About face

As I started writing this post before the last one, I was originally going to go on about how long it had been since I'd last posted.  As it is, a couple of weeks between posts seems relatively prolific given the time there was between the previous two.  But what will remain the same is that as this is going to be another meat curing post, I should start off by addressing the broken promise that I made after my last foray into this subject, my home-cured salami. (here for a quick refresh.) It's about four months since I actually made the stuff, approximately eight weeks of which was spent hanging in my cellar gradually hardening, slightly shriveling due to my overly cautious first approach to hand stuffing natural animal casings (or any other casings, come to that matter) leaving a bit too much space inside, and getting excited by the development of little white specs of mould.

Ultimately I think eight weeks was a bit too long.  The texture in the very middle is just about perfect - quite soft and giving.  When you slice it you can see the fat start to glisten (especially on the one that's sort of chorizo, but isn't really), and although it's a bit of an odd shape (license to be firmer with the casings next time, they're stronger than they appear) it actually looks like salami.  And also, they both taste really good, too, which of course is the most important thing.  The flavours are distinct enough, in one the fennel really comes to prominence, in the other the smoked paprika pervading and providing a vibrant red colour.

It is always tempting to just eat it straight up, but the flavour it has when cooked is pretty damn impressive.  Initially I just stuck some on a homemade pizza.  Do pardon my modesty if I say it was amazing.  (It was).  I also made something from the hip that was sort of based on Jacob Kenedy's Orecchiette with 'Nduja, a dish I had at on my second visit to Bocca di Lupo.  Mine basically consisted of salami finely chopped and fried with red onion and garlic, then adding some sliced aubergine and halved cherry tomatoes before tossing through some paccheri pasta.  It lacked the richening sauce from the wine and cream of the original dish, but the melted fat from the salami distributed a deep, winey, meaty flavour throughout, with occasional hits of fennel.  I think I may have to work on it and there's something pretty good in there.  I still have designs on cooking some variation of razor clams with chorizo, which hopefully will happen at some point soon.

So onto the second part, as I said, this belated salami update was only part of the parcel. 

I first came across guanciale in Kenedy's The Geometry of Pasta, where he describes it as "a fatty, porcine treat, hard to find but worth seeking out."  And if it's worth seeking out, then there's a good chance it's worth persevering with making your own for several months.  Guanciale is the jowl of the pig, or in simple terms, its face.  Cheek, specifically.  Pig's cheeks are amazing, one of my first attempts at making pasta was a pig's cheek ravioli where I cooked the cheeks for several hours until the meat fell apart but was able to come together as little lumps of pasta filling from all the sticky, gelatinous fat in and around it.    As a cut of meat it's at least half fat, probably more 65% - 35% fat to meat.  So of course I wanted to try curing it at some point, and it seems ideal for doing so.

Up to this stage all my efforts at curing have come with a reassuring helping hand from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, but neither The River Cottage Meat Book nor The River Cottage Cookbook offers any sort of guide for curing pig's cheeks.  Neither does Kenedy's Bocca, a book which is so amazing on all other levels I shall forgive it.  So this is where the theory of doing things over so you know the basics well enough to be able to wing it on other things comes into play.  The sort of thing that someone impatient with a short attention span doesn't bother to do.  Like me.

Nonetheless, I kind of did that, but just used my one bacon curing as the basis.  I used the flavoured cure mix that I had been planning on using for the second round of bacon curing, which never actually materialised.  As a much smaller cut than a 2kg pork belly, I thought it must probably take less time to apply the cure in the initial stage.  As for hanging and air curing, I had a bit of a gander around the internet and found that Michael Ruhlman suggests hanging it for two months.  Michael Ruhlman co-wrote The French Laundry Cookbook (as well as Thomas Keller's other books), and was one of the disciples on Anthony Bourdain's pilgrimage to The French Laundry, so by association his opinion will do nicely.

Anyway, the cure mix was as follows;

1kg salt
1kg demerera sugar
25g ground black pepper
20 juniper berries, crushed
a few bay leaves, chopped

So I repeated the same process of applying a rub of cure mix each day for just under a week, then rinsing it off, patting dry and hanging, although whereas the bacon hung for about a week, this will hang for up to two months.  As of now, it's been up about a month.  I already can't wait for it to be ready, and it may be hard to resist temptation to take it down early at the expense of a bit more flavour maturation.

The prospect of my own pasta combined with unctuous, heavy, pork fat is quite something.  Whereas with the salami I pretty much made it just because I wanted to, and it was quite an obvious thing to cure and as such didn't really have anything specifically planned for its use.  With guanciale on the other hand, I'm already accruing recipe plans, all involving making pasta as well, so there shouldn't be much excuse to not go on and on about it afterwards.