Cheese Experiment

Vermont Raw Milk Cheddar made in Brooklyn.

1 gallon of raw Vermont milk (from Taylor Farm in Londonderry)

salt

cheese culture

veal renet

Waxing the cheese and getting it ready for three months of aging. Hopefully all goes well and we wind up with one awesome cheese.

Cured Coppa

Today I embark on a quest of meat cured love. I mean hell, I've made bacon before and guanciale, why the hell not go a bit further and a bit longer. You know length matters, and if you don't, well then I guess I feel a bit sorry for you. Well anyway where was I... yes longer. I'm talking about time and pork in one delicious force, that is if all goes well.

It starts with a fine coppa from the boys over at the Meat Hook. Their meats are all sourced as locally as possible coming from all sorts of great farms in the New York area and sometimes even some little piggies come in from Queens. Yea you heard me, Queens bitches, as in the most massive borough of New York City. Who the hell knew they were raising livestock right under Kevin James' nose. Back to the pork. I got 3 lbs. of coppa, which is from the shoulder of the piggy, directly behind its head. From there I cut it in half, this way I can experiment a bit with aging it for different lengths of time.

Now it's time for the spices aka the cure.

5 oz Kosher Salt

1 oz White Sugar or Raw Sugar

2.5 oz Dark Brown Sugar

0.8 oz Red Pepper

0.5 oz Smoked Paprika

0.5 oz Black Pepper

0.2 oz Sage or Thyme or both

0.5 oz Garlic Powder or the real stuff

1 tsp DQ Curing Salt #2

From what I've heard, using the curing salt, aside from just the kosher stuff, you greatly lower the risk of botulism by a whole lot, if you're feeling like living your stupid ass life on the edge, just go for the kosher salt.

Now get a huge bowl and grab your meat... yes grab your meat you damn five year old. If you want to grab your junk and throw it in that bowl and cure it, go for it. I'm sure it won't shrink too much smaller, like we realized before, it aint that big to begin with. I'm sure you'll make the Darwin Awards some day, so why not make it today. Now that your PORK is in the big ass bowl, make it rain. Pour that savory curing concoction all over that raw porky goodness. Too bad this isn't gonna be ready for a few months. Rub that meat, I know, all over. Make sure that cure is getting all over that coppa. If there's any nooks and crannies, get em covered with cure.

Once that's done, throw the pork with the cure all over it into a big ziploc bag. If you have your pork in two pieces, use two bags... I really don't care. Hey, you say you've got access to a vacuum sealing food mabobber, why the hell not? Go for it. If you're using the poor man's ziploc bag, just make sure you force all the air out of it.

Hard Part . . . Part One

Let that pork cure. You have to leave it in your fridge under a littler bit of weight for 10 to 15 days. Flip it every other day. From there, it's going to go something like...

remove from bag

rinse your meat

dry it off

slam it deep down into a sizable casing (natural of course)

and wait some more (a few weeks or month or two)

I'll write more on this as it gets done.

Bye Dad.

Fridge Breakdown Pre-Resolution

I thought it would be interesting to list the tons of crap that fills up the belly hole of our fridge before it gets cleaned out. Some of that stuff has been in their since we moved into our place and a lot of it isn't fresh, local, or seasonal. So here it is.

Bag of onions

Quinn's homemade Rainbow Cookies (3 layers of green in the spirit of a Troll 2 party our friend arranged)

Jar of homemade pickle slices

Jar of homemade faux kimchi

Ground meatloaf mix (supermarket kind)

BEER

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

Sam Adams Winter Lager

2 Bud Light pints

Juniper II (home brew)

Juniper Plume Tree Ale (home brew)

Jar of Fairway tomato sauce from the beginning of time

Western Beef's so called grape jelly

Weird cheese with a layer of ash in it (Quinn's yelling at me that it's Morbler not just a nuclear fall out zone in there)

Vermont white cheddar

A few Kraft Singles

Sun Chokes or Jerusalem Artichokes (in season bitch)

Eggs

English muffins

Reduced fat mayo

Leaf Lard (Thanks Meat Hook)

One massive shit ton of Almond Paste

One empty jar of homemade pickles

Jars of pickled Red Cabbage, Pearl Onions, and Radishes

Loaf of wheat bread

Duck Confit (from yours truly)

Assorted wonton and egg roll wraps

Raspberry jam

Miso paste

Homemade Spicy Relish

Rainbow Cookie scraps (what to do...)

Too many gross salsas

more pickles

Apricot jam

Empty jar of apricot jam

Half full jar of apricot jam

another half f*%^ing jar of apricot jam

Jalapeno pepper dip

Hot Ajvar

HOMEMADE BACON & GUANCIALE

Butter

Maine blueberry jam

Lime juice concentrate

Tons of Hot Sauce (Frank's Red hot being our favorite)

Siracha

Molasses

Dark Soy sauce

Ketchup

Veal Rennet (Cheese making experiment)

Capers

A few mustards (one homemade)

Hot curry paste

Pure Maple syrup

Hershey's chocolate syrup

Worcesters sauce

Sesame peanut sauce

Tahini

More Beer

Flat, almost empty bottle of Schweppes Ginger Ale

Simple syrup

As for the freezer... this is a bit worse than just some shitty condiments.

Poblano pepper (I don't know what I was thinking)

3 or 4 homemade soups and stocks from I don't even know when

12 year old Jameson

Homemade hot chocolate (spiked with rum of course)

Pine nuts

Parmesan rinds

Mesophilic cheese culture

Soaked apple wood chips from tales of bacon past

Cranberries

Dark cherries

Cookie-less cookies and cream ice cream (thanks Quinn)

Duck Fat from the Meat Hook

Butter

Braised pork shoulder

Homemade Mole Negro

Pork loin w/potato-parsnip puree

Whole chicken with a good deal of freezer burn

more butter

Hamburger buns

Homemade hot dogs

Strawberry ice cream

Bread flour

Hamburgers

Homemade chili

Shit ton of bones (pork, duck, chicken, & beef)

So there you have it. This will be fun to look back on when we get closer to our goal of better eating. Until the next fridge raid.

Good Morrow Young Dinosaur

You may not be the broken legged baby T-Rex from Jurassic Park II, but you may be interested in food. We will try to unearth some weird things like Indiana Jones and Nicholas Cage in National Treasure II (I just love him in Con Air with that hunk of a mad man John Malkovich), but in a way that will hopefully make your taste buds wiggle because who doesn't want a super-sized helping of food porn.

So it appears I am going to be the singular sane contributor to this here blog. Kyle will be too drunk on any and all manner of pork product to produce any semblance of a coherent thought. I, however, am drunk on cheddar waffles. Anyway, hello and welcome. I guess we started this because we're tired of only talking to each other about how much food rules, or maybe because with no Top Chef we are in need of something else to occupy our time. Either way, I'm sorry. Now let's hear it for Steve Jobs...

As it is a new year we've decided to try something new and responsible; eating more seasonally and more frequently at home while supporting our local economy by buying locally sourced produce, meats and more. And to make sure everybody knows how awesome we are for doing it, we're going to archive it here for all to see....or for at least us to look back on in our glimmering twilight years. So in the words of the Man With the Bowl in Troll 2, here it is, nice and creamy.