06 Jun

Bacon flavours

Posted By Anthony @ 10:04 am in The Farm

BaconFor as long as man has understood how to make bacon he has sought to individualise the bacon made. The most obvious flavour of bacon – salt – is its most obvious draw back. This would be especially so back in time when extra salt would be used just to be on the safe side. The easiest way to counteract the salt was to add sugar to the cure to give a sweet cure. This is the cure of choice here at The Blue Pig Company. It does not taste ” sweet ” but it tempers the saltiness a little. Some parts of the country took this a stage further and added things like treacle to the cure such as Suffolk ham. Some cures were developed even further and become more like pickles. They would include beer, brown sugar, vinegar as well as the curing mix which added a further preservative effect on top of more complex flavours.

The principle of extra preservation and extra flavour was something that was most popular and necessary in northern and western Europe with its damper climate and greater chance of food going off. In modern Britain this is seen with the continuing popularity in Scotland of smoked bacon. Originally this would simply have been hanging bacon in the chimney to help keep it longer. Then recesses would have been specially made to keep bacon. It would have been quickly obvious that smoke from different wood produced different flavours and so bacon took on another reflection of its locality. Oak has emerged as the most common in Britain and what could be more English than oak? We use it for our smoked bacon and the resident teenager describes it as making “a well good bacon sandwich”. European settlers in North America used the local timber and so Canadian Ham is smoked with their national emblem – Maple.

In the Mediterranean countries the dryer climates took cured meats in another direction the most famous being Parma ham. It also gave rise to things like Pancetta. This has as many recipes as people who make it which would include all the woody herbs like rosemary, thyme, sage as well as things like crushed juniper. Here we add crushed black pepper, garlic and nutmeg and it has as many uses as your imagination. I once suggested it was good on a game bird and brought a rather quizzical response from a “senior” customer who wanted to know “What are you suggesting young man?” So perhaps just stick it in your pasta sauces, soups, salads, stews or wrapped round a pheasant.

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05 Jun

The origins of bacon

Posted By Anthony @ 9:58 pm in The Farm

Following my post about sausage flavours, it seemed sensible to look at the origins of bacon as it is one of our most popular products. This is the first part of my bacon post.

Many of us are aware that in times past, a pig would be killed in the autumn and the meat preserved to provide food for the winter. Originally this would have been simple salting and or drying and keeping in a cool dry place. This would have been fraught with difficulty and even apparently good meat would have had the possibility of the presence of botulism. Botulism is something best avoided as it’s very often fatal. But man found a way of making meat safe for longer with the use of a naturally occurring mineral called Salt Petre. We now know this as Potassium Nitrate which when added to meats breaks down into nitrites which act as a preservative. This is known to have been in use throughout Europe since c1500 and is something our grandparents were familiar with to help make their bacon and hams. In the USA its inclusion in bacon cures is a legal requirement. The problem with Salt Petre is that it is perfectly safe in small quantities but in excess will make you ill. So it is mixed with common salt to make a curing mix that prevents botulism but in a ratio that does not cause illness from the curing mix itself.
There has been much bad press over the years relating to the use of nitrites in food. Much of this is related to its addition to foods we would not traditionally have added it to, ready meals for example. This is done to extend their shelf life. Extension of its life is exactly why bacon and ham were invented – a peasant farmer needed to feed his family throughout the winter.There is also concern now that modern diets have too much salt in them but two rashers of bacon only have one third the daily salt needs of an adult as meat is naturally very low in salt. Now we want to eat bacon because its delicious.

Here at the Blue Pig Company we use a technique called drycuring. This involves simply rubbing the fresh pork all over with the curing mix and then storing in a vacuum bag in our cold store until its ready to eat. It’s then washed to remove any excess salt and allowed to dry before slicing. The dry curing method reduces the weight of meat as the salt draws out moisture which is one of the reasons big commercial bacon curers like the brine method. This places the pork in a bath of what is in effect salt water and this can plump up the bacon by 20% by weight. Very commercially attractive but it leads to the white “scum” in the pan and severe shrinkage. It’s also why brine cured bacon can taste very salty as cooking removes the water but not the salt.

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02 Jun

A Brief History of Sausage Flavourings

Posted By Anthony @ 10:53 pm in Uncategorized

Sausage FlavoursThis post came about as I recent stumbled across some information about the origins of the Cumberland sausage. It made me curious about sausages and sausage flavours, I thought I’d share what I found here.

Sausages have been around for as long as recorded time. The Sumerians in what is now modern Iraq made them 5000 years ago. The English word “sausage” comes from the Latin word “salsisium” i.e. something that has been salted. Which is a clue to the major flavour and would have been used originally to prolong the usable life of the meat. The spice trade is as old as the sausage so in all probability were used at the same time. But it was the Romans who are thought to have brought sausages to Britain they used black pepper extensively which has a preservative effect too.

Tenth century Britain was familiar with Ginger, Cloves, Cinnamon, Mace and Nutmeg and in conjunction with local herbs and produce saw the early development of distinctive sausages peculiar to their region. By Elizabethan times what was a major trading port in Whitehaven would be a centre for the trading of spices and lead to the Cumberland sausage having pepper as its distinctive taste. The West Country was the leading area of apple production, often with Gloucester Old Spots eating windfalls in the orchards, so they were the natural home of pork and apple sausages. Wales with its national vegetable leek have a fantastic friend for mash and they would use chives when the leek was out of season. Lincolnshire became famous for growing Sage and so we have the Lincolnshire sausage.

However many of these local specialities were built on the back bone of the use of imported spices again used differently in each area. Manchester would use white pepper, mace, nutmeg, ginger, cloves as well as some sage often with ginger as the stand out flavour. Yorkshire traditionally used white pepper, mace, nutmeg, and cayenne in what we would recognise as a modern breakfast sausage. The Midlands fell in love with pork and tomato sausages where they originated but we know from our farmers markets that West Yorkshire loves them too. Indeed they claim them as their own.

If you add in each butcher trying to brand his or her sausage we get the almost infinite choice we have today. It’s probably why Michael Caine said: “Forget caviar, sausages are the food of the rich and famous” The original peasant food has come a long way but it deserves to be revered.

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