More about rabbit and our go-to butcher

Here’s an addendum to the rabbit post just below. Today, on the Toronto Star website, I found this clip:

The “story behind the story” is this: Gasparro’s is the butcher shop where we buy almost all of our meat, including the rabbit used in the recipe I shared with you. Nick is the “managing brother” and a delightful person – as is everyone who works there. And they know Italian food! They even make their own guanciale.

Too bad the interviewer is a bit of a ditz. She didn’t even bother to check how the family name is pronounced.

Home curing your own pancetta

Home cured and far better tasting than store-bought!

As mentioned in my December report on our first batch of salume (guanciale) this curing season, we’ve also branched out into making our own pancetta.

There is lots of information on the Internet about what this Italian pork delicacy is (and isn’t), so I’ll leave it to you to do some research on it if you wish. The quick and dirty explanation is that pancetta* is the Italian version of bacon. Generally, it’s not smoked (you can find smoked versions of it, though) and it can be made one of two ways: the more usual arrotolata (rolled) or stesa (flat). The rolled version is often used as part of an antipasto plate. The flat version is most easy to slice or dice for cooking. Regardless, pancetta is simply salt-cured pork belly with whatever herbs and spices tickle your fancy. It’s dirt simple, takes little time (except for the waiting), and is really quite fantastic, far better than what you generally find in stores.

I normally make something at least a half dozen times before sharing a recipe, but there have been developments with the pancetta recipe that really need to be shared immediately with everyone who’s interested.

I stopped in at Gasparro’s a couple of Saturdays ago and Jason (one of the butchers and a real talent at his craft) asked how our pancetta was coming along. There was a substitute butcher helping out that day (I didn’t know there was such a thing!), and we got to talking. He was Italian and seemed to have a lot of experience making salume.

He asked if I washed my pancetta in white wine after the curing was complete (and prior to hanging it). I told him I do that with guanciale but not pancetta. Then he laid a bit of information on me that I hadn’t considered and is really quite transformational. Washing cured meat in wine has an important function beyond adding flavor and aroma. “It neutralizes the salt.”

Very intriguing. So two days later, after rinsing the cure off my chunk of pork belly, I put it into a shallow glass dish and poured over a couple of ounces of Orvieto (our Italian house white) and rubbed it into the meat really well. The aroma coming off the pancetta was incredibly amplified. To check the action of the wine on the salt, I fried up a small piece cut off before the wine bath, and then after. The salt was noticeably reduced. But things might change after the week-long drying process as liquid is reduced throughout the meat. (I was making pancetta stesa.)

I brought it upstairs last night and unwrapped it (I use a cheesecloth wrapping as suggested by Michael Ruhlmann). The fragrance still noticeably showed the wine. Quite frankly, my pancetta smells amazing. I cut off another small piece and fried it lightly. The wine had definitely had an effect on my perception of saltiness. Mind you, I generally cure things a bit less than some would, simply to keep the salt level down, but this batch was markedly better than the first two I made. If one of you makes it and uses the wine wash, I’d be very interested in knowing what your results are.

From here on in, I’m going to wash all my salume in white wine. My guanciale is better for it. The new pancetta is better. And if this holds true, my lonzino should also be improved. It’s certainly worth a try.

So, if you’ve got a yen to make your own pancetta, here’s a recipe that will give you pretty darn good results, if I do say so myself. It’s more or less Michael Ruhlmann’s recipe from his fantastic book, Charcuterie. I’ll throw in the wine-washing tip free of charge.

It certainly does pay to talk to people!

Pancetta
Makes however much you want

INGREDIENTS
pork belly, skin removed (measure the weight in grams to make the following calculations easier and more accurate)
kosher salt: multiply the weight of the meat by .022
curing salt: multiply the weight of the meat by .005
brown sugar: multiply the weight of the meat by .011
coarsely ground black pepper: multiply the weight of the meat by .0175
2 grams juniper berries: multiply the weight of the meat by .0045
1 clove of garlic per 500 grams of meat
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper per 500 grams of meat
1 dried bay leaf per 500 grams of meat
1 sprig of fresh thyme per 500 grams of meat
1 gram freshly grated nutmeg per 500 grams of meat
2-3 oz dry white wine (for the wash afterwards)

METHOD

1. If you’re going to roll your pancetta, make sure the piece is squared up. I’m not going to include rolling instructions, but direct you instead to YouTube where you’ll find some good videos available if you want to go that direction. If you are going to keep your pancetta flat, you don’t need to square it up.
2. You’ll notice that the ingredient list has everything is dependent on the weight of the pork belly you’ll be curing. If you’re seriously interested in home curing, you really need to use a scale. It’s the only way to be really accurate. I’d suggest purchasing one that will measure up to at least twenty pounds. I find metric measurement is easier to work with accurately, but suit yourself.
3. Obviously, it’s critical to get the proportions correct – especially where the curing salt is concerned, because in high amounts, it can be dangerous to your health and to those you’re feeding. Just to show you how it works, let’s assume you have a 2 kilo (2000 grams) piece of pork belly. (Get out your calculator!) The cure ingredients would be measured out thusly: 44 grams kosher salt (2000 x .022), 10 grams curing salt (2000 x .005), 22 grams brown sugar (2000 x .011), 35 grams coarsely ground black pepper (2000 x .0175), 9 grams juniper berries (2000 x .0045), 4 cloves of minced garlic (1 x 4), 1 tsp cayenne pepper (1/4 x 4), 4 dried bay leaves (1 x 4), 4 sprigs of fresh thyme (1 x 4), and 4 grams freshly grated nutmeg (1 x 4). Is that clear? Notice that the proportion of curing salt is about 1/4 of the kosher salt. Don’t mess this one up!
4. Pan toast the juniper juniper berries for a few minutes to really bring out their flavor, then crush them using a mortar and pestle, the side of a knife or the bottom of a frying pan. Chop the thyme sprigs coarsely. Now mix all the cure ingredients thoroughly in a small bowl.
5. Place the pork belly into a glass pan or other non-reactive container, pour on the cure and rub it into the meat very thoroughly on all sides.
6. Take the pork belly and put it into a large zip-lock freezer bag. Also add in any of the cure not already clinging to the meat (there shouldn’t be much).
7. Refrigerate for around 7 days (depends on the thickness of the meat), turning it every other day and additionally rubbing in the cure some more (this is known as “overhauling”). Don’t expect it to throw off a lot of water.
8. You’ll know your pancetta is fully cured when the meat feels firm at its thickest point. If it’s still feeling a bit squishy (like raw meat), place it back in the fridge for another day. Continue the cure until the meat feels firm all over.
9. When the pancetta is fully cured, thoroughly wash off the cure under running water. Watch for bits of thyme stem and juniper in cracks and crevices. Pat it dry.
10. Put the pancetta into a glass pan, pour 2 oz (or more if it’s a big piece) of dry white wine over it. We prefer Orvieto, but you might also try Pinot Grigio or Colli Albani. Thoroughly rub the wine into all sides of the meat.
11. Wrap the pancetta in two or three layers of cheesecloth, make a sling for it with string and hang it where you dry your cured salumi. We have made our basement cold, so it’s between 50° and 60° during the winter which is pretty well perfect. Ideally, you’d like the humidity to be around 75%. We use a vaporizer on a timer to accomplish this – especially in the dead of winter when it tends to be driest. Expect your basement to suddenly smell very wonderful!
12. One week of drying gives me the best results. You don’t want the meat to dry out too much and get hard (especially if you’re going to slice it thinly for antipasto).
13. Late-breaking news (from another post): you’ll know your pancetta is ready when it’s lost 35% of its original weight.

Unwrap your pancetta and enjoy! Last year I found an amazing sandwich can be made by lightly frying thinly sliced pancetta and then putting it on a roll with sliced tomato out of the garden, some provolone cheese and a bit of mayo – sort of an Italian BLT. Some of this latest batch of pancetta is going to be frozen and saved for that.

*Note: Pancetta is correctly pronounced as if the “c” was a “ch” as in “panchetta” (accent on the “ch”) – just to help your Italian along a bit.

Getting ready for a weekend of cooking!

Our charcuterie just before the mouse invasion!

I just did a quick run down to Gasparro’s, our favorite butcher on Bloor Street here in Toronto. We always like to have a chicken on hand and our spare got used last week in an experiment with brining and smoking – which was a spectacular success (more about that in the future: we’re still in the research stage).

Nick Gasparro sold me a beautiful pork roast (why are all butchers suddenly “Frenching” the rib ends on their roasts?), six ribs-worth. Karel and I are going to cold smoke it on Sunday in another experiment, then hot smoke it to finish. We’ll use two different woods: maple and hickory.

Normally, Karel and I do our weekly food shopping on Saturday mornings, mostly at Toronto's fabulous St. Lawrence Market on Front Street. Today, though, I needed to get the brining of the pork roast started since it needs twelve hours in the liquid and then to rest in the fridge for several hours so the salt can spread evenly through the meat. Our goal is to have the roast lightly salted and with brining it’s pretty easy to overdo it. Since we’re using salt in this case more as a seasoning than to preserve the meat, it’s better to leave it in the brine for too little time than the opposite.

The brine recipe is from my current favorite cookbook (we have over 100), Charcuterie (link is live in case you wish to order it). It’s Brian Polcyn’s creation and he doesn’t smoke it after brining, he grills it, which does add some smoke flavor. But we’ve got a really good reason for branching off on our own: we’re going to serve smoked pork chops to enjoy with homemade sauerkraut we made in October under the expert guidance of the Gluch family – of great sauerkraut renown. Vicki has come up with what looks like a great recipe for baking raw sauerkraut (herbs, spices and riesling wine), and if it works out, we’ll be sharing that with all of you, too. As a teaser, the brine we’re using is flavored with dark brown sugar, juniper berries, fresh sage, garlic and black pepper. Right now it’s cooling on the back step and the roast will soon go in for twelve hours or so. It smells heavenly.

A CURING UPDATE: Currently, we have four hog jowls (guanciale) and two pounds of pork loin (lonzino) air-drying in our basement. It all smells heavenly. Only problem is, it also smelled heavenly to some deer mice that must have come into our house when the cold weather hit. Not having checked the two jowls finished at that time and hanging from our water pipe, I was shocked to see how much had been nibbled away. We’ve decided to let the damaged ones continue hanging after dispatching two of the little rodents (both female, thank heavens). Seeing no more of their little carcases in our traps for the past two days, I think we’re safe. We’ll just cut away the nibbled parts, and keep the remaining guanciale to be enjoyed “chez nous”, using the two we’ve cured and hung since to share with other people.

Fortunately, the little critters didn’t seem to care for lonzino (probably the fennel I used in the cure) or I would have been really put out. To combat further mice invasions on our larder, I’ve left the traps out, and moved everything to a place where they shouldn’t be able to get at it again. But the whole thing remains a huge bummer. For the future, I may need to make some sort of wire box since with our house’s foundation resembling Swiss cheese, we tend to get a few of the little buggers in every autumn.

To conclude, stay tuned for our report on the results of this weekend’s culinary adventures. We haven’t written much about German food on the blog so far, and what could be more Teutonic than Kassler Rippchen, boiled potatoes and sauerkraut?

The ultimate in Italian barbecue(?): Bistecca alla Fiorentina

At Ristoro Di’ Cambi in Florence in June 2012

This past weekend I celebrated my birthday, and no, I won’t tell you how old I am. I prefer to think of myself as “well-aged”. Since I’m the main chef in the family, I decided to make my own birthday dinner.

As mentioned here already, a year ago Vicki and I were in Italy researching for the crime novel I’m currently writing and our one big meal out was in Florence where I had the best darn bit of beef it’s ever been my pleasure to negotiate: the justly famous bistecca alla Fiorentina. We went to a place that specializes in this iconic dish: Ristoro Di’ Cambi in the Oltrarno section of Florence. They did not let us down.

For some reason I hadn’t equated Italians with North American’s near fetish for cooking slabs of meat over charcoal. Stupid, I know, but there it is.

Nowhere to be seen, though, were those gleaming silver monstrosities you see lined up every spring at your local Home Depot. The only barbecues we saw on our trip were the very basic little round types with spindly legs and a grill on the top, the kind where you throw some charcoal in, light it up with a bit of paper and twigs, then throw the meat on. I asked an Italian about cooking outdoors using propane and he looked at me as if I were mad.

After using the fantastic charcoal available in Italy, I could see why. It burns clean and very hot. This same person told me that most of it is made with oak. We could certainly see evidence of this in groves of the trees on the sides of many hills throughout Tuscany, some under cultivation for centuries.

You need the best lump charcoal to cook bistecca properly. Briquettes won’t cut it because they don’t burn hot enough. Since the meat is very thick, by necessity, you need to sear it over very hot coals, then spread out the fire leaving most of it on one side of your barbecue, raise the grill several inches and finish the meat over a lower heat. If done correctly, it comes out with a deep mahogany color with no burning, and after letting it rest sufficiently before carving, the inside is rare at the center, more done at the edge, but not at all dry and with very little leakage of juices. In short, after having this dish a few times now, I believe it’s the best way to cook a steak.

First and foremost, in Italy the only proper beef comes from Chianina cows, a breed you see all over Tuscany, dotting the hillsides in small herds. This breed is quite large and grows rapidly. The meat also tends to be fattier than what we’re used to on this side of the Atlantic. Of course, it’s also grass-fed which makes a huge difference in the flavor.

The cut used for bistecca is what we would call a porterhouse. A porterhouse has a larger portion of the tenderloin than the related T-bone cut and on the opposite side of the T-shaped bone is the strip loin. In Italy, the thickness of the bistecca is dictated by the thickness of the bone, so with a big animal, the piece can be quite thick and large. Italian restaurants sell it “per etto” but you get the whole thing so you can expect a steak up to a kilogram. I’d suggest that one steak should be ordered for 2 or 3 people. It will be about 2 inches thick. Only use meat that has been well-aged, so you need to trust your butcher.

As for preparation, the meat is left to shine on its own. Seasoning is left to primo olive oil, salt and pepper and maybe a rub from a cut clove of garlic. All of this is supposed to be done after cooking, by the way. Some restaurants in Italy apparently serve it with wedges of lemon. That’s it. No fancy rubs or sauces, no herbs.

My birthday dinner. I got skunked on the asparagus!

My birthday dinner was for 6, so we were looking for two porterhouse steaks. The place I originally ordered from (Beretta Meats, a usually reliable organic source) messed up and had cut two 1-inch thick porterhouses which I could not accept and which they could not rectify (the person taking their phone orders should listen a little better from now on), so we were left scrambling. Fortunately, I remembered being told about an excellent Italian butcher on Toronto’s Bloor Street, so we went down there.

Gasparro’s is a wonderful place. I dealt with Nick, an enthusiastic man who knows what good food is and where to source it. His shop sells Mennonite free-range chicken and eggs, and the display was filled with cuts of beef, pork and lamb, all locally sourced, and store-made sausage. Nick talked me into buying two rib steaks he cut on the spot from a long rack, and I went for it because the 28-day aged meat looked fantastic with wonderful marbling throughout. After dinner on Sunday, we had to agree that Nick knew what he was talking about. While not strictly a bistecca alla Fiorentina, the meat was tender, juicy and delicious.

Anyway, you carnivores are probably getting a tad peckish at this point, so here’s the recipe.

Bistecca alla Fiorentina (Florentine Steak)
SERVES 3-4

INGREDIENTS
1 two-inch, or traditionally, 3-fingers high porterhouse steak (2 pounds or more)
Olive oil (the good stuff only!)
large grain sea salt (we use a Welsh version, smoked over oak for extra flavor)
freshly ground black pepper
one garlic clove, peeled and halved (optional)

METHOD
1. Make sure your steak is room temperature and completely dry. I take a steak this thick out of the fridge a good two hours before cooking. That way, the center is not really cold anymore. If it is, your finished steak is going to be dry and tasteless on the outside before the inside is even warm.

2. Build a really intense charcoal fire with the best lump charcoal you can find (it will burn hotter). Heat the grill for only a minute or two before putting on the steak to avoid having it burn into the meat. It should be about 2 inches from the coals. I rubbed ours with a bit of olive oil seconds before putting on the two steaks.

3. Cook the steak 3 minutes on each side, searing it well. Now, raise the grill about 2 inches, bank most of the fire to one side (with a few coals left on the opposite side), and put your steak at the cooler end. Cook each side an additional 5 minutes (assuming you want the steak rare – which you should!), and finally spread out the coals again and turn the steak up onto its end bone and cook another 6-7 minutes. This evens out the cooking as the bone spreads the heat into the center of the steak. It’s very important (unless you’re highly skilled at barbecuing meat) to watch the temperature at the center of the meat. For rare, you want it to be around 125°F, for medium 140°. If you want it more done than that, it’s up to you, but I can guarantee the results will be tough and dry, especially on the outside of the meat. You can’t trust the poke method to see if a cut this thick is done on the inside. I’m very good at that, but since this steak will be pretty expensive, I don’t trust myself to get it right. An instant read thermometer is a good (and cheap) way to get it right!

4. You will want your steak to rest for a good 10 minutes to get the juices to migrate back to the core of the meat, so this is the time to lightly brush it with olive oil, grind some pepper over it and lightly salt it. Using salt that’s not finely ground allows it to not completely melt, giving you small bursts of saltiness as you eat that are quite lovely. If you are using the optional garlic addition, rub the meat on both sides before you brush on the olive oil.

5. Remove the meat from the bone and slice it. Serve it on heated plates (especially important if you’re serving outdoors. Let the birthday boy or a favored guest nibble the meat left on the bone!

The traditional accompaniment in Italy is boiled canellini beans (yet another example of why Tuscans are disparagingly referred to as “bean-eaters” in the rest of Italy) that have been seasoned with olive oil, salt, and pepper. For wine, an excellent Chianti Classico Reserva is a perfect choice, or maybe a Brunello, but you want something “hefty” – and good. Don’t cheap out here!

For my birthday, we served this with a few pieces of buttered spinach and cheese ravioli from our favorite place for fresh pasta, Bologna Pastificio (with freshly-grated Parmesan from Zito’s), and local asparagus.

For dessert I made a Beethoven Torte, but that’s a recipe for another day.