Today was all about the pig! And now I'm finally catching up :). We learned about how to butcher an entire half of a pig - head included. Phillip also showed us how to make some more advanced cuts of meat from larger cuts, bone in and out. Here are a couple of the techniques and recipes I learned from today:
- Brawn: one of the most intriguing I'd say... Apparently you can also call it "head cheese," because that's essentially what it is... You boil down half of a pig's head without the brains and then peel away as much meat as you can get. The second picture is of Phillip taking out the tongue, which you also include. When you deconstruct the head, you have to take the jaw out first, and also the eyeball... Luckily you don't have to include that in the terrine!! D:. The end product is a terrine with chunks of cooked carrot, meat, skin, and fat... Honestly if you don't think about where it's coming from it tastes pretty good! It looks so deceptive and innocent in the third picture.
Next he educated us on all of the different types of sausages!
I volunteered to help him press the sausage into the casings! Bren took an action shot for me! :D
- Apparently there are 4 different types: cooked (sort of like the brawn ^^), raw (which is just minced raw meat trimmings and spices), emulsified (like the consistency of a hot dog), and fermented (dried and cured sausages like salami, chorizo, etc.) I found the emulsified sausage really interesting - he combined mined meat with fat and ice in a food processor before filling the casings.
- On to casings... the best kind of casing is to use is true animal intestine. The synthetic ones aren't really that ideal. Each animal has a different size too (lamb being the smallest, then pig, then cow), so you can easily choose what size you want your all-natural sausage to be. It was so bizarre watching him blow them up like a long balloon!
- Add-ons: if you really want, you can also hot smoke your sausages! He did this with a frankfurter on a makeshift smoker on the stovetop. Such a simple contraption can yield an incredible delicacy! I want to make one when I get home! :D
I volunteered to help him press the sausage into the casings! Bren took an action shot for me! :D
Can you guess what these are?
They're fried pig ears!! They had the same texture as veggie straws! :O. I thought they tasted quite delicious actually. It's a great way to use up all of the pig so that nothing is wasted (though I guess dogs do like pig ears too!). This gutsy dish made a chef in New York really famous for her ingenuity, where the pig ears were fried in duck fat. I can't even imagine how delicious they must be!
I thought this next picture was so beautiful! I love how structurally sound Romanesco is! Apparently each spire is a perfect fractal (which is defined as a geometric figure where each part is a statistical character of the whole)... Whatever that means! Maybe each spire has mini spires which look exactly like the whole thing and continues on infinitely smaller and smaller in such a way? I dunno!
I thought this next picture was so beautiful! I love how structurally sound Romanesco is! Apparently each spire is a perfect fractal (which is defined as a geometric figure where each part is a statistical character of the whole)... Whatever that means! Maybe each spire has mini spires which look exactly like the whole thing and continues on infinitely smaller and smaller in such a way? I dunno!
The rest of the evening was quite nice! Bren and I accidentally volunteered to finish making chorizo for the instructors, so we were at the school until 6:30 after being there since 9:30. It was a long day! At least we got a pig head and various greens out of it! (Though really I got pressured into taking the head - the instructors were trying to get rid of it! WHY did I take it!??!? D:).
I watched a movie called "Into The Wild" tonight. I would highly recommend it! It's based on a true story where a young man goes to Alaska to live off the land for a spring. Sometimes I have ridiculous dreams of doing that, but I don't really want to now. I think I'd at least love to be able to support myself to some extent by growing my own food, but I don't think I'd be able to live completely in the wild and forage for my own food every day. :\. Still though, watching his experience was inspiring.
Love,
Livvy
I watched a movie called "Into The Wild" tonight. I would highly recommend it! It's based on a true story where a young man goes to Alaska to live off the land for a spring. Sometimes I have ridiculous dreams of doing that, but I don't really want to now. I think I'd at least love to be able to support myself to some extent by growing my own food, but I don't think I'd be able to live completely in the wild and forage for my own food every day. :\. Still though, watching his experience was inspiring.
Love,
Livvy