home cured bacon

I love bacon, and I read a post on Michael Ruhlman's site about how to cure your own bacon at home, so I decided to try it.  I bought a pork belly at Garrett's butcher shop in Algood, TN.  It weighed about 3.5 lbs.  I followed Ruhlman's directions, which involved making a cure of salt, honey, black pepper, bay leaves, thyme, and garlic.  You rub this cure all over the pork belly and put it in a big plastic ziploc bag, and store it in the refrigerator for a week.

The pork belly shrinks some during the week, because the salt is drawing some of the moisture out of it.   When you get it out at the end of the seven days, it's smaller.  You rinse the cure off, and then you bake the pork belly at a low temperature in the oven until it reaches 150 degrees internally, which took about two hours in my oven.

At this point I removed the skin on the underside of the pork belly.  I froze some of it, for seasoning soups later, and Molly the Border Collie ate some of it.  It is very tough, like shoe leather, but she just swallowed it whole.

I sliced up some of it immediately and fried it, but it was hard to slice when it was warm right out of the oven.  A day or two later, after it had chilled in the refrigerator, it was much easier to slice.

This bacon is very lean, compared to the bacon we buy at stores.  I think the reason is that many pigs these days are bred to be lean rather than fatty.  I learned from the ever-useful Oxford Companion to Food that in the 19th century, when bacon was the main meat for working class and rural people of the British Isles, there were many breeds of bacon pigs.  Now most bacon pigs descend from Yorkshire Large Whites and Danish Landrace pigs.  ( Some of my ancestors were from Yorkshire; maybe that's why I like bacon so much!)

Star Wars cookies

I got these cool Star Wars cookie cutters from my sister Marian for Christmas.  They represent Boba Fett and a generic Storm Trooper.  To make them, I used the 1-2-3 cookie dough recipe from a cookbook called Ratio.  You weigh out one part sugar, two parts butter, and three parts flour, mixing the butter and sugar together first. This makes a very basic shortbread cookie, which I varied a bit by adding some vanilla flavoring and an egg yolk.  Then I rolled it out and cut out the cookies.  Boba Fett looks more like a domed adobe house than like a bounty hunter, but maybe that's just me.

I also played with another Christmas toy, which is a measuring cup attached to a digital scale.  Very handy, and very good for aficianados of Ruhlman's ratio system.

1:2:3 improvised christmas cookies

I wanted to make some Christmas cookies today, but I didn't want to go to the grocery store. I had butter, sugar, and flour:  what could I make?

I got out a book I got last summer: Ratio, by Michael Ruhlman.  The premise of this book is that you--yes, you!--can invent recipes. In fact you don't need recipes. You just need ratios. 

Most of the ratios in the book are on the order of x parts butter, x parts flour, x parts egg, x parts liquid.  With these ratios, you have a basic recipe for bread, pasta, pie dough, biscuits, all kinds of cakes and quick breads...and cookies.  The cookie recipe is one of the easiest to remember:  1 part sugar, 2 parts butter, and 3 parts flour.

Note that these "parts" are parts by weight, not by volume.  I have a little digital scale that I got at Walmart.  So for each batch of cookies, I weighed out 30 grams of sugar, 60 grams of butter, and 90 grams of flour.  This made a little batch of about 10 small cookies.

Cookies made with this ratio are shortbreads:  they are not terribly sweet, and there is no egg in them.  A plain cookie of just butter, sugar and flour is.. very plain, but good.  I could actually taste the butter, and I realized that getting good butter might make these cookies a lot better.  (I was just using Land o' Lakes unsalted butter.)  I am going to try that soon.

After trying the recipe first  plain,  I ground the sugar for the next batch with some candied orange peel in the blender, before creaming it with butter and mixing it with flour.  I put an almond in the middle of each of these cookies.  Nice!

I realized I had a little bit of a chocolate bar left, so for the third batch I melted that in the microwave and mixed it with the butter and sugar. You use 1.5 parts chocolate to every part of sugar. (Actually I should have mixed the melted chocolate with the flour first to keep it from melting the softened butter.)  To decorate those, I put a walnut in the middle of each one. How cute!

For the last batch, I really went wild.  I put left-over vanilla seeds in the blender with the sugar, along with some cloves and 30 grams of walnuts.  (You can substitute ground nuts for a third of the flour.)  Also a bit of dried ginger. Ground that up, and creamed it with the butter.  Added a little lemon extract, and some salt.  (A pinch of salt was added to all the batches.)  Then the flour.  This made a crumbly cookie, which I decorated with a bit of blueberry jam when they came out of the oven.

Ruhlman suggests chilling the dough before shaping it into cookies, but I thought it was easier just to do it without chilling.

Wow.  I used up a lot of left-overs in the kitchen and I sort of invented two cookies!  (The other two were suggestions in Ruhlman's book.)