Bacon

According to the authors of Charcuterie, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, one friend and fellow cook, and many, many posts on the web, curing your own homemade bacon is easy and results in a very good product.

Having messed about a bit with meat and sausage and pate and cooking and such, I figured to give making bacon a go. For my first try, I got a couple of nice pork bellies that had the rind off and cured them as described in "The River Cottage Meat Book", using juniper berries, bay leaf, black pepper, brown sugar, pink salt and coarse sea salt. Each day, I rubbed the meat with a bit more of the cure and poured off any of the collected liquid. After a five day curing period the bacon (really pancetta, since it wasn't smoked) was good, but very salty.

Undaunted, I tried again. I've made duck prosciutto (directions from Michael Ruhlman here), which is about the most satisfying bit of meat curing ever, so bacon, reputedly easy, shouldn't be that far out of reach. This time, I cured the pieces of pork belly in a bag in the refrigerator with a generous amount of the same cure, but didn't pour off the brine. I used quite a lot of cure in the process and, after five days, rinsed the meat really well with cold water, then left the pieces of belly on a rack over a pan in the refrigerator overnight to dry some. The next morning, I set them out to smoke, using mixed apple and oak wood which I had soaked in water overnight.



A tin of water between the fire and the meat kept the temperature at 125 F and under.



Eight hours of smoke



The bacon came out pretty, slicing nicely and with good color.




Unfortunately, I'd let the smoke get a bit too heavy and this bacon was, again, very salty. Soaking the slabs for a couple of hours in cold water (changed once or twice) took care of both of those problems, but I still didn't get the result I was hoping for. Next batch, I tried a version of the cure from "Charcuterie" and the amounts suggested there, which was more sodium nitrite (pink salt) proportionally and only an ounce and a half of salt for a five pound piece of pork belly. Also, rather than the very strong sea salt I used kosher salt. For flavor I used brown sugar and black pepper, along with bay leaf. I cured the pieces of belly (this time with the skin on) for seven days in a bag in the refrigerator and didn't pour off the liquid. After that, I rinsed and dried them, let them air dry a bit, then smoked them for six hours at an even lower level- keeping the temperature down to around 100 F and keeping the fire down so that it only produced a trickle of smoke. This was both aided and complicated by a gusting wind- springtime in New Mexico.

This bacon, once cut from the rind, is harder to slice than the other slabs, as not as much liquid has been removed. It also cooks down a bit more in the pan. On the other hand, the flavor is what I was aiming for the first time. While somewhat more salty than commercial bacon it has just a bit of smoke to it and a nice, meaty flavor and texture- definitely good stuff.

So, another step on another learning curve.

"shades of gray"

I find it amazing how a good songwriter can use almost any subject matter. Fifteen years ago the Oklahoma City bombing was committed. To blow the song's punchline a bit, here Robert Earl Keen sings about the aftermath of that event; dealing with the subject tangentially, and respectfully, in the course of telling a darned good short story set to music.

the more things change

"We had spent the summer in New Mexico, and, during a brief stop in Santa Fe, we had been grilled on why we live in New York by that group of Eastern-refugee remittance men the place specializes in--the people who half-retire at forty-two in order to devote themselves to talking about a novel they might write and and overseeing the repairs of any cracks that might develop in the adobe walls of their house and discussing water rights their land carries by virtue of the original Spanish land grand and raising a herd of twelve or fourteen particularly elegant goats."
Calvin Trillin "The Dance of the Restaurant Trotters" American Fried (1974)

Persistence

So, last fall we were driving out after a slow day duck hunting when we spotted a drake mallard in a riverside drain. Uncharacteristically, the bird didn't fly, so we eased past it a good ways then walked back down the road to flush it. The drake went down wing tipped and swam for the bank. We got the dog on the spot and this is the video of the retrieve.

Booker located the mallard in a beaver hole. At about the two minute mark Booker starts digging and eventually gets the bird to flush from the hole, then runs him down. Unfortunately, most of the action occurs into the sun and behind a Russian Olive. Edited a bit for length:

getting the kinks out

"Graceful" isn't really an option, how about "athletic"?







"Chesapeake rampant"

What's in your pack?

What do you all carry for a day pack, if you do, when chasing elk or deer?

I'll go first (and here provide the disclaimer that, while this post has links to various companies selling bits of gear, that's just for illustration purposes- those products linked are things I've bought that work well for me- this is not meant to be a commercial):




This pack is an Eberlestock J105, designed to be a fairly low-profile day pack which can expand to carry out an elk quarter. I'm a big fan of the idea of saving a whole round trip from kill to truck.

Cinched down for hunting:



Then opened up:



Near or far, uphill or down, I'd rather make that first trip with a load on my back. On the other hand, you don't want something too cumbersome or that's noisy at all during the times that you're stalking. Nowadays there are a number of packs out there designed to carry fairly small going in and pack a load coming out.

For years I carried a Nimrod lumbar pack (an early version of their Pinnacle model)that had a pack sack that you could unroll, fasten to the shoulder harness, and then use to carry out a quarter. I adopted the Nimrod a bit too early, later models have some improvements that would make it more comfortable and functional. The biggest problems with the Nimrod are that it has a pretty limited capacity when the pack sack is rolled and stowed, the padding on the shoulder straps is too soft, letting them collapse and get uncomfortable, and, more importantly, under a load the hipbelt rolls and fails to provide adequate support. I think the hipbelt has been fixed in current models by the addition of vertical stays. The Nimrod is fairly light and doesn't get much in the way when going through brush, both of which are very nice. While it does provide a way out with the first quarter of an elk, you only want to carry a front quarter, with maybe the backstraps, as the model I have puts some pretty good hurt on you when it is loaded up. Later ones might be better.

As for the Eberlestock, I'm still making up my mind about it. For the cons, first off I'm not fond of wearing a daypack all the time, as, even cinched down, it hangs up more then a lumbar pack when going through brush or ducking under limbs in the p-j. Also, the darned thing is heavy (9.5 pounds empty!)- the inevitable price of a really sturdy structure and heavy duty fabric, as well as a wealth of pockets. For the pluses, it is quite comfortable, carries a hind quarter comfortably (I've packed out five elk quarters, four of them hindquarters, and an oryx hindquarter along with the backstraps and head all in one go, with this pack at this point- no really hard carries yet, though) and those pockets do allow you to stash gear you seldom access well out of the way and not have to dig through it. Also, two large pockets are on the outside of the pack and compression straps once the main compartment is unzipped and loaded, which keeps the bits of gear out there from getting crushed, much.

In the photos up above, you'll see a rectangular opening at the top of the pack- that's a rifle scabbard that lays along the back stays.



I've used it when packing meat a couple of times, but generally I feel more comfortable carrying my rifle in hand with a load. It was handy walking out in the predawn dark on a muzzleloader hunt, as the un-capped rifle fit all the way down to the lock and I had both hands available for stumbling. As to the gear in the pack, first off alongside the rifle scabbard but opening from the other side of the pack and also right up against the internal frame are two pockets, the upper with a hydration port for a water bladder and tube. I don't use a tube hunting- one more thing to hang on brush- but the pocket does locate a water bottle nicely high and right up against you:



Growing up, we never carried water or packs, just threw a couple of candy bars in our pockets, along with maybe an apple. Of course, waffle-weave cotton longhandles and Levis, along with cotton t-shirts and cotton flannel or wool shirts were also what we wore. As I got older and started staying out a bit longer and ranging farther, I started carrying a bota bottle. Now I use a Platypus water bottle. The advantage of a soft bottle like this is not only that you can tuck it out of the way in a corner of the pack, but that you can squeeze the excess air out of it as you drink so your water doesn't gurgle or slosh, making your stalk the much quieter.



In the little pocket below the water bottle pocket I stash my first aid kit and two lights- the first a little headlamp that burns a long time on three AAA batteries, the second a little halogen flashlight that runs through batteries very quickly but that casts a bright beam quite a ways. The little first aid kit is augmented by a couple of WMI's handy little cut kits, which have what you need to take care of a gashed finger or hand in a little envelope, and extra moleskin. Cutting myself while field dressing or developing a blister are by far the most likely injuries in my experience. I also have a couple of feet of (orange) Velcro tape in that pocket, as it is really handy for holding things together or tightening things up.

Eberlestock put two long pockets on either side of the pack that open from the top or the sides. A spotting scope or tripod fits pretty easily. Not carrying either of those very often, I don't get a whole lot of use from the pockets but stash a ditty bag in each side with things I don't get into very often. Note that the pockets have a light colored lining, another nice touch.



One bag is stuff for handling a carcass.



A number of pieces of parachute cord or thin rope are really handy when dressing an animal out by yourself. Not only is it useful to tie legs off out of the way, but three times I've had to tie off a carcass I was field dressing to keep it from rolling or sliding down the hill I was working on. Also, at least three fairly long pieces are handy for hanging quarters that you are going to come back for. That's also what the game bags are for, one bag can stretch over two elk quarters and will keep off dirt and flies while you carry the first load out. I may have a bit more cordage than I need, but I can't recall ever thinking "Gee, what am I going to do with all this rope?" whereas I've wished for another foot or two of line on more than one occasion. The little ziplock has two of the big, 2.5 gallon ziplocks and a couple of 1 gallon ziplocks folded up in it, all for carrying and keeping clean heart, liver, tenderloins, and other bits of meat. I carry a pair of nitrile gloves or the long plastic "field dressing gloves", not so much out of worry about blood-borne disease as for ease of clean up. Once your hands get gory, you bloody everything you touch and even wet-wipes aren't great at getting the blood off. The Wyoming saw isn't absolutely necessary, as you can dress an elk without one, but it makes the job easier and, if you kill a bull elk, it is far lighter to carry out antlers on a skull plate as opposed to the whole head. Another option is to leave the saw in the truck and bring it to the carcass after the first load of meat is out. The marking tape (usually two rolls) is for finding my way back to the carcass. I don't mark right up to my elk, as I don't want anyone walking away with one of my quarters.




In the other side pocket lives a bag containing a very basic "stuck overnight kit".



Metal cup for heating water, very light nylon bucket for holding water, two ways of making fire, firestarter paste, film canister filled with cotton balls soaked in vaseline, candle (also a form of firestarter), emergency blanket (2), dry socks (not pictured), Cyalume stick for a nighttime signal and a whistle for a daytime signal. As you can see, I'm pretty concerned with fire starting. That's because if I'm cold and wet on a cold and wet night, my fire starting skills aren't going to be at their best and dry wood hard to come by. If it's dry and pretty weather, a fire won't be nearly as big a concern and I'll just need one of those matches ;)



Also in that pocket lives a little Otis gun cleaning kit. It has a nylon covered metal cable that can work as a ramrod and the whole kit weighs four ounces. If you jam the muzzle of your rifle in snow or mud, you'll really want a ramrod for cleaning that bore. It's a seldom-used item but a nice bit of insurance.




In the top pocket of the pack, which you access from the harness side, I carry the myriad little things I might want to access at any time. Scope cover (which I seldom use and may go away), ultralight tripod (camera is usually in my pocket), bandanna (dressed in synthetics and wool, a piece of absorbent cotton can be really handy), some energy in the form of chocolate and power bars, compass, (maps, too, if I'm carrying any of that area), spare rifle cartridges, spare .22 cartridges if I've got a pistol with me for small game, short piece of cord for carrying such small game, spare knife (very light), bit of duct tape, toilet paper, wet wipes, fleece beanie, and gloves. A neat trick is the fact that thirty .22 long rifle cartridges will fit in a film canister and not rattle.



One item of clothing I always carry is raingear, usually stuffed down in the main compartment of the pack. Some of the breathable raingear is really nice- quiet yet still waterproof- and forms the layer I'm most likely to be pulling on and off as weather changes, as well as the most important wind-breaking and water-shedding layer should the weather go bad. Most of the time I'll also wear or carry a fleece pullover.

This is more gear and pack than I really want to lug, but so far I'm willing to pay the weight penalty. All-up, this weighs seventeen pounds with a full (1 liter) water bottle and a .22 pistol on the hipbelt. The gear is intended for a long day hunting by myself- out before daylight and back in the evening, with the off chance of having to spend the night out or having a problem a couple of miles from a road in rough country.

So, what's in your day pack?

daffodil

First daffodil this year.


Update- and just 24 hours later:



Down in the Southwest we should never complain about moisture, and I'm not, but spring is a hard season to love.

consumption

"Aldo Leopold once said; 'A wilderness without wildlife is of no use to me, a wilderness without wildlife is just empty country;' and he is right, and for some of us, walking on the land without tasting of its bounty is just empty walking. Some can survive on the sustenance provided by simple beauty, especially those that live far from the land. Others need to return with meat to feed their families and somehow justify the hours they spend in cold and lonely and lovely places. And yes, there are those that require the hides and horns of animals to substantiate their hunting tales, a brute addition perhaps, but a necessary addition, to their love of the silence and the beauty of the land. But we must all remember that whether we carry a gun or not, the strip-mine shovel digs for us. We are all takers. Takers removed by degree, not dimension, from the strip-miners, loggers and roughnecks. The only difference is in the giving back."

Bob Jamieson "Breaks", Gray's Sporting Journal, Volume Eight, Issue 4, Fall 1983, p. 46.

starting the week with cute

My folks were in South Texas visiting my aunt and uncle recently and went out on a ranch looking to put a nilgai in the freezer. The nilgai didn't cooperate, but Dad did walk up on this baby scimitar horned oryx, which also range on and off of this particular ranch.




A bit too young to successfully run from predators, he laid very, very still and concentrated on being invisible while his mom hovered nearby and Dad got a few telephotos. Check out the bitty little horn buds!

pâté

Before sausage, but in the same sort of category (as Brett of Trout Caviar points out in comments a bit earlier) we recently experimented with country style pate. For a dinner with friends we ended up trying three different variations. As a basis, we looked to the pigeon pate recipe from The River Cottage Meat Book.

The first version consisted of duck and goose hearts and gizzards, along with the breast meat off of a teal that was a bit shot up. This pate was flavored with dewberry jelly, white and black pepper, garlic, bay, and red wine.



The next was made with half of the breast off of a Canada goose (also a bit too pellet-riddled to be suitable for roasting or other treatment). It was flavored with juniper, garlic, bay, and port.



and the last was made with the meat of a slightly freezer-burned grouse. The grouse was flavored with apple jelly, thyme, bay, a bit of cayenne, cardamom, black pepper, and Calvados.



The mis:



We have a local source for good bacon, which they'll kindly slice very thin. You stretch those slices out even more thin, then line your mold with them.


Duck and goose bits:



You sauté an onion, brown the meat in the remaining bit of fat, then deglaze the pan with your choice of alcohol and pour the liquid over the meat, which you then grind (along with the onion) and mix with the jelly and spices. For fat in the pate, we ground our meat with some raw pork belly.



Once packed in the molds, you cover your pate with buttered parchment paper then bake them in a water bath in a slow oven.



Once done, the top of the bacon (which becomes the bottom of the pate) is nicely brown from the butter, while the remainder is quite white due to the water bath. You aren't done, though, as you leave the covers on, weight the pates, then let them chill for a day.






The process was a bit of work and somewhat time consuming, but not really that bad, particularly given how long a pate lasts and their suitability for freezing.


Final presentation. The grouse turned out to be a bit crumbly. The very dry meat of that bird needed more liquid than we had put in. A bit more highly spiced, it was an initial favorite with the tasters. All were good, though, and I think this may be the very best use for waterfowl gizzards and hearts.

robalo

Snook have always been a fish of some romance in my mind.
Like Charley Waterman, I think their Spanish name, "robalo" sounds better then the oddity of "snook", which sounds like something that happens to someone on a felt-covered table, or an object of derision. Tell someone not fairly involved in the outdoor world that you'd like to fish for snook and you're liable to face the same expression as if you'd said you were off to hunt snipe. On the other hand, robalo sounds racy and a bit powerful, more fitting for a beach front cruiser and ambushing predator. Webster's traces the name "snook" to Dutch for a type of pike-fish. Fair enough.

Growing up and fishing a bit in South Texas, snook were rumors or memories, as they, along with tarpon, had pretty much disappeared. Fortunately, both have come back to some extent. Cold snaps like recent ones in Florida and Texas are hard on the populations, though. I'd read of snook in stories about Costa Rica and the Florida Keys and other warm waters. Heck, even Travis McGee fished for them. They lay under mangroves and docks and would cut you off in a minute. In the fall they'd run the beaches and passes. Mouth like a bass, strong, with razor-sharp gill plates. Those were the things you read about snook. My first couple trips to the tropics didn't lead to any snook, though. Bonefish and tarpon (sightings) along with seeing and throwing at permit were all plenty of excitement. The first snook I saw was a baby caught by a friend in the South Texas surf. Neat as a novelty, but not quite the explosive gamefish you read about, not until it added another foot of length or so.

I won't complain, though, because a few years ago, six now in fact, I caught my first and to date only robalo.

We headed down to Baja for a couple of days. It was our second trip and we stayed in San Jose del Cabo, which was busy sprouting condos where only a couple of years before nothing but beach existed. After some slow panga fishing, Dad and I took advantage of our mid-morning flight time to slip out to the beach at dawn on the last day, walking along and throwing plugs with spinning outfits. Fishing on the beach at that time is always exciting, the low light is flat and you can't see much, so it's easy to imagine lots going on out there even if bait isn't being chased to the surface.

I was using Dad's light travel rod and a reel with ten pound test to cast a chartreuse Top Dog out past where the waves were breaking. The beach was quite steep so we'd follow a retreating wave, cast, then back up before the next wave and start working our plugs. As my plug climbed the back of a breaker just yards off the beach it was suddenly sucked down by a mouth I could put both fists into. An interesting struggle with a couple of half-jumps later, I had her up on the sand and removed the plug. A quick picture, wade her out and revive her, and it was time to rinse of the gear, pack our wet clothes in plastic for the flight home, and leave on what for me will always remain a high note.
Hard to top:






Funny, growing up I don't think I ever daydreamed anything better.

and then the bits

After making stock, we took three pounds of the oryx's liver (which was three quarters of that organ) and trimmed it up.



Then we took an equal amount (all we had) of trimmings that were too small for stew meat, added another three pounds of pork shoulder and a pound of fatty pork belly and made sausage.




Our amounts were dictated by the amount of trim we had and the amount of liver, as our goal was to make good use of the liver without just slicing and cooking it. A's not a bit liver fan. Besides which, liver makes a great sausage component.




Using the ratio specified in Charcuterie, we put together 3 oz. of salt and 1 t of pink salt, then went about our (own) spicing. For the 10 lbs of meat, that ended up being 4 T of black pepper, 2 T of half-sharp Hungarian Paprika, 3 T dried thyme, 3 T dried parsley, 6 bay leaves, ground fine in a mortar with a bit of the salt, and 4 oz, approximately 1 cup, of garlic. We mixed the spices with the chopped meat and let it season overnight.



Next day, we made up two batches of sausage in five pound lots, one with a cup of very dry sherry mixed in with the meat, the other with a half cup of water and half cup of red wine. The latter carried the garlic flavor a bit better and turned out better overall. The reason for two batches? You need to mix the ground meat together a bit to get it to bind, and five pounds is about the maximum amount the Kitchenaid stand mixer will comfortably handle.

Testing a bit of the meat for spicing:


The (natural, hog) casings had to be soaked for a while in cold water, then rinsed and rinsed out:



Threading the casings onto the stuffing tube is a tedious process lending itself to bad jokes:








Fortunately, this blog barely rates PG so you'll be spared any of those jokes. For the sharp-eyed readers, yes, the feed tube on that grinder does have meat on it. We had to take photos between batches because I forgot to do so at the start and, once you get going, you aren't taking photos unless you're ok with smearing up the camera with raw pork bits. I've made sausage by myself, but find the job is much, much easier with a second set of hands. In any event, 5 pounds in one long coil, then divided into links:





Pretty, aren't they? This is a fairly spicy, garlicky fresh sausage. It falls well short of being hot and the liver is only there in the background. I doubt anyone who didn't know about the liver would guess at its presence, a fact no doubt helped by the very mild nature of (all of the) game liver (that I have tried to date).

Ten pounds of sausage sounds like quite a lot, and a couple of hours work was involved in this process, but once you start parceling it into packages it doesn't add up to all that much. More interesting than the couple of pounds of burger and plain liver for the frying that we'd have had otherwise, though.

That's it for the oryx processing, though, now we're just down to cooking and eating.