Category: Food & Drink

 More about snout-to-tail eating at tonight’s Cochon 555 later. Tonight you’ll have to be satisfied with two photos that illustrate what I didn’t get to witness while I was sequestered, eating and judging the porcine handy work of five talented cooks.

To demonstrate the skill it takes to break down an entire pig — complete with head and skin — why not have someone break down an entire pig?

 So there was Aaron King, of Garden Market in Des Moines, going at a roughly 75-pound duroc with only the aid of a hacksaw and his knives, while everyone around him ate pork.

He was out of practice since the last time he had taken apart a whole hog was five years ago, and that made him nervous. It took him about an hour and a half, and he ended with all the bits laid out and a tidy, cleaned ribcage.

Oh, how I would have loved to stand and stare as Aaron dismantled that animal. But I only caught the beginning and the end.

It’s been a little more than a year since I put a bullet into the brain of a pig. And, while we’ve been noshing on the remains since, I’ve been remiss by not blogging about it. So a laundry list:

• There was the brunch with the in-laws at which we ate my bacon as both strips and in a quiche (the crust of which used some of the lard) and a sage sausage from ground pork scraps. Sorta like The Onion‘s Entire Meal Pig-Based story only better.
• My mother roasted a cola-brined ham — juicy with a luscious caramelization on the outside — for my graduation party a year ago that did that hog proud.
• We had so much ground pork that we were, for a time, putting it in practically everything. (For some reason we never tried pork burgers, a traditional hog-farmer meal.) But the best sausages were the ones we ground ourselves, hacking muscle and fat off the shoulder bone and letting it sit in the fresh ginger, sage and salt.
• There was the lardo. And the face bacon. And the comic that went with it. (No food poisoning, I’m happy to say.)
• We smoked a couple chunks of shoulder on the grill and ate a feast of pulled pork, and a smoked-hock-and-white-bean soup was a fantastic mid-winter meal.
• And there was the requisite pork chops, both bone-in and boneless ones hammered flat. Iowa tradition.

Despite this plethora, our freezer still holds an abundance: baby-back ribs, some loin and a few chops, an uncured side, hocks, another six-pound bucket of lard, a chunk or two of shoulder.

But there’s some room in there. Maybe it’s time I go looking, as a butcher would say, for a “beef.”

It’s truffle week on my good friend Emily’s blog (that’s her photo above). And we ain’t talkin’ no Freedom Truffles neither. These black truffles are from the mountains of Oregon, her new home. She dug an ass donkey load herself yesterday which is actually impeding her writing duties:

My hands aren’t really ready to type the story of my own truffle hunt. In the end, I spent about five hours coming through dirt with a rake to unearth about twelve of these little black truffles and came back covered in mud and with newly discovered back muscles.

But she’s already posted a taste of truffles — shaved in risotto — on Twitter.

I’m jealous. I will have to take her up on the Oregon food-and-wine tour she offered.

 I was a teenage coffee snob.

I would not drink an espresso shot unless it was pulled in 20 seconds. I refused to drink coffee that wasn’t freshly ground — in a burr grinder — immediately before brewing. I would not subject coffee I brewed to the abuse of a coffee-maker hot plate, insisting instead on a thermal carafe.

During the time in high school and college I spent as a barista, I looked down on the idiots to whom I served almond-coconut lattes with soy milk. And would I smile when a customer ordered a double machiato. They knew what they were drinking; they were a kindred coffee spirit.

Flash forward several years. A friend is explaining why she hates visiting her father-in-law. He is a cheapskate for the ages. She enumerates the sins of his cheapness. Then, at least as I remember it, she gets to the story’s kicker.

He actually makes, she says with a tone that suggests that this sin is akin to winging trespassing neighborhood children with a BB-gun, he actually makes a pot of coffee every morning that he drinks the entire day, long after it has become drinkable and gets pissed if I pour it out and make fresh.

And that’s where she lost me. While I was too ashamed to admit it then, I will now: I drink day-old coffee all the time.

I resisted drinking day-old coffee for so long, either dumping the leftovers or serving them to my wife. But now I find finding left-over coffee in the pot a minor pleasure: in the morning means drinking coffee without the fuss of making it.

Sure their are times when the bitter skunkiness of day-old coffee sends spasms down my spine, but if Michael Ruhlman can profess a deep love for percolators and Folgers, surely I can live down a willingness to drink day-old coffee.

As much as I love eating cured meat by itself, when Sam and Laura gave me three pounds of cured pig, I quickly realized it would be necessary to find something else to do with all that pork. And while I wasn’t worried about it going bad (it’s cured, after all), it has been about a month since I popped the seal on the first pound of prosciutto Americano.

Something had to be done.

But what the hell are you supposed to do with prosciutto besides eat it in hunks? I haven’t really been served it any other way. Sure I’ve had it dressed up — wrapped around melon, stuffed in a fig, put with a salad — but not prepared differently.

But putting prosciutto in lasagna is apparently a real thing, though I’ve never had it that way before.

So we ground up around three-quarters of a pound of La Quercia prosciutto Americano (my 3-year-old thought meat wiggling around like worms as it came out of the grinder was one of the funniest things she’d seen in a while); threw in some speck — the smoked version of prosciutto — for good measure; and cooked some grass-feed ground beef with a little onion and garlic and tossed in the ground pig. We mixed together the obscenely creamy whole-milk mozzarella (and some part-skim to reduce the high-fat guilt) and the ricotta. And Laura whipped up some tomato sauce.

I have loved lasagna well enough and long enough to have carefully crafted a ceramic lasagna-specific dish in a high-school art class that my mother still uses. The prosciutto added a dimension — a smokey, cured depth — that lasagna usually doesn’t have.

I’ve struggled with an appropriate metaphor for this, but let’s try this: A couple years ago every body realized you could add foie gras to burgers made with good ground beef and have THE BEST BURGER YOU’VE EVER EATEN. It was sorta like that, only didn’t involve sticking a funnel down a duck’s throat.