Charcutepalooza: Fresh Bacon and Pizza
I have never taken part in a blogging challenge or event before, but when I heard about Charcutepalooza, I knew I had to participate. Charcutepalooza is the brainchild of two food bloggers, Mrs. Wheelbarrow and The Yummy Mummy. Each month for a year they pick a recipe from Michael Ruhlman’s excellent book, Charcuterie
The first topic was Duck Prosciutto in January, but I found out about this challenge too late for that. However, I hope to circle back some time during the year and try the duck prosciutto.
For February the topic is the salt cure. You can choose from one of two challenges: The Apprentice which is fresh bacon, or the Charcuterie Challenge, pancetta or guanciale. I choose bacon, and to be honest it felt like a bit of a copout for me at first. I have been curing and smoking my own bacon for years now, since i first bought Ruhlman’s book. I have even posted about it on his blog, here and here. Ideally, I would take this opportunity to expand my horizons and try the pancetta or guanciale. However, logistical reasons and time constraints prevented me from going that route for now (I know… excuses, excuses).
So I started this out a little disappointed in myself since not only was I going with the bacon, but I was not even smoking it, because my smoker is buried under 173 inches of snow right now! My disappointment quickly faded because, you know, I was making fresh bacon at home dammit! And I was going to use it to make Bacon and Onion Pizza, which would be awesome.
Curing bacon is actually pretty easy. The hardest part is probably procuring the pork belly itself. Once you do have the belly, you just dredge it in the salt cure ( kosher salt, pink salt and sugar), put it in a large ziploc bag and refrigerate for 7 days, turning it ever other day to redistribute the cure. After a week you rinse it off, pat dry and roast it low and slow at 200 degrees in the oven for a few hours until the internal temperature is 150, and you have the most delicious fresh bacon.
Years ago, my wife, Sandy, turned me on to Pizza with Bacon and Onions. Not being your traditional Italian pizza topping, it never would have occurred to me, but once I had it it became part of my regular rotation. I was really excited about taking nice thick slabs of homemade bacon, cutting it up into lardons and topping my pizza with it and some thinly sliced sweet onion. I was definitely no longer disappointed, the crispy chunks of bacon with their rich pork flavor really do make a perfect pizza topping.
Bacon and Onion Pizza Recipe
Makes 2 pizzas
4 slices of thick cut bacon, cut crosswise into 1/4 inch strips
1 28 oz can of imported Italian plum tomatoes
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
1/4 pound shredded mozzarella cheese
1/2 medium onion, thinly sliced
extra virgin olive oil
2 balls of Neo-Neopolitan Pizza Dough
- 1 hour before baking, place a baking stone on the bottom shelf of the oven and preheat the oven to as high as it will go.
- In a medium skillet over medium heat, cook the bacon until crisp. Remove with a slotted spoon and place on paper towels to drain.
- Place the tomatoes in a bowl and crush with your hands. Stir in the salt and pepper.
- Take one ball of dough and flatten it out to 10-12 inches in diameter, for detailed instructions click here.
- Spoon on the the crushed tomatoes, sprinkle on grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and mozzarella cheese, place onions and cooked bacon on top, drizzle with a little extra virgin olive oil and transfer to oven on top of stone.
- Cook for 10-12 minutes, until crust is deep golden brown. Remove from oven and repeat process with second ball of dough.
Fresh Italian Sausage
I have been making my own sausage for a few years now, ever since I picked up the book Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing
My Fresh Italian Sausage recipe is actually a hybrid of the Sweet Italian Sausage recipe in Charcuterie and the Fresh Italian Sausage recipe from another book in my library, Cooking by Hand
There several keys to making a good sausage that both books share. The first key is keeping your meat and fat cold. If it gets too warm during the process, the fat will separate from the meat and you will end up with a crumbly sausage. Tips that I picked up from both books are putting the meat in the freezer after I cut it up until it’s almost frozen, putting the auger, dies, blades, etc from your grinder in the freezer to get cold before grinding, and grinding the meat into a bowl set in ice.
Also very important is the addition of fat. Fat makes the sausage juicy, and a good Italian sausage must have a certain percentage of fat. Back fat is not an easy ingredient to get a hold of, so you may be tempted to exclude it from this recipe and just use 5 pounds of pork shoulder, but trust me I have tried it and the results just aren’t the same. Talk to your butcher and see if they can special order it for you, or you can order it online from a source like Niman Ranch. Speaking of sources, you can get the hog casings from Butcher & Packer.
The last key to a good sausage is after it is made; cooking the final product. A lot of people have a tendency to overcook sausage. A sausage should be cooked to a temperature of 150 degrees. Charcuterie suggests using a meat thermometer to check the temperature. I would never tell you to stand there like a dork at your grill sticking a meat thermometer in individual sausages. Just use common sense and judgment, if it’s cooked a little over 150 it’s no big deal, but you can tell when you are absolutely killing it… just stop yourself.
As far as equipment goes, I use the meat grinder attachment for my KitchenAide stand mixer to grind the meat, into the mixer bowl, then mix the ground meat with the ice cold liquid using the paddle attachment. I initially used the sausage stuffer that attaches to the grinder, but was not happy with that for several reasons, not the least of which is that going through the auger heats it up and increases your risk of “breaking” the sausage. I ended up buying this 5 pound sausage stuffer
Fresh Italian Sausage
Adapted from Charcuterie and Cooking by Hand
Makes 5 pounds of sausage
4 pounds/800 grams boneless pork shoulder butt
1 pound/450 grams pork back fat
3 tablespoons kosher salt
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
2 teaspoons minced garlic
2 tablespoons fennel seeds, toasted
2 teaspoons coarsely ground black pepper
1-1/2 tablespoons dried sage
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 cup ice water
10 feet hog casings, soaked in tepid water for at least 30 minutes, then flushed with running water
- Cut the pork and fat into roughly 1 inch dice, and mix together in a bowl. Cover the bowl and place it in the freezer for approximately 30 minutes, it will feel nearly frozen.
- Remove the meat from the freezer and combine well with the rest of the ingredients, except the water.
- Grind the meat through a 1/4 inch plate, the large die if you are using the KitchenAide grinder attachment, into a bowl set in ice.
- Add the water to the meat mixture and mix with the paddle attachment of the stand mixer for about 1 minute on medium speed. The mixture should be thoroughly combined and quite sticky.
- Immediately stuff the sausage into the hog casings, pinch and and twist to form 6-inch links. Alternately, you can shape the sausage into patties. The sausage can now be refrigerated or wrapped well and frozen until ready to cook.
Bacon Pictures
I took another shot at making bacon from Charcuterie
The other big improvement in the process came in the smoking. I think I am getting this process down. I placed a tray with water underneath the bacon, the moisture from which helps the fire to burn at a steadier rate so the lid doesn’t need to be opened as often to add coals. I also used apple wood chips soaked in water instead of the stupid pellets from my first go around. The chips worked much better, although I think wood chunks will be the real way to go. I feel I am almost there with the smoking, a little more tweaking and I will be able to present a detailed method that gives consistent results here.
As far as the bacon goes, both slabs came out awesome, as you can see by the accompanying pictures (actually, these are all pictures of the savory bacon, but trust me the maple came out just as good). Of the two I think I prefer the savory, especially, for cutting thick and cooking on the grill. If you have never had thick cut bacon on the grill you have to try it. My wife’s stepfather turned me on to this; he starts off every barbecue he has grilling some up for people to snack on while he prepares the rest of the food.
Home Cured Fresh Bacon
After a year of leafing through the excellent book Charcuterie
The first challenge was getting the two special ingredients, pink salt (sodium nitrite) and pork belly. Pink salt was easy enough to get through Butcher-Packer (sold under the name DQ Curing Salt), I also ordered dextrose, which is what the authors prefer to use for the sugar in the cure (they give formulas for making the cure with both dextrose and regular sugar). Pork Belly was another story, not something that you find on the supermarket shelf. They say that you can try to have your butcher special order it for you, but since that would require me talking to somebody, I saved it as a last resort. Luckily, you can order it online from Niman Ranch, once I factored in the shipping costs it was expensive enough to make me hesitate, but I was able to justify the cost in the name of science.
My pork belly arrived on a Friday, a big 8.5 pound slab of meat. I cut it into 2 manageable pieces that would fit into 2.5-gallon Ziploc bags. In the book they say the easy way to do it is to put a 3.5 to 5 pound belly in the bag, add 1/4 cup of cure and shake it up to cover the belly. I am always for the easy way so that’s what I did. I decided to eliminate as many variables as possible and just go with the basic cure of kosher salt, sugar (dextrose) and pink salt. If you want you can take it in a sweeter direction adding maple or brown sugar or a savory direction with garlic, herbs, pepper, etc. It wasn’t too long after I added the cure, shook the bellies up to coat, and refrigerated them that I started to have my doubts that it was enough cure.
They say that the pork belly will release “a lot” of liquid while it is curing and needs to be kept in contact with that brining liquid throughout the whole process. Since it did not look like what I would consider a lot of liquid, the doubts about the amount of cure continued to nag at me. It eventually got the best of me and after a couple of days I added a little more cure to one of the bellies.
After the seven days passed I took the bellies out and the one I added the extra cure to definitely seemed more cured, it was nice and firm, while the other was mushier. The latter also had a blotchy appearance to it. I decide to not take any chances and just smoke the first one. I know it was wasteful but quite frankly I am glad that I was able to get one slab out if it.
Anyway, I rinsed the belly, patted it dry and proceeded to rig up my Weber kettle Grill for smoking. I had never smoked on the grill before but had read a lot about doing it and knew the basic concept, just enough coals on one side to keep it at a low heat, with something to generate the smoke on the coals, and put the belly on the other side to cook slowly with indirect heat. For the smoke I used hickory wood pellets that you put in an aluminum pouch. Poke a small hole in the pouch, and place it on top of the coals and boom, smoke.
As I hinted at earlier, the smoking did not go well. The first problem was the pellets suck. They burned out very quickly, and even trying to add another pouch didn’t work out too well, because once the coals burned down to a low steady heat it didn’t seem to be hot enough to make the pellets smoke. Next time I will have to try soaking wood chips and placing them directly on the coals.
In addition, it was very tough to regulate the heat correctly, at first it was too hot, then when the coals burned down, and the temp started to get too low, I had to add more coals and it would take a while for them to catch, and once they started burning it would get too hot. It is definitely going to take practice and a well planned out system for feeding the coals to get it right. I have a feeling I will buy one of these before I get that down. Still, even though it didn’t quite smoke the way I wanted, and it was frustrating I think just cooking it on the grill and the little smoke added some extra flavor. And it sure did look good when it was done.
Cutting the skin off was pretty difficult, but doing it while the belly was still hot as the book recommends definitely helped. I cut a slice and tasted it just like they recommend and boy did it taste good. Did not seem too salty from the extra cure. After letting it cool, I wrapped it and put it in the fridge and bided my time until the next morning when the real test would come.
The moment of truth, breakfast, nice thick slices of bacon frying in the skillet. I took my first bite and I realized I had never really had bacon before, at least not as good as this. I ran into a few bumps along the way, but none of the problems were show-stoppers. I need to find a cheaper source for pork belly, because I am definitely going to be doing this again. Next time I will try 2 slabs again, only I will go beyond the basic cure and do one slab sweet, and the other savory. Also, I am going to try the saltbox method of coating the meat mentioned in Charcuterie, just dredging it in plenty of cure making sure all sides are covered and shaking off the excess. I think this will work out better than trying to measure it out.
