quiet work,” work that didn’t need to scream or shout. Maynard’s is just such a quiet book, all about hard work, work well done, and the peace and contentment they bring.

And he certainly had experiences that were adventures to him!

(more…)

Nitrates and nitrites are an essential ingredient in some of the cured meats offered through the Club, and since they are something of a health concern, some of you might be interested in learning a little more about them.

History and Benefits of Nitrates and Nitrites in Cured Meat

Humans have been ingesting nitrates for as long as we’ve been eating plants, which is to say for as long as we’ve been around. The value of nitrate in curing meat was discovered thousands of years ago, when people first began using sea salt to preserve excess meat and discovered that salt with trace amounts of nitrate in it turned a bright pinkish color and was less likely to spoil. In the Middle Ages, saltpeter (potassium nitrate) was discovered, and by the seventeenth-century it was used in meat curing and is still used in Europe today. With the emergence of the science of chemistry in the nineteenth-century, it was learned that nitrates reduce over time to nitrites and that nitrites were the active curing agent. Once it was possible to produce pure nitrite, it replaced most nitrates, and the USDA set limits on its use for the first time in 1926. Of the two commercial meat cures commonly available today, Insta Cure #1 (also known as pink salt) contains a small amount of sodium nitrite (6.25%), while Insta Cure #2 combines this with a small amount of nitrate (4%).

Although nitrite was identified as the active curing agent more than a century ago, much of its reactions with meat are still a mystery. Through natural microbial activity in meat, nitrite is reduced to nitric oxide, which is highly reactive. Nitric oxide reacts with 10-40% of the myoglobin to form nitrosomyoglobin, which we see as the bright, pinkish-red color of cured meats. By regulating oxidative processes in the meat, nitrite contribute to the development of a typical “cured” flavor. Most importantly, but least understood, nitrites inhibit the growth of a wide range of microorganisms that could cause meat to spoil or people eating it to become ill. The most important of these is the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, which is found in soil and produces a nerve toxin that can be fatal to humans. According to the CDC, about 25 cases of food-borne botulism are reported in the US each year, most from home canning.

To reproduce, microorganisms typically like an environment that is warm, moist, only slightly acidic, and high in protein. In other words, meat is an ideal growth medium, which is hardly surprising, since these microorganisms have evolved right along with us. Refrigeration is an important control that has allowed us to greatly reduce the amount of nitrite that we use, but many traditional charcuterie techniques call for curing over a long period of time or for fermenting and/or smoking meats at warmer temperatures, all of which could allow bacteria to grow. In these situations, nitrites provide indispensable insurance against the growth of unwanted organisms.

(more…)

A number of people have asked how I adapted an old refrigerator for dry-curing meats and sausages, so here goes. From all that I’ve read, the four important things to control for the dry-curing of meat are light, temperature, air circulation, and humidity. Since I’m not doing a lot of dry-curing, a smaller, old refrigerator was the right size and, of course, has temperature control built in. With its seal, a fridge also excludes light, which is important, since exposure to light contributes to fat oxidizing and turning rancid.

But since a fridge is designed to keep food much colder than the 55-60 degrees fahrenheit that’s optimal for meat-curing, it’s more accurate and more efficient to run the fridge’s condenser off a separate temperature control. That’s what’s pictured here, borrowed from a buddy who used it with the fridge back in the days when he was brewing his own beer. The temperature probe, on the bare copper wire, is simply slipped behind the door seal and into the fridge. The control is plugged into the wall outlet, and the fridge plugs into it. This one, by Johson Controls, keeps the fridge within a degree or two of the selected temperature.

That takes care of two out of four. Humidity has been a tougher nut to crack. For some reason that I don’t understand, in the summer (which can be pretty humid here in the midwest), I have to work to raise the humidity. Fortunately, all this takes is a pan or two of salty water. (The salt prevents molds from growing.) In the winter (when we have to turn a humidifier on in the house), the problem has been reducing the humidity in the meat-curing fridge, especially getting a nice gradual decrease in the relative humidity level that will dry salamis out without case-hardening. (Case-hardening is when the outside or “casing” dries out too quickly and becomes impermeable, trapping moisture inside the sausage and promoting rot.)

(more…)