The Kitchen: Bacon Experiment with Trotter

After careful consideration (well, not really) i decided it was time to take down one of the trotters.

It spent 2 weeks in brine, 3 days in salt and approximately 6 weeks hanging outside.

Pulling back the muslin cloth i found there was no nasty bits growing on it, and after cutting away a portion of skin to reveal some (the only) bits of meat i found a nice, slightly salty but tasty bit of pork goodness.

I ended up turning this into a sort of cassoulet thing with tomato, mushrooms and a whole lot of white beans.

With the trotter cut up into small pieces (after being used to create the stock for the dish) it provided a good dosage of extra flavour and texture running through the beans.

Trying this has given me a new hope in the belly bits working out for me... soon they will be had...

The Kitchen: hanging meat

I found a nice constructed little building next to my house that doesn't get much sun on it. This to me means it won't get too hot and would be great to hang my meats.

so wrapped up in muzlin cloth is my dry cured pork bellies and my brine and dry cured pork hocks. so far things are going well. but they need to hand for a good two to three months so things could turn ugly.

all i can really do for the time being is hope. hope that the rot doesn't set in, and hope that the nothing jumps up and rips them off the string.

i'm also going well with my sourdough breads. i've begun getting a consistently good loaf out of each attempt and have gotten to baking a loaf every two days.

the idea of mixing in some fruit has been floated. i just need to work out how to do it without destroying the fluffiness of the dough.

The Kitchen : Not For Cooking. For Experimenting

Our kitchen is a little bit of all right. Once you get past the issues of space, light and the silly oven that gets way too hot and destroyed two tarts and a cake in one day. (This issue has been fixed by the introduction of an in-oven thermostat thing)

In the first month of being here I’ve already started off with my experiments. Well, I’ve started off the smaller experiments to see if they’d be worth doing as big experiments.

Currently I have three long-term experiments going. This will probably change in the next day or two.

The first is my testing of preserving fish in olive oil for long term keeping in the cupboard. With all the supermarket tuna being tinned in Thailand and all the Salmon coming from Canada, I decided it was better to buy my own fish and preserving them. This way I’d be getting a variety of fish, and they’d be much more local than what is in a tin.

So with my leftover half of bay trout from the other night I made a jar to see how it is all done and to see that it tastes good after being kept for a week or two.

Experiment number two is a simple test to see how I’d make cured pork products. Rather than getting a nice bit expensive chunk of belly to try this, I’ve decided to use some pork hocks. These are cheep (at $1 each you can’t go wrong) and if they work would do well in my soups during the colder days.

After days and days of reading (that’s what makes you an expert apparently…) I decided to start by resting the pork in a brine of salt, pepper and a touch of brown sugar. Depending on how patient I am this should be rest for a good 7-12 days. There’ll be updates along the way.

The third and most challenging experiment is producing good sourdough bread. In the past I’ve failed at this really well. I could never get that perfect loaf in the past.

Only on day two I’m waiting for the started to get bubbling. This one could take a few days as well.

So now that the experiments are up to date as well things should probably get shorter and much more to the point.