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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If you don’t want to know the name of the pig that I’ll be making into pâté, pulled pork, and prosciutto, of a pig that could pass into your hands in the next year and cross the liminal boundary of your lips, becoming one flesh with your flesh, then stop reading now.  Names and photographs (as the Amish know) are powerful things, and seeing them, reading them, listening to them reverberate silently in our ears – taking them in through the eyes and the ears and keeping them in memory – are all proleptic and anticipate that moment of sacrifice and consumption.

And, by and large, we prefer to eat with our eyes closed or at least averted.  We eat meat, spear it on our forks, but keep ourselves at arm’s length from it, translating even the names of the animals as we transform them into food: pig into pork, sheep into lamb, cow into beef, chicken into McNuggets.  In general, we don’t even want to remember that meat came from an animal, let alone that animal there, the one in the picture, who even has a name, perhaps.  It’s as if we dis-member the animal, break it down into unrecognizable parts, laid out on styrofoam trays at the supermarket or speared on the end of our fork, precisely in order to keep ourselves from thinking about or re-membering the living being they come from.  There are exceptions – hunters, butchers – who look the flesh they eat in the eye first, but anyone with blood on their hands is likely to find themselves ostracized or even demonized by the majority.

And, for all my desire to know where my food comes from, to have a hand in it, to analyze (over-analyze you might be tempted to say) and be aware of the sacrifice involved in it, I am not exempt from this general rule, this blindness.  After all, the eye that never blinks also goes blind.

Although I can tell you the provenance of every scrap of meat I use, I do not know the names of the animals, I did not look them in the eye, I did not have a hand in their slaughter.  Until yesterday.

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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)!

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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After last month’s NY Times article came out, my stash of Nduja was depleted in 9 hours, 41 minutes, and 17 seconds.  Lots of interesting comments have been coming in.  As the largest maker of Nduja in the country, Chris Cosentino’s Boccalone got the lion’s share of the coverage, but a number of correspondents, including a few Calabrians, have confided to me that they have tried it and found it wanting: disappointing, inconsistent, or even downright “terribile!”  So you might just have lucked on the best Nduja in the US, right here.

One of the interesting points in Julia Moskin’s article was how nduja gets “translated” when it’s made over here.  The Calabrian original is rude and crude, rough and tumble, and “absolutely takes the top of your head off,” as Nancy Harmon Jenkins says in the article, so there’s plenty of room for a “meatier and mellower” version.  In addition to the pâté I created, I like this version made with bison meat.  Besides, a more traditional nduja salami, made entirely from pork belly, can take the better part of a year to ferment and dry, while this one should be ready in a little more than a month.  Hopefully it will be enough to keep the ravenous hordes from pounding down my door, while the killer nduja slowly cures.

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Every time you make something, hopefully, you learn something more or something new, and the final product gets better and better, until – “Bam!” or “Basta!” – everything is kicked up to moltissimo mode.

Emulsion sausages are the most elegant and refined in the Charcutier’s repertoire – and the biggest pain in butt to make!  Meat, fat, and ice are minced in a food processor over a period of 15 minutes or more, threatening to overload all but the most robust motors and to make the mother of all messes.  (Scott, over at Sausage Debauchery, made it once and says, “Nevuh-fukking-uh-gen!”  And temperature is critical.  First, all the ingredients must be frozen or semi-frozen, to allow as much time as possible for processing, and then the temperature must be watched like a hawk, as it starts to climb quickly at the end.  Go over 60º F, the emulsion will break, fat will separate out during cooking, the remaining sausage will be dry and crumbly, and all you get for your trouble is a sausage that breaks your heart.

The recipe in Ruhlman and Polcyn’s Charcuterie book is sized for what a Cuisinart can handle, but only makes a 3-pound sausage.  And, lemme tell ya, it’s not worth going to all that trouble and risking a broken heart for just 3 pounds of sausage, even if, like me, you consider Mortadella the king of emulsion sausages.

So, the first thing I did was (more…)

David Sax considers pickled tongue an essential part of “the holy trio” of classic Jewish deli fare.   Sadly, pickled tongue has fallen out of favor, and is now more like the poor stepsister, the one who’s kept at home and not taken to the ball.

I did put it on the menu for our tasting party last month, but a lot of people simply couldn’t bring themselves to touch something with such an anatomical look or label.  Those brave enough to eat some liked it a lot. As the corned beef and pastrami kept disappearing, Stewart Pequignot sidled up to me and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “That tongue is really the best thing here!”  Jason Brechin also liked it best and was disappointed that there wasn’t any left to order a few weeks later.  (I’m not called This Little Piggy for nothing!)  So, as soon as I get my next batch of pork tongues from Stan, I’ll be making more, for cognoscenti like them.

In reviving it, I’ve taken some liberties – this ain’t your bubbe’s pickled tongue! First of all, the tongue is pork, instead of beef. Second, the seasonings are much more exotic: coconut palm sugar ground with fresh ginger, and “long” pepper from Bali. Here’s my recipe for the brine:

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From more of my recent reading: In The End of Food, Paul Roberts analyzes what the “relentless downward price pressure” exerted by mega-retailers like Walmart (who gets almost a quarter out of every dollar Americans spend on food) has meant for the producers and processors who supply them. As he describes it, “meat processors were the earliest victims of the Great Retail Squeeze,” which required them to resort to “high-output, low-cost tactics.”  “Smaller, less efficient pork slaughterhouses were swept away by massive new facilities: the largest in the world, built by Smithfield Foods in Tar Heel, North Carolina, processes two thousand pigs an hour” (57-81).  As with farming, it has become a matter of “Get big or get out!”

Except, of course, that there’s no end to this insanity.  Farms and facilities get bigger and bigger, investing in ever bigger, more expensive, and more efficient machinery, only to find themselves leapfrogged by someone, somewhere in the world, who has gotten even bigger, priced them out of the market, and made all their facilities redundant.

Walter Jeffries, a small, independent, pastured-pork producer in Vermont, has found a way to restore some sanity to the system of food production by turning this formula on its head.  “Stay small and stay in!” could be his mantra or battle cry.

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