Friday, March 28, 2008
Birth Announcement
I guess in actuality this is a conception announcement, but who's splitting hairs?!? As you can see from the video, we unearthed four 'BeauBirk' hams from their salt slumber. These four babies now finish off our first experiments with Beau on 'building a better pig'. These are hog 1 and hog 2, fed a modified diet and a peanut intensive diet. I guess the thing that makes these hams a little different from the pork tasting that we posted a few weeks ago is that we are going to have to wait a year to get a taste!!! A little bit of clarification on the video.....after shooting we realized that those four hams were sitting in close to 80lbs of salt, not 20!!! Also, Scott's mention of using black pepper 'to keep the bugs away', is a historical reference to why hams were coated with black pepper when they were put up to hang in barns. Our aging facility is a little more sophisticated and 'bug free'!!! So, like I said, this post is more of a conception announcement(does that mean we can consider the larding and peppering a 'baby shower'?) and we'll get back to you in a year with the full birthing(slicing and eating)!
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3 comments:
Hey
Black pepper will not keep insects away but it does inhibit the growth of bacteria and fungus. But you don't have to worry about any of that with all that salt.
Salt is a fabulous antibiotic. It works in large part by depriving microbes of water. Good luck with those hams!
Interesting comment regarding the black pepper. As I said, we largely did it to respect tradition, however if you check Polcyn and Ruhlman's Charcuterie book(which we use as one of our texts) on page 198, step 4 you'll notice they also mention it. Check out this link for more info regarding the black pepper.
http://www.aamp.com/news/documents/RawTalentHamBooklet.pdf(page 5)
Thanks for the comments. Please keep checking out the blog.
By the way, I see you made the list of "chefs who blog" on the ruhlman.com site, March 28th entry.
Andy
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