Indeed.

Some more pictures from Tractorcade [...]]]>

Indeed.

Some more pictures from Tractorcade 2010.

The lardo has finished curing and has been hung to dry. The mocetta is on day eighteen and is doing very well. There’s either salt or good mold on the outside of it.

Look! I actually weighed it this time!

574 grams of pastured [...]]]>

Lardo on day one, mocetta on day 18

The lardo has finished curing and has been hung to dry. The mocetta is on day eighteen and is doing very well. There’s either salt or good mold on the outside of it.

Look! I actually weighed it this time!

574 grams of pastured goodness. You can much more clearly see the resident hairs in the skin. Today I learned that industrial/conventional pork producers aim to produce a carcass with no more that 0.6″ of back fat. The minimum thickness for curing into lardo is 1″. It’s truly wonderful to have so many artisanal producers in our neck of the woods.

Ruhlman doesn’t, I think, talk much about before/after weights in Charcuterie or, at any rate, I missed it. Either way, it’ll be interesting to get the data on moisture loss. Come to think of it, what would the percentages look like in pastured pork versus industrial, saline-injected meat?

Ten days later, it's unwrapped.

This is what the fatback looked like once unwrapped from the plastic wrap and tin foil that held the cure in the fridge.

No, it's not exciting, but it's documented.

Poor lardo spends all of its time in the dark. Light will cause the fat to turn rancid so it’s wrapped in foil in the fridge and cured in the dark. On top of that, it’s swaddled in cheesecloth while it hangs.

All wrapped up in cheesecloth to protect it while it hangs.

I confess that it has more than a little to do with my odd reading habits of late, but locking things away in a darkened closet seems a little sinister to me. While charcuterie has very little to do with unnamable evil, there are a few commonalities.

As I alluded to earlier, there’s a little over a pound of fatback [...]]]> That’s not actually true, it’s back fat. However, I once saw one of those godawful women’s magazines at a grocery store and, after reading the headline “Cure your belly fat now!,” was honestly confused that they weren’t talking about bacon.

As I alluded to earlier, there’s a little over a pound of fatback curing in the fridge right now in anticipation of joining my mocetta (goat prosciutto, roughly) that’s hanging in the Harry Potter closet under the stairs.

First, let’s check in on the mocetta. It’s been hanging for 11 days and is definitely looking more like prosciutto that rotten meat.

As you can see, I was in the middle of doing knife maintenance and sharpening.

There was a bit of white mold turning to blue green on it so I performed a little surgery.

The nice thing about the bad mold was that I got to check on the progress of the drying. It seems to be moving along nicely. It’s distinctly firmer and the cured texture goes about a centimeter into the ham. It turning into food instead of rotting meat!

After a few more days (okay, a week), I checked back in on it and the “wound” seems to have healed itself and the ham is drying as intended with no more blue mold.

Moving on to the lardo.

First of all, it’s fat. Pure fat (almost) which has been salted and dried. I’m not sure if I’ve had it before but I hear good things and have a lot of fat back. Now, I’ve been served pork belly confit* (Yeah, that was these guys). And it was fantastic. Not cured though.

I started with Michael Rulman’s recipe from the book Charcuterie but, as ever, fiddled with it. Juniper berries were added and white pepper substituted for 1/4 of the black pepper.

From left to right, juniper berries, bay leaves, peppercorns, and basic cure #1

And now the meat. The recipe calls for fatback or, you know, the fat from the back of the pig. This may sounds obvious, but butchery terminology is rarely so straightforward. The boston butt, for example, comes from the part of the back directly over the front legs. What this implies about bostonians is unclear.

The pink that you see is muscle that came along when the fat was removed. The other side has little bits of stubble that remains from the process of scraping the pig. Pig, not carcass, is a deliberate word choice. It’s a carcass once it’s gutted or skinned, as I see it. Since scraping is the first step after killing and bleeding, I still see it as a pig.

Scraping is cool though. The pig doesn’t get skinned or plucked like sheep, goats, and poultry (the only animals I have firsthand experience with). Instead, the pig is scalded, or immersed or exposed to water around 145F and the hair and outer layer of skin is scraped off in an unpleasant and time-consuming manner. Basically, you skritch skritch skritch every inch of the pig’s skin with a knife or a pastry scraper or even a hog scraper if you’re well equipped.

The scraping process inevitably leaves a little bit of the hair behind. Like pinfeathers on broilers, this has resulted in a drive toward lighter-colored animals to satisfy consumer and producer demand for a blemish-free product. Like white poultry, the lack of pigmentation makes the animal less hardy in the sun. When I get pigs, I’m thinking a breed like the large black hog. Mmmm, hardy.

Due to misremembering the recipe, I was looking forward to posting this with pictures of the lardo leaving the fridge and being hung. Fortunately, I re-read the recipe and it’s got another three days. (Less botulism means more years to eat food!) I’m going with Ruhlman’s minimum this time as my stuff has been turning out saltier than ideal.

In other news, I’ve come into possession of a 5.5 pound leg of ram from a mature, adult ram who, until yesterday, displayed a bad attitude toward children. During the butchering, the meat smelled intensely of the flavor of lamb. He was also tremendously fatty with much more marbling than other lambs/goats I’ve and the meats has a deep red color. Much of the odor faded while he hung, which is why one hangs meat, I guess.

I am a bit bereft of recipe ideas for the leg. Suggestions? I’d like to find something to highlight the powerful flavor and muscle development in the same way that coq au vin is best with a gamy old rooster.

Thoughts?

As is typical, I’m [...]]]> Well, not really. As Lauren posted earlier, we’re doing fairly well at reducing the contents of our still-very-full chest freezers. And, with the departure (ascension? transfiguration?) of orange and blue I’ve renewed my interest in curing my own charcuterie. And it turns out there’s a blog challenge underway.

As is typical, I’m both ahead of and behind in the game. My duck prosciutto was finished before it was supposed to be and next month’s isn’t started yet. Oh well. Orange’s leg is curing in the Harry Potter closet under the stairs, delicately suspended about a huge pile of musical instruments, so that puts me ahead of the game, maybe. Except that’s not what’s supposed to be curing right now. Now as in my youth, I suck at following along with the class.

Home-grown duck home-cured in the guest room. The knife is my souvenir Portuguese lamb butchering knife.The recipes is from Ruhlman's book Charcuterie.

The prosciutto turned out well. Perhaps a bit too salty but it’s supposed to be that way, right? Also, I don’t know if the white stuff is mold or or salt. Research time.

The mocetta (goat ham) is curing under the stairs. This is day four.

This is the hind leg of one of our goats. He’s curing according to Hank’s recipe for Mocetta or goat prosciutto. Well, except for the fact that I forgot the bay. Twice. It cured in the fridge for a total of three weeks and will need to hang for 2-6 months. I suspect it’ll be on the longer side of things because it’s pretty humid here. There’s a gob of white on the bottom left that I think is fat, but I’ve got my eye on it.

When I get around to it, I’ll hang some lardo in there as well because I finally managed to subdivide the fatback from our latest big. It’s inconvenient to work with a single bag containing all the fat from a pig. I did the same with the five(!) livers from the previous pig. No, the pig did not have five livers, the other customers did want their livers so I was forced to save them. And then toss them in a ziplock and freeze them into an undifferentiated mass of offal. Note to self: don’t do that. Also, make paté.

On the upside, seems like other charcuterizers on the internets have to build complicated temperature and humidity management systems. I checked out our unheated guest room/office/library and found it have perfect conditions for curing meat, right down to starting at a lower temperature and becoming slightly warmer as it cures. It is becoming clear to my why subsistence farmers have traditionally butchered in the fall/winter. And that I like my Cascadian climate.

If you look closely you can make out an ATA flight case for a Sho~Bud Superpro pedal steel guitar.Yes, I do have strange hobbies.

G: Prefer garlic scapes to turkey ‘scapes. Less hurty.

L: Yikes!!

G: But they got a size on them and hella vigor.

Should store h2o2 in the truck I reckon.

(On edit)

Lauren suggests that I clarify that h2o2 is hydrogen peroxide and that I include the photo I took [...]]]>

G:
Prefer garlic scapes to turkey ‘scapes.
Less hurty.

L:
Yikes!!

G:
But they got a size on them and hella vigor.

Should store h2o2 in the truck I reckon.

(On edit)

Lauren suggests that I clarify that h2o2 is hydrogen peroxide and that I include the photo I took mere seconds before the opportunity to photograph turkey-inflicted carnage presented itself.

The entirety of that email was the subject line “Large Turkey is Large” and the following photo.

Additionally, we raise our birds outdoors from the day we get them. They are on grass and dirt (and [...]]]> Heritage chickens. They have great foraging instincts and they love to explore. It’s great and it’s the reason that we raise only these breeds. It’s wonderful to raise an animal that acts like an animal.

Additionally, we raise our birds outdoors from the day we get them. They are on grass and dirt (and straw. and under a heat lamp) from the day they show up at our long-suffering post office. We think that a heritage breed on soil and grass is unmatched from an animal welfare and a taste perspective.

However, there is a downside.

They get out.

All. The. Time.

You know 1″ poultry mesh? So do they. They like to go through it. My theory is that the squeeziness is reassuring to them. Temple Grandin is with me on that one.

Excuse me, I need to collect a chick.

Lest you think that’s a rhetorical device, I assure you that I just stepped away from my computer to collected a panicked, five-day-old chick. What does this look like? Let me show you.

Yep, it's a hat full of five-day-old chicks.

This is not, I confess, the chicken I just went to collect. She was only a single escaped chicken and the ones in the photo and my hat are the chickens that escaped when I was at our other farm, dealing with our other chickens.

Lauren’s dog is, in general, an amazing animal possessed of a tremendous amount of mothering instincts. Seriously. I’d sooner trust her with a newborn than an electric mesh fence. She has been a tremendous asset in identifying and locating escaped chicks this year. She’ll hear a distress peep long before we do and zero in on the poor little peeper in the way that only a critter with ears that big can do. Good girl.

But she’s bored with it by now.

What? This is a hat full of chicks. Seriously?

I’d like to have a really awesome punchline right now… Something that just drives this whole anecdote home… But I don’t, so I’ll leave you with the thought that I’m currently wearing a hat full of baby chicken poop.

We took a day “off” this weekend (Visited farmer’s markets and farms around Chimacum. And shopped for hay.) and headed up to Port Townsend. We perused an antique store and found a perfectly functional corn planter and a brightly painted Planet Junior-type wheel hoe. We’d been eyeing these tools [...]]]>

Our shiny new cultivator!

We took a day “off” this weekend (Visited farmer’s markets and farms around Chimacum. And shopped for hay.) and headed up to Port Townsend. We perused an antique store and found a perfectly functional corn planter and a brightly painted Planet Junior-type wheel hoe. We’d been eyeing these tools for years but could never justify the price for a new one. However, our valuable antique cultivator was priced at about a third the cost of a new one. A bargain!

The antique dealer, however, seemed a mite confused that we were evaluating his antique with an eye toward using it in our garden. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that his antique was, in point of fact, a thrifty and useful tool.

It wasn’t as awkward as the time Lauren had the following conversation about an antique egg scale:

“So how can it accurately weigh eggs with this sticker missing?”

“Well, you are just going to use it for decoration.”

“No, I need it to grade eggs for sale.”

“…”

This is what a baby robin looks like.

Note the more-than-superficial resemblance to a baby chicken, like one of the three that used to be able to get out of the coop.

Now, imagine that Oscar (Note to readers: Oscar is my dog) finds such a baby bird, partially feathered out, behind [...]]]>

PEEEEEEEEEP!

This is what a baby robin looks like.

Note the more-than-superficial resemblance to a baby chicken, like one of the three that used to be able to get out of the coop.

Now, imagine that Oscar (Note to readers: Oscar is my dog) finds such a baby bird, partially feathered out, behind the coop. Imagine how concerned both you and Oscar might be that such a critter has escaped both its housing and my notice. Terrifying.

And I had no idea what species the poor bird was. Turkey? Chicken? How old? Which of the seven flocks does this critter belong to? Very stressful.

Until, of course, after much chasing through blackberries, I manage to pick up the critter. At that point, the mouth gaping behavior presented a clue that this might not be a domesticated bird. The second, and more definitive, clue was when at least two robins began tripping their shit and dive-bombing me while emitting emergency bird distress calls.

I took their point and set the chick down and wished them all the best.

I like compost, soil likes compost, worms like compost. Everyone likes compost. You know what I don’t like? Pathogens. Pathogens and weed seeds that show up in uncomposted manure. At last year’s Tilth Producers conference I attended a workshop [...]]]> This is not legal advice, please consult your county extension. That’s what they’re there for.

I like compost, soil likes compost, worms like compost. Everyone likes compost. You know what I don’t like? Pathogens. Pathogens and weed seeds that show up in uncomposted manure. At last year’s Tilth Producers conference I attended a workshop on static aerated composting given by Scott and Amy Turner of Blue Dog Farm. (Actually, I’m not positive it was both of them presenting because that’s not in my notes)

At any rate, there are rules governing the spreading of manure on Organic farms that specify a certain window prior to harvest (90-120 days, depending) but, once you’ve composted manure, it is no longer manure, it’s compost. However, I could not find a reliable source* for when manure counts as compost. And it was a tricky research problem especially for someone who doesn’t read legal writing particularly well. The Wisconsin State DNR links to the s. NR 502.04, Wis. Adm. Code [PDF 194KB] Compost Performance Standards which includes the following paragraph alluding to a national standard:

(h) Materials resulting from composting shall be:
1. Stabilized to eliminate pathogenic organisms and to ensure that the materials do not reheat upon standing.
2. Free of sharp particles which could cause injury to persons handling the material.
3. Free of toxins which could cause detrimental impacts to public health or the environment.
Note: Pathogens are defined in ch. NR 204 as “disease causing organisms, including but not limited to certain bacteria, protozoa, viruses and viable helminth ova.”
Appropriate methods for pathogen elimination during composting are specified in 40 CFR, Part 257, Appendix II, Section B:
1. For in−vessel or static aerated pile composting, maintain a continuous minimum temperature of 55° C, or 131°F, for a minimum of 3 consecutive days.
2. For windrow composting, attain a minimum temperature of 55°C, or 131°F, on a minimum of 15 days, which are not required to be consecutive, and turn the windrow a minimum of 5 times during the high temperature periods.

The document referenced at the state level is40 CFR : Protection of the Environment, a monstrous collection of regulations that the EPA has thoughtfully put online (Good jobs, folks!). The section relevant to reducing pathogens in compost states the following:

Composting: Using the within-vessel composting method, the solid waste is maintained at operating conditions of 55 °C or greater for three days. Using the static aerated pile composting method, the solid waste is maintained at operating conditions of 55 °C or greater for three days. Using the windrow composting method, the solid waste attains a temperature of 55 °C or greater for at least 15 days during the composting period. Also, during the high temperature period, there will be a minimum of five turnings of the windrow.

So, as I read the codes, manure qualifies as compost then the following conditions are met:

Also, let’s take a moment to thank the EPA and WDNR for doing such a great job indexing and making available these documents.

Edit: After going through all that, I found the composting page at extension.org which states the following:

The interesting thing is that I misread the regulations. I assumed that both a windrow (long stack of material) and vessel (big box) needed to stay above 131°F for three consecutive days and that composting in a bin also required turning. I was misinformed. Or, more accurately, I misinformed myself. Curiously, the federal standards are less rigorous than my own, personal standards.

My compost pile with the temperature around 155° F. ZOOM! say the bacteria.

*No, my recollection of a conference session is not reliable.

The result is that we’ve got a mess of [...]]]> So it’s Spring and the chickens are sleeping in the coop and are still in the sacrificial paddock when the fence keeps them in and free-ranging when it doesn’t. I prefer to think of it as a Sacrifice Zone but that’s because I’m a nerd.

The result is that we’ve got a mess of tomato starts potted up in 4″ soil blocks and a shortage of space in the greenhouse and a spare chicken tractor. In the best idea I’ve had in a long time, it occurred to me to remove the blue tarp covering the tractor and replace it with clear plastic. Ta-daaa! Instant greenhouse.

In use, the tractor is partially covered with a blue tarp to let the ladies to get out of the sun or rain, depending.

Because of the poultry cloth on the tractor we couldn’t clip the plastic to the PVC hoops as is our usual custom. Instead we attached the plastic by laying it on top and zig-zagging twine over the plastic in the manner we learned during the Tilth Producers farm walk at Terry’s Berries. This has proven to be faster and more reliable that the clips with the added bonus that the greenhouse can be vented by sliding the plastic up without fiddling with any clips and potentially tearing the plastic.

So, yeah, I’m pretty pleased with myself.

Here is the tractor greenhouse with the plastic fully deployed for maximum heat.

Here is the tractor cum greenhouse with the sides pushed up for venting. Noticing how much easier this is than farting around with clips?

Look how happy the tomatoes are in their roomy new soil blocks. I'm pretty sure we started them too late but, you know, first year farming.

It’s official. Oscar and I are the only males left on the farm. And I’m the only one that’s, for the time being, unfixed. Mr. Guy went to his new home today, ingloriously swaddled in cardboard. He was not pleased with that but I think he’ll enjoy [...]]]>

My duck. In a box.

It’s official. Oscar and I are the only males left on the farm. And I’m the only one that’s, for the time being, unfixed. Mr. Guy went to his new home today, ingloriously swaddled in cardboard. He was not pleased with that but I think he’ll enjoy his new home. And our ladies will enjoy the respite from his attentions and, hopefully, will re-grow some of the feathers on their butts.

Farewell Mr. Guy! May you molest only the correct species in your new home.

Mr Guy Loves the Ladies

It's a Futurama joke. Sorry

Unfortunately, [...]]]> So we recently figured out how to turn on stats for the blog and it turns out that many people get here by searching for “straw bale root cellar,” which is something I posted about earlier after shamelessly stealing the idea from Throwback at Trapper Creek.

It's a Futurama joke. Sorry

Unfortunately, our straw bale root cellar failed miserably. While Throwback built her cellar in the barn we, sadly deficient in barns, built ours under the back porch and stretched a tarp overtop of it. End result was that critters and water got in resulting in the food and straw bales being eaten and rotted respectively. Bummer. But live and learn, food storage is a skill and, despite losing about 30% of what we stored over the winter I think we did alright. Mostly we don’t want anyone following our example thinking it’s a road to success.

And the great thing about gardening is that, even when food goes bad, it’s not wasted. It’ll either get fed to the poultry or composted. Either way it turns into healthy soil and healthy food. It’s just a matter of time.