Re: Attention Oaklanders: How to eat a pig!

[Guest guest]

geez i really hate it when websites wnat you to fill in masses of

infromation jsut to see a article

screw u new york post.

speaking of real sausage. im aparantly seeing a butcher tomorrow who i

spoke to yesterday

said he has a book taht dates back to 1845 with authentic sausage recipies.

im goign to try and photocopy some pages if i can

Heidi Schuppenhauer wrote:

>

> Anyone interested in REAL sausage ...

>

>

> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/28/dining/28BERT.html?8hpib

>

>

> An intelligent and articulate man with a shyness rare among today's

> star chefs, he showed me a model of a pig's skeleton, citing the Latin

> name of each bone, and learnedly discussed the action of enzymes and

> the changes in pH that take place during curing and aging. It was way

> over my head, but he mastered the chemistry in courses he took in meat

> sciences at Iowa State.

>

> For the moment, Mr. Bertolli makes sausage once a week, Tuesdays and

> Wednesdays, in batches of 70 to 75 pounds, but he has been laying

> plans for a 10,000-square-foot factory in the Bay Area to manufacture

> pork products on a larger scale. When it opens late this summer, it

> will turn out a dozen kinds of fresh and dry-cured sausages, for sale

> to the public and to wholesalers in the area.

>

> Everything, he vows, will still be tied by hand, using linen twine,

> just the way it is done now, and only pure natural casings will be used.

>

> AS soon as he had dealt with the hindquarter of the pig on the day of

> my visit, Mr. Bertolli set to making coppa. He cut into the pig, six

> ribs or so back from the head, lifted out a loin, trimmed away much of

> the fat and shaped the meat into a compact, beautifully marbled

> cylinder. Each pig yields only two of these very choice pieces.

>

>

>

>

>

[Guest guest]

>geez i really hate it when websites wnat you to fill in masses of

>infromation jsut to see a article

>screw u new york post.

Sorry, I forgot about the signup part. You only have to

do it once ... the New York Times has been having

GREAT food articles lately though, it's worth

filling out all those & ** & ^ pages. Really.

-- Heidi

[Guest guest]

Unfortunately after a time the articles are no longer available unless you pay

8-( But it is worth it to sign up.

Peace,

Kris , gardening in harmony with nature in northwest Ohio

http://home.woh.rr.com/billkrisjohnson/

>geez i really hate it when websites wnat you to fill in masses of

>infromation jsut to see a article

>screw u new york post.

Sorry, I forgot about the signup part. You only have to

do it once ... the New York Times has been having

GREAT food articles lately though, it's worth

filling out all those & ** & ^ pages. Really.

-- Heidi

[Guest guest]

I thought this was very cool but then I got to where the chef is using nitrates

and

nitrites as 'curing agents'. I wonder why -- surely his Italian ancestors whom

he is

emulating didn't use them?

From the same NYT article:

Next came the house specialty: soppressata Veneto style, as much like his

grandfather's as Mr. Bertolli can manage....

..... In Italy, the meat would next be hand cut, but Mr. Bertolli uses a German

contraption consisting of a spinning bowl with a rotary knife whirling

vertically inside

it. On my visit, he put 25 pounds of shoulder and fatback into the machine, in a

four-

to-one ratio, and three-quarters of a pound of salt. What came out was a dry,

crumbly

mixture of irregularly sized pieces, rather like butter cut into flour in making

a pie

crust. Then he added pepper, cayenne and aniseed, along with sodium nitrate and

sodium nitrite as curing agents.

--- In , Heidi Schuppenhauer <heidis@t...>

wrote:

>

> Anyone interested in REAL sausage ...

>

>

> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/28/dining/28BERT.html?8hpib

>

>

> An intelligent and articulate man with a shyness rare among today's star

chefs, he

showed me a model of a pig's skeleton, citing the Latin name of each bone, and

learnedly discussed the action of enzymes and the changes in pH that take place

during curing and aging. It was way over my head, but he mastered the chemistry

in

courses he took in meat sciences at Iowa State.

>

> For the moment, Mr. Bertolli makes sausage once a week, Tuesdays and

Wednesdays, in batches of 70 to 75 pounds, but he has been laying plans for a

10,000-square-foot factory in the Bay Area to manufacture pork products on a

larger

scale. When it opens late this summer, it will turn out a dozen kinds of fresh

and dry-

cured sausages, for sale to the public and to wholesalers in the area.

>

> Everything, he vows, will still be tied by hand, using linen twine, just the

way it is

done now, and only pure natural casings will be used.

>

[Guest guest]

>I thought this was very cool but then I got to where the chef is using nitrates

and

>nitrites as 'curing agents'. I wonder why -- surely his Italian ancestors whom

he is

>emulating didn't use them?

They might have. Dom (of kefir fame) uses " ash " in some of his recipes, which

is basically Sodium Hydroxide. Nitrates come from a simarlarly easy source ==

-- Heidi.

[Guest guest]

What source would that be? After I posted this I was catching up, and saw a

recent

thread talking about nitrates in salt petre. What is salt petre and how

commonly was

it used? Anyone know if traditional sausage recipies used nitrates and / or

nitrites

and in what form? Also did traditional sausages use live lactobacilli cultures

all the

time, or just some of the time? And how were those cultures introduced? And how

would nitrates / nitrites affect living cultures?

And in case that's not enough questions -- which is supposedly carcinogenic --

nitrates, nitites, or both?

--- In , Heidi Schuppenhauer <heidis@t...>

wrote:

>

> >I thought this was very cool but then I got to where the chef is using

nitrates and

> >nitrites as 'curing agents'. I wonder why -- surely his Italian ancestors

whom he is

> >emulating didn't use them?

>

>

> They might have. Dom (of kefir fame) uses " ash " in some of his recipes, which

> is basically Sodium Hydroxide. Nitrates come from a simarlarly easy source ==

> -- Heidi.

[Guest guest]

>What source would that be? After I posted this I was catching up, and saw a

recent

>thread talking about nitrates in salt petre. What is salt petre and how

commonly was

>it used? Anyone know if traditional sausage recipies used nitrates and / or

nitrites

>and in what form? Also did traditional sausages use live lactobacilli cultures

all the

>time, or just some of the time? And how were those cultures introduced? And

how

>would nitrates / nitrites affect living cultures?

You can buy nitrates, though it is harder than it used to be because

the make great gunpowder. They are sold as fertilizers if nothing else, and

you used to be able to buy small amounts at the pharmacy. Salt petre

used to be used for gunpowder, and for preserving meats sometimes.

Cabbage has natural nitrates in it, I've heard. Might be why it makes

kraut so easily!

None of my old books uses nitrates for preserving though. They

all use salt, or salt and vinegar. For sausage, the Martha Washington

book says to chop up twice as much fat as meat, add spices

and salt, and stuff it in a clean intestine and hang it from a rafter

where it will keep a month or so. So preserve sausage, they used

lactobacillus (mixing meat with kefir seems to work pretty good,

though I haven't tried it at room temp). I'm not sure what they

used for culture, or if they used a culture back then ... if you

mix raw meat with salt you will PROBABLY get a lacto culture

naturally without any more work. Some of the recipes add

vinegar though, and raw vinegar probably has some lactobacilli

in it ...

-- Heidi