I have been mulling this over for the last couple of weeks. Trying to figure out heads and tails of concept, feeling or just inkling of how dogs (hounds, in my case) enter your life and then exit.
If you have a dog live to be twelve, and you end up living to be eighty, that dog will have been in your presence about 16% of your time on this earth. That leaves 84% of the time that the canine was not part of your life. Yet, if you are a dog lover, and those who know me know that am I, you will have multiple hounds pass through your life. They all have personalities, some were hot headed and some were gentle souls who had gotten the short end of the stick for part of the life before wandering into mine.
Hounds have phantasmal qualities, as well. They can communicate with you, but at the same time, the communication is not straight-forward and simple, it is often as cryptic as a ghost's writing on a fogged up bathroom mirror. We often mentally claw at and grapple with what is going on in their heads. Are they in pain? Do they need something?
Often, as soon as we think we understand them, just that little bit, they pass through our lives. We are forced to grapple with the void they leave and the questions that may remain unanswered about them. But, we move on, and soon, another hound has begun their own passing through.
Honey & Bee season has closed. The Ahrens' bee-yard was winterized a week or two ago, and the hive (yes, singular) here in Proctor was winterized yesterday. On the honey production curve, when looking at the number of hives that we had going into the summer versus the honey produced at the end, it would be seen as a terrible year. The caveats abound, however. We generally do not pull honey from new, first year hives; that would have ruled out eleven hives. We did have a bit of a swarming issue with our experimental Russian bees, and I hope to detail that in a separate post. In the end, we harvested sixty pounds (27.2 kg) of honey from our two hives at the Proctor bee-yard.
Prior to just a few days ago, winter was no where to be seen; the snow, frost and freezing daytime temperatures were stuck to the north of us in Canada. We had been taking advantage of the oddly nice (by our standards) weather. We were in a sort of weather purgatory; it was nice out, but it would have been great to be nicer but it is not going to stay this nice very long. By January-weather-standards, this sunny and 50 degrees F (10 degrees C) is fantastic, but the recent weather was much like April weather; while we are able to comfortably work outdoors with a light shirt, jeans and regular shoes (no boots), it was still dropping below freezing at night. I look at photos of the yards, and of the grass and foliage from June, and all are lush and deep green; a deep green color that only comes with countless "applications" of nitrogen rich urea from the hounds. With daylight each day, getting shorter by minutes, we leave for our day jobs in the dark, and arrive back home in the dark. This arrangement is not conducive for working outdoors and often results in worm tunneling around with a flashlight in the dark trailing hounds in an attempt to keep up with their "deposits". I have been tending to sit inside, with a hot cup of coffee and my laptop.
When the cold weather arrives, I tend to tinker with this or plan for spring about that. Spring seed catalogs have started arriving in the mail, as well. But, the recent nice weather did allow for a very strange sight: gardening, in northern Minnesota, in mid-November. We actually put in another garden.
There had been fencing around a row of grapevines, but having since removed a large, ramshackle compost bin from one end of the stretch, the hounds had found ways of getting into the vineyard area. This was unacceptable. Three feet (one meter) out from the wire fence, we sunk new fence posts into ground and secured them in concrete. We stretched new wire fencing, and fill the new enclosure with black dirt. With a couple hundred crocus and allium bulbs on hand, Melissa set to work making a nice flower-border that should look nice in the spring.
As the honey & bee season closed out, a new, hopefully continuous season started: eggs. The chickens started to lay last week, and are currently at a plateau of four eggs per day.
The road to Baconwaldia started with a piglet and ends with thick cut, incredibly salty and smokey bacon. In short, you feed and water the hog until slaughter; the carcass is either butchered on site or taken to a butcher. With the latter, you receive back a box of difficult cuts of meat, all neatly wrapped and marked. "Pork Chop." "Pork Steak." "Shoulder Roast" "Pig Feet." "Bacon, Fresh." The last cut is what we are after, the pig's belly. In the world of commerce, pork bellies are a commodity and are traded via futures contracts not unlike frozen concentrate orange juice, cotton, rice, wheat, coffee, sugar and many other bulk items.
That said, Baconwaldia does not involve futures contracts or traders in general. It involves a dedicated farmer to care for & manage the pig; a cold morning with fresh water, hot coffee, sharp knives and good company is also needed to send the hog off onto its voyage toward Baconwaldia.
Traditional, old-school bacon, the bacon of Baconwaldia, would have been created by a skilled charcutiers. The meat would have been salt (sodium chloride) cured for many days, and then cold smoked with hardwood smoke to add further shelf life to the pork belly. The cured and smoked meat would have been wrapped in muslin and hung in a larder or dry cellar; without refrigeration, a properly cured and smoked pork belly would survive most of the winter.
With the discovery of how to produce nitrates and nitrites at the turn of the twentieth century, the onset of mechanization and modern, mass production of foods and the modern practices of animal husbandry, the charcutiers of yore were factored out of the bacon-equation. Machines remove the skin, a brine mixture of salt (sodium chloride), nitrates (sodium nitrate) and liquid smoke are needle-injected into the slabs of meat. Later, the slabs are showered with yet more liquid smoke. The meat is then slow cooked in an oven then frozen. More machines trim the frozen slabs into uniform sizes. I think it is a shame that the pork belly's modern voyage involves not a whiff of smoke nor a lick of flame.
The wagon-wheel-rutted-road to Baconwaldia that I took did not involve sodium nitrate, liquid smoke or inject-needles. Instead, the process was hands one, and craft-like. Craft Bacon, not unlike Craft Beer. My ingredient and materials list was pretty simple:
- Pork Belly
- Salt (a pink, Bolivian salt)
- Brown sugar
- Kentucky Bourbon
- Local apple & pear tree wood
- One (1) medium steel trash can - to make our smoker
- A short length of steel rod
- Four (4) steel "S" hooks
- Inexpensive meat thermometer
- Resealable plastic zippered bags
Clean the pork belly; removing any dirt, grit or grass (as in my case) from the piece. Also, remove any membrane-tissue or extremely soft fatty tissue. Cut the piece into equal-sized pieces. Coat all sides of all pieces with a heavy layer of salt; group pieces in twos and place into plastic bags. Put the bagged pieces into the refrigerator (even though it is entirely possible to do this whole process sans-refrigeration, it is there, so you might as well just use the damn machine to keep things cool). For the next four days, each day, rinse the pieces and rinse the bags. Re-salt all the pieces and place back into the bags and refrigerate. This whole process is called dry curing. You are drawing out the moisture from the meat at the same time leaving salt in the meat (and fat). If you notice the first photo (above) and then the second photo (above), the fat and meat in the first photo appear "looser" and has an appearance of containing more water than that in the second photo. The second photo is from after several salt changes. Each salt change, your bag will have liquid in it. After round one, you will have a salty, blood-colored mixture. Progressively, the liquid gets more and more water-like after each salt change.
On day four or five, you can add in flavors, if you choose. I did one slab of bacon as "Salt & Brown Sugar" and one other as "Salt, Brown Sugar & Bourbon" In both with the brown sugar, I did 1 cup brown sugar. In the bourbon-ized bacon, I put in two jiggers of Wild Turkey.
By this point, I was running low on my Bolivian Rose salt, so, I let the bags of meat sit for three days more days without changing the salt or flavoring mix.
Smoking was the most enjoyable part for me; making the trash can smoker and having it actually work was thrilling. With a drill, I put several holes through the lid of the can, as well as near the base. I also happened to have an old wood stove from an icehouse (for winter fishing). I removed the door from this little stove and installed it into the trash can.
An inch or two below the lip of the can, I drilled holes on opposite sides and slipped the steel rod in; this was used to hang the meat. With a nice fire going in the can, the lid worked well to snuff out the flames, and the stove door was nice to regulate the amount of oxygen that did get into the can. The smoke was extremely pleasant smelling and even the dogs got into bathing in the wafts of smoke.
You will want colder smoke. I eventually settled in on a slightly hotter smoke than I wanted, but it seems to have done the trick. The smoker seemed to like the 180 degrees (F) area. Ideally, something around 150 degrees (F) would have been nice. Remember, the idea is to not roast the meat, it is to smoke it. The smoke penetrates and further dries the meat.
When all is said and done, you probably did not save any money by crafting your voyage to Baconwaldia, but you will have some damn fine Craft Bacon, a nifty trash can smoker, a partial bottle of Bourbon (unless you drank the rest while waiting for the meat to finish), and a neat story on meat preservation.
For the most part, I follow a vegetarian diet. It is also easier to tell people, "I am a vegetarian*." Most people know what it is, know what diet they generally follow (or think they follow) and have the automatic assumption that it is for animal rights reasons. However, there is an unspoken asterisk next to vegetarian for me - it includes a few things actually. I will eat eggs, fish and milk products in addition to tofu, vegetables, beans, rice and the list goes on. I am closer to a pescatarian, but aside from the more well read crowd at the University (of Minnesota Duluth, where I work), I would get strange looks by the locals here in southern-Northern Minnesota; even stranger looks and bewilderment from the home-crowd on the Iron Range.
The second, and more important part of the asterisk has to do with why I have chosen to not regularly consume meat. It is rather simple: I feel better. It has nothing to do with "killing is wrong" or "animals are people, too." Without going into a great deal of detail, I feel better physically. Fewer stomach aches, fewer head aches, etc.
In some parts of the world, meat is a luxury. Meat may only be eaten several times per month due to cost or accessibility. Here in the United States, meat is abundant, meat is cheap, and meat is all too often under appreciated by the masses. On the rare occasion, there are those like Steven Raichlen, of Barbecue University, who truly appreciate the significant role that the consumption of animal flesh has played in human history.
Some time, at the beginning of May, I was helping a friend set up her beehives. After getting things setup, Melissa and I left. In the truck, on the way back to our house, Melissa said very excitedly, "Theresa is getting pigs; she asked if we want one, too." These were not to be pet pigs, but, rather, pigs to do a job and then, before snow fall, to be killed, butchered and eaten over the course of the winter and spring. The job they needed to do was rut up and fertilize an acre or so of land for next season's planting. Shortly there after, we plunked down money and became owners of ½ a pig.
Animals get slaughtered for consumption all the time. Billions of chickens are consumed globally each year. The United States, according to USDA projections, produces 10,884,000 tons of consumable cattle each year. The methods used to raised poultry and livestock, and everything from the transportation of the animal to market to the means in which it is dispatched (killed) are all important things. For many Americans, the most difficult and taxing part of meat consumption is trying to decide on whether to get t-bone steaks or the porterhouse steaks. There is an inherent disconnect between what gets purchased from a grocery store (and subsequently consumed) and how that product - meat, vegetable, box of crackers, etc - got to the store or even how it got to be in its current form.
From piglet to pork chops, we know the vast majority of the story of our ½ pig. It is comforting to know the quality of care received and the quality of the food consumed during its life. Having participated, even tacitly, in their progress through the summer, is humbling, and it is comforting to know your food's story.
The remaining two hogs were [humanely] slaughtered this morning. From dispatching to delivery at the butcher's, the two pigs took 2.½ hours. The stories involving these three pigs will continue with the meals they are part of and the stories and memories that are shared by the families consuming them.
