Charcuterie - A few confits, lardo, home made cheese...and a MEAT TREE!!

...take a look at that subject line....this is what happens when your slaving away at work to the point that you have so little spare time that you have to choose to either: blog about something, or cure some meats, make some cheese, or make some beer..

It's kinda like the chicken and egg question right? If I dont do any of that curing, cheesing (is that a word?), or brewing what the hell am I gonna blog about? Do you guys want to hear about our condo purchase or that I've been teaching our dog to low crawl? Perhaps I could entertain you with a recount of an exciting round of Call of Duty 4 which I "fragged" a ton of people?

..yeah I didnt think so :)

..oh and by the way thats the "meat tree" above..it's really nothing more than a bent up hanger from a dry cleaner and a bunch of cured meats dangling from it.

Lets start off with the Charcuterie stuff, 2 salt cured pork belly's (lardo). Really straight forward stuff here-after taking the rind off to make pork cracklings weeks ago I encased the remaining 2 pork bellies (1.5 lbs each) for a day, rinsed after 24 hours, dried them thoroughly and patted down with a little white pepper to keep the nasties away. They are currently in week 3 out of a total 4 weeks they will be hanging from my "meat tree". I plan on enjoying thin slices of them with some truffle oil and maybe some of my home made cheese.

Also hanging from the ole "meat tree" is a very large duck breast which was treated the same as above. This of coarse is going to be my 5th round of Duck Breast Prosciutto which, for my money, is one of the tastiest salt cured products I have ever had. It should be ready to come down this weekend!

whew...1/2 way through...hang in there!

Okay, lets continue this charcuterie madness..now we've got some confits to rap about. Confit, if you dont know, is the salting and slow cooking of meats in their own rendered fat, after which they are stored submerged in the same fat which will eventually set and keep an air tight seal around the meat. Awesome right?

It's really old world stuff, think pre-refrigeration when salt was extremely valuable as not something you put on your pom frites but actually as something that helped preserve meats for long winters (as it also did with veggies I might add). Then you submerge in some fat (usually from the same animal) and let it set giving you a nice environment to safely store your food.

For my first go around with confit I settled on a duck breast and pork belly. Both had to be supplemented with some additional fat to render (but of coarse from the appropriate type of animal) and both were slowly simmered in that fat for around 6 hours a piece, then stored in pyrex containers and tossed into the fridge for keeping and ripening (thats something about confits...they only get better with age I'm told). I plan on using the duck breast in some sort of cassoule and the pork belly will likely be used as an appetizer served the next time we have folks over for dinner and some homebrews.

Now..onto the cheese!

Really not much to say here (I didnt exactly save my best material for last here..). Eventually I can see myself really getting into cheesemaking but for the time being I'm kinda Busch league about it. This batch was just straight up organic whole milk, some veggie rennet, and a tablespoon of starter culture which I pulled from a live culture yogurt. I'm somewhat happy with the results as it is a very straightforward and honest house cheese...but it lacks that little extra bit of character which I'm going to work on down the road. Having said that I do believe these are my favorite pics out of the whole post ;)

Alright..I'm spent...it's time to get dressed and knock out one more Friday before planning out the next batch of random cured meats!

Cheers!

Brian