Beyond Piggy Market

I haven’t even written about Piggy Market yet, and we’re already going beyond :-)  Dammed lazy bloggers!

Piggy Market is a new shop in Westboro that sells its own chcarcuterie, plus some ready-cooked foods and other assorted local goodness like ice cream and apple cider.  We bought some sausages, and some bacon, and suffice to say everything was tasty, but pretty pricey.  In particular, the bacon, which they made themselves from a Tamworth pig, was really really nice.  The sort of thing where you have two slices and you feel like you really had something satisfying.  The sausages were also great (and expensive)…I don’t have time to do them justice in this blog post.

My usual retort when confronted with something tasty and expensive is “we could make this stuff ourselves”.  And so we shall…

I was given a copy of Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn for Father’s Day.  This book has been very educational, both in terms of understanding what exactly all those things are at the deli counter, but also how it is that we as a society make effective use of the animals we raise for food.

This isn’t a “30 easy recipes you can make on the spur of the moment” kind of book.  You shouldn’t be afraid to work out ratios, and you need time on your hands. The quickest thing in the book takes two days to make, and some recipes include aging times of a year or more.  Despite the book not having “easy stuff”, there is certainly a range…with many simple cured meats at the easier end of things and most air-dried sausages and hams at the “super challenging” end.

So far, I’ve been working my way through some of the easier recipes.  Duck Proscuitto (made before I had the book).  I also did the fennel-cured salmon fillet.  I don’t have any photos to offer, but suffice to say this was very successful.  It had much of the flavour and texture of cold-smoked salmon (without the cold smoking of course).  The flesh sliced up into beautiful paper-thin slices just like the commercial stuff.  I can’t see buying much cold-smoked salmon anymore, and I’m in the midst of figuring out how to make candied salmon, one of my favourite treats that you can’t buy anywhere in Ottawa.

The first thing I made from the book per se was bacon.  Bacon is cured for a week, then traditionally hot-smoked.  However, Ruhlman insists the results are just fine from cooking in a slow oven to a temp of 150F instead of smoking.  I used the BBQ attempted without success to get a bit of smoke in there.  I think next time I’ll be able to both get the smoke happening but keep the overall temp of the BBQ low enough to slow-cook the bacon.

This is pork belly from a heritage breed called the Large Black Pig.

fresh out of the BBQ.  tastytastytastytasty

sliced by hand.  You need a sharp knife and it helps to put the bacon in the freezer for a short time beforehand.

I just made a small piece, and it was sufficiently popular at home that there is no more left.  I started another small piece today to cure in the fridge.  Nobody wants to go back to buying bacon, except maybe from Piggy Market.

Next up was some pancetta, also made from Large Black pork belly (but air dried instead of slow-roasted).

pancetta, partway through curing.  The dark bits are crushed juniper berries.

The finished product, after hanging in the basement for a week.  Lots of savoury flavours…mainly black pepper and garlic.  I don’t feel the need to go back to buying pancetta anymore.

With these sort of things, half the fun of making it yourself is to get flavour profiles that you can’t get in the store.  I have lots of ideas I’ll be experimenting with in the future.  I’ll also be attempting some recipes from some of the later chapters of the book.