Bacon Time

Recently I set out on the quest to make Bacon. However because my grill was stolen a few weeks ago, I created Pancetta instead. It seems like everyone and their mother is making Pancetta these days. For those who are unaware, Pancetta is very much like bacon, only it is dried instead of smoked.

Started with two lbs of raw skinless porkbelly. (Sorry, due to technical difficulties, I had problems with the first couple of pictures)

A mixture of :
Garlic
Sage
Rosemary
Thyme
Bay Leaf
Red Pepper
Corriander
1lb of Kosher Salt
1 cup of sugar
10 Teaspoons of Pink Salt.

For those of you who don't know, Pink salt is a special blend of regular salt, and Sodium Nitrite.

This mixture was spread all over the pork bellies, and placed in a zip lock bag in the refridgerator for a week.



After a week a huge amount of liquid was left in the bag. I just disposed of it, and rinsed the meat.


Then I cut a hole in each piece and let it dry for another week. It was hot out, and the optimum temperature is around 70 degrees with 50% humidity. The air conditioner had to run overtime to keep that up.



The meat was all crusty and didn't look appetizing at all. However the first cut revealed a thing of beauty.


Now the meat is still raw, so it still needs to be cooked. But holy cow is it delicious, very salty. Carbonara is in the future.

14JUL2010- Breakfast sausage

Meat in tube form is one of the great joys in life -Anthony Bourdain

Damn, this was delicious, but a huge pain in the ass. I'm already putting this under the not quite worth the effort catagory.

I started with a 4 lb chunk of Boston Butt. Which isn't actually porky pig's ass, but his shoulder.

In order for sausage to fit inside the tube it needs to be ground, and in order to be ground it needs to be cut into chunks.
Sausage needs a source of fat, and normally fatback is used. I couldn't find fatback, so I used Bacon and cut down on the salt that I added later. This is the chunked pork with 1lb of bacon also chunked.

I fed it through this beast. It took at least an hour

Finally it was all ground. If I do it again, I might use a food processor. To the ground meat I added about (I eyeballed it):
2 TBS Fresh Sage
1 TBS Fresh Thyme
1Tsp Cayenne Pepper
1TBS Red Pepper Flakes
2 TBS Brown Sugar
Ground Pepper
About 1/2 Tsp Kosher Salt.

I did the same thing as Alton Brown did. The good part begins about halfway through.

The final results

13JUL2010-Lamb Tenderloin with Madeira sauce

Unfortunely my camera is full, or else I would have taken pictures of this. It was pretty simple:

I made a rub out of:

2 TBS Olive Oil

1 Tsp Cumin

2 cloves of minced garlic.

I rubbed this all over my lamb tenderloins and gave them a quick sear.

The tenderloins went into a baking dish. I preheated the oven to 350.

In the meantime I deglazed my pan with a cup of madeira wine and some shallots. After about five minutes of reduction I poured it over the lamb. In the oven for 10 minutes.

I wish I had some pictures to show off how well it came out. From now on I will take pictures.