Bacon, Prosciutto and home made snags

As soon as you feel sad to see the pigs you have raised free range from 6 weeks of age head for the abattoir, the meat arrives and the rewards of the 6 months of rearing is felt. Yesterday we picked up the meat from 2 of the 3 pigs and spent the evening preparing a leg for prosciutto, the belly and loin for bacon and shoulder minced with some added backfat to prepare some sausages.

I have adopted the preserving rules that are set out by the well known Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall of River Cottage fame. The preservation of the bacon goes something like this.

Bacon
- 2kg of salt
- 1/2 kg of brown sugar
- bay leaves crushed up
- lightly crushed juniper berries (20 or so)
- cracked peppercorns

The above is all mixed and rubbed into the bacon. The bacon is left in this mixture in a box and each morning and night the liquid that is drawn out is drained and the bacon is left on its otherside. This is done for 3 or 4 days. The salt is all washed off and then the bacon is hung covered in muslin to dry for no less than 4 days. If the bacon is left in the salt for longer than 4 days, the bacon can be a little too salty for a rasher, but this can be rectified by placing the rashers for breakfast in water when you get out of bed and this will extract some salt before cooking. I highly recommend River Cottage DVD called Pig in a day for people interested in curing pork or making snags. The flavour of the bacon is fantastic and not tainted by the nitrates pumped into bacon these days.

The sausage making is a real delight. I have learnt there is a real art to this, but a little practice and you do get the hang of it. And I highly recommend you fry up a little of your mixture before making a sausage to taste you have the mix right. One of our sausages is a paprika style snag and I am really looking forward to eating these. If you have the money, a quality machine is worthwhile. Our sausage maker is a little basic and slower, but it achieves the same result (however we were still making sausages close to midnight!!!). We also use natural beef intestine for the casing.

The prosciutto is simply buried in a lot of salt (25 kgs). It is left in the salt for 3 days per kg of weight with a day taken of. so about 23 days for my leg. It is then hung for around 9 months. This is a long term project and the first time we have tried this so it will be interesting to see how it goes.

Oh, and we had the first roast pork for dinner. And it was delicious. I think I could almost taste apple in the meat as they were feed a large quantity of apples for breakfast.

The sausage maker

The final snags which hang over night to dry off before freezing