Pink Poop and the Case for Hunting

I recently spent a couple days reading a book by Steven Rinella called Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter. Part memoir, part confessional, part putting a civilized world that tends to be anti-hunting on Oprah’s couch to ask, “What exactly is your problem with killing things?”

My husband bought me this book for Christmas this year. Neither of us was familiar with or watched Rinella’s show MeatEater on the Sportsman Channel. The topic of hunting has been more interesting to us of late because of the offers of some spectacular wild meat that has come our way. We also have been invited on at least two hunting trips out in western Nebraska this coming fall, invitations that, while I will not do any actual shooting, I plan to accept.

As someone who has never hunted before and maybe picked up a gun two times in my whole life, I appreciated such a thorough picture of the hunting lifestyle. Rinella comes from a hunting family. Both of his brothers hunt also, and he has had many hunting adventures with them. They all love the outdoors and feel a great deal of accomplishment in being independent (and well-fed) during hunting trips that are sometimes days long.

Meat Eater by Steven Rinella

After a while, the amount of killing in the book did begin to wear on me. This is especially true for the portion of the book that covers his fur-trapping and trophy-hunting phases, both of which he has closely examined (and re-examined) as he has gotten older. He confesses to killing some animals illegally, mostly for the money but also because he found it hard to resist the urge to not act on his deep knowledge of animal behavior (required to be a successful hunter). In other words, just to prove that he could. Particularly sad and wrenching was his story about the unnecessary trapping and killing of an otter, whose habits he had been tracking over the course of several days. While he acknowledges that he experienced great joy at watching the otter live and play, the temptation to hunt it was stronger. He is very regretful about those times and said he has learned his hunting boundaries from experiences like that and how they made him feel. He still is an avid hunter, but his understanding about why he hunts has evolved over time, boiling down to essentially hunting so he has enough food to feed his family.

While he defends the lifestyle, I do not believe even he thinks the earth could sustain a world full of hunters. Mostly he wishes people would be more understanding about hunting, less against it, although I think talking about his cravings to sink his teeth into his bloody prey makes him look a little overzealous and might not be the best way to convert his critics.

One of his biggest points in the book, one I happen to agree with whole-heartedly, is that hunting provides a source of meat that is known and fresh. He laments that becoming “civilized” has meant becoming estranged from the source, more compartmentalized and detached from the processes that must take place in order to put meat on the table. According to his calculation, man has hunted forever. To hate the act of hunting, he says, is in some ways to hate yourself. (Woah! Watch out Dr. Phil!)

Hunter and author Steven Rinella

He uses another experience to bring home the point that meat has been adulterated in unhealthy ways in order to appease our modern sensibilities. He describes visiting a salmon farm, which housed a couple of pet seals.  The seals’ diets were composed almost exclusively of salmon. Proof of their salmon diet could be found on the rock island where they lounged: It was stained bright pink from the seals pooping out salmon that had been fed pellet food containing red dye.  (The red dye gives the farmed salmon that orange-pink hue that wild salmon get naturally from eating certain crustaceans.)

You don’t have to be a hunter to argue that we shouldn’t be eating that crap. And you also don’t have to start hunting your own salmon. But certainly we should be making the case to the food industry that we’re just fine eating normal-color, farmed salmon if that means not depleting the world's stocks of wild salmon, still getting to eat sushi, and have normal-color poop.

While after reading the book, I still do not feel compelled to starting hunting, one aspect of it that I totally get is the freshness of the meat (one of the reasons why I started exploring home butchering in the first place), although to hear his descriptions of packing meat out after he has killed and butchered an animal makes me wonder how any of the meat harvested deep in the back country can ever make it out and still be edible. I think it’s commendable that he values the meat of the animals he’s hunting and not just the kill. He cares that the life of the animal is not wasted, an important point to make since it’s likely other hunters are reading his book, too.

My favorite part of the book was a section at the end of each chapter called “Tasting Notes,” where he discusses some of the stranger things he’s eaten, how he prepared them, and what they tasted like. Squirrel, beaver, heart, bear, and mountain lion, to name a few. Since part of the reason I’m on this blogging journey is to experience some new flavors, this was particularly interesting to me. Fun fact #1: Bears and mountain lions are carriers of Trichinella spiralis, which causes trichinosis, the same parasite that can infect pork. So boys and girls, be sure to make sure to cook those bear fillets to well done. Also, a great description of the author researching – through trial and error – whether old timers really did eat beaver tail (he concludes that they probably did). And singing the praises of squirrel meat simmered in the slow cooker with some cream of mushroom soup. (When he gets a craving, he traps them in the small garden behind his Brooklyn apartment when they try to steal his tomatoes.)

Lastly, for you anglers out there, the parts about fishing are a major selling point. My husband, who also likes to fish, liked it when I read the parts about Rinella’s fishing adventures aloud to him. Those stories have a very you-are-there quality about them. 

Success!

This week has been spent digging into my dry cure stash to see if any of it has turned out as I had hoped. It has been a real delight. But first I’ll start with one of my disappointments of the week: learning that the whole wild boar prosciutto that I ordered from an online vendor named D’Artagnan  was out of stock. And they did not let me know this until two days after it was supposed to arrive. The guy at D’Artagnan said the producer told him the hams were not drying “as fast as they hoped they would.” Hmmm. OK. I admit it; this made me a little leary. If you’re making this product commercially, you should probably know what the drying time is. I was intrigued by the fact that these animals were trapped (you can hunt them in some states) and then certain cuts dry cured for a more…interesting flavor. But I guess this little experiment will have to wait.

Wild boar prosciutto that I'm trying to get my hands on

As for my own cured meats, the first cut I tried was the pork loin from the hog we butchered here at home. This was a young animal so the loin was kind of small but I have to say that the flavor was really nice. Very intense and porky. The salt was just right. When you pulled it apart, it was like gummy candy.  The kids have even eaten it, and I have given a few chunks away to a people who have given me instrumental advice along this dry-curing journey. No one has died. Yet.

Just by way of clarification, curing whole muscles is much more straightforward and simpler than doing sausage. Nitrates are required for sausage because the outside of the meat (where the bacteria live) is incorporated into the inside of the meat, usually by grinding, and not exposed to the air during the drying process. This is true for rolled pancetta also: While flat pancetta is OK to cure without nitrates (because you have a whole muscle that is exposed to the air), rolled pancetta means that bacteria from the outside are being rolled inside and not exposed to fresh air, meaning they can grow there and cause major food-borne illness.  I do have the nitrate salt mixture and will be trying the more complicated sausages, but have not gotten to it yet.

Homemade dry-cured pork loin (top). The shiny look is from the oil from the fat layer.

Homemade dry-cured pork loin (front)

On the topic of slicing, one guy whose blog I follow said a commercial slicer is absolutely essential, and the more I’m eating of our homemade stuff, the more I agree. I tried to slice it thin enough to present to company, and I mean paper thin, but even with my super duper sharp, ultra special, I’ll-commit-sobuku-before-I-surrender Japanese knife, I would get pieces that were chewy enough (usually along the edge) to not be very pleasing. My cousin Bill will be trying a mandolin on his. Hopefully he will report back and let us know if it worked.

My other comment on this is that I probably let it dry too long. It lost a little more than the recommended 30 percent of its weight. That might not matter for other cuts, but because this piece was smaller, it did get a little hard. Not a huge deal, but I’d like to get the velvety-ness that I really crave in these kinds of meats. It also partly had to do with the fact that I didn’t have my handy dandy automatic humidity controller until after the meat had been hanging for a while. The humidity values did vacillate quite a bit for a few weeks in the beginning. All I can say is thank goodness for technology. Having this aspect under control also is giving me more confidence to try more complicated dry-curing recipes, so I’m excited.

The other piece that we tried this week was the coppa. This cut on the pig is from the bundle of muscles that run along the neck. It is highly prized in Italy for curing because it has a wonderful fat-to-meat ratio.  In the taste test, because these pieces were a little bigger, they didn’t lose too much weight and as a result, were more moist and softer and more melty on the tongue. Really amazing flavor. And really pretty, too. I absolutely cannot wait to try this again, only next time with a big cut from a full-grown hog.

Homemade dry-cured coppa. The marbling is obvious. This really tasted awesome. Biggest success so far, in my opinion. We have eaten it straight, with cheese and fruit, and also in a grilled sandwich. We are discovering that there's no wrong way to eat it :)

This is a cycle, you know. It takes a month or two for pieces to be ready so my goal is to always have something going. I recently have started a few new pieces curing and will hang them after a few days soaking up the cure in the fridge. First is three breasts of wild goose given to me by a very generous hunter friend. He usually makes a gnarly taco meat with them. He has also used the meat to make chili. But he’s never had it cured. The cure I’m using should work for either a duck or goose prosciutto. Either way, the flavor is suppose to be very intense. We have been warned!

The second one (not pictured) is a piece of venison that I will be curing in the style of a bresaola (without the casing so I don't have to use nitrates). Bresaola is usually done with a very lean cut of beef. I have a very lean cut of deer that I will use instead. Fingers crossed!

Kyle weighing ingredients that will go in the cure.

One wild goose breast laying on the salt cure just before being coated. This is a massive piece of meat. Having never handled one of these before, I was really impressed at how very red it was. You'd think it was a piece of beef.

All three goose breasts after sitting in the cure over night. The cure pulls out a lot of juice, which is what it's supposed to do since the removal of liquid is the trick to preservation. 

Curse You, Bobby Flay!

Once after my husband, Kyle, had finished cleaning up the kitchen in the wake of one of my inspired cooking adventures, he proclaimed with great exasperation, "The Bobby Flay kitchen is closed!" We all laughed, and the saying stuck. If you hear the term "Bobby Flay kitchen" in the context of one that has been wrecked by an overzealous (albeit well-intentioned) home cook, just know it was Kyle who coined this phrase. I try to keep the mess under control when I'm cooking. Really, I do. But I am not always successful.

The past couple weeks I have been cooking with some of the new meats I've acquired, both cured and fresh. I'll share what I've been making as well as some photos (and even some meat-inspired art). This is fair warning, however, that my food photos are not anything fancy. I have come across some foodies out there who also enjoy creating food-photo art that manages to convey visually the deliciousness of the dish. Perfect for food blogs, it turns out. So you will have to use your imaginations with my pictures, which are more nuts-and-bolts. Apologies in advance.

One of the first recipes I have tried with the flat pancetta was bean soup. This is a recipe I have been making forever. My dad has been cooking dried beans for as long as I can remember. It's one of the first recipes I learned to cook once I was on my own, great nutrition and flavor for someone who is still looking for a job after graduating from college and/or has a gaggle of mouths to feed, both situations I happen to be familiar with. Great for ultra-tight food budgets and very easy.

15-Bean Soup with Pancetta

Ingredients:
1 lb of mixed dried beans
1/2 lb dry cured pancetta, chopped (bacon if you're not curing your own)
1 onion, diced
2 Tbsp olive oil
salt and pepper, to taste
additional meat seasoning, to taste
water

I use this bean mix, and then just throw away the seasoning that comes with it. I always season it myself with salt, pepper, and whatever other seasoning I feel like, such as cajun or burger seasonings. This dish is incredibly versatile that way. I also like the variety of the beans in this mix: some standard ones (such as pinto and red) plus some bigger ones like butter beans that swell and stand out and then also some that just fall apart (split peas) during cooking and thicken up the soup as it cooks.

Give the beans a good couple of rinses in warm water. On the third rinse, I just let the beans soak while I finish getting the other ingredients ready. I will include that water in the beans, not drain it off. Meanwhile I put the cubed pancetta in a pan to render. One thing I'm noticing about the dry cured meat is how lightening fast it renders. You absolutely cannot walk away from it. It really only takes a couple minutes to brown it. The other thing I've noticed is the low smoking point, so be sure to have the vent above your stove going.

After the meat has browned, remove most of the bacon fat, and add the olive oil and onion. Cook the onions for a few minutes. Put the beans and the water they're soaking in into a crock pot set to high. Add a little water/beer/white wine to the pan with the meat and onion to loosen up any of the meat residue left over from browning (a few seconds), then put it all in the crockpot. Add a tablespoon of salt to start and pepper to taste, plus a meat seasoning of your choice. Cook for 4-6 hours, stirring occasionally. Adjust the salt and seasoning when it's done.

Cubed pancetta

Pancetta done rendering

The finished soup with some sour cream and homemade extra spicy chili paste in the middle

I am quickly discovering the beauty of Italian peasant food. This carbonara recipe by Mario Batali and recommended to me by my cousin Bill comes via Food and Wine Magazine (online version). I had heard of eggs in pasta but never raw egg. To be honest, it sounded too rich and after trying it, I'll confirm it is a very rich dish (you don't want to eat this very often), but it is truly delicious, both in terms of flavor and texture.

Spaghetti alla Carbonara

Ingredients:
1 lb dry spaghetti (linguini or fettucini also work great)
1/2 lb guanciale (dry cured pork jowl); you can also use just straight up bacon -- I used flat pancetta in mine
1 c.  parmesan cheese
4-5 eggs, separated
salt and pepper to taste

Pancetta (before slicing like bacon) and eggs directly from the farm.  The deep orange yolks from free-range farm eggs makes a spectacular presentation when the dish is done. They also taste amazing!

Slice the pancetta bacon-like and brown in a pan (again, this goes exceedingly fast and can create a lot of smoke if you don't have a fan on). Drain the meat on a paper towel and set aside. Remove all but a couple tablespoons of the fat from the pan. Cook the pasta to al dente and drain, reserving 1/4-1/2 cup of the cooking water. Reheat the meat in the pan (this takes no time), add the pasta water, and then the pasta. Toss around to mix. Then add the egg whites, cheese, pepper, and salt. (The meat is pretty salty, so be sure to taste before adding any additional.) Toss/mix again. Serve pasta onto four or five plates. After making this dish, I think it would easily feed five people, but it's your choice. Make a little "nest" in each plate of pasta and then put the yolk in the center. To eat it, you just break the yolk and mix into the pasta as much or as little as you want.

To me, the dish has a very "comfort food" feel. After eating pasta all my life almost exclusively with a red or white sauce, it's hard to believe that egg and pasta could taste this good together, but they really do. Understandably, some people will have a problem with raw egg but in this dish, the white is actually cooked, and the yolk is no different from eating an egg prepared for breakfast with the yolk left runny. Quality eggs really make the dish.

Fettucini alla Carbonara

Finally, I prepared one of the deer roasts last week, which, true to one hunter acquaintance, tastes almost exactly like high-quality beef. The texture is finer, however, in my opinion. Very delicious. Makes a wonderful Sunday dinner.

Deer Roast in a Slow Cooker
1 deer roast
1 diced onion
1/4 c. worschester sauce
minced garlic, to taste (I like to use a lot)
1 can stewed, diced, or Rotel tomatoes
2 c. water

This dish is as easy as putting everything in the pot, turning it on, and waiting til it's done (4-5 hours, depending on whether it started frozen or not). As you may learn about me, I love my slow cooker. One of the main reasons is because it has the ability to turn tougher pieces of meat into a veritable feast for many with so little effort. But it also works with tender meat too, like the deer. When doing this in an oven, I was warned to not going beyond medium rare with doneness or risk making it tough.

Deer roast right before serving

And just to share, a painting I made inspired by one of my recent butchering adventures. No title yet.

The Cure

I learned to enjoy cured meats like prosciutto and hard salami during trips to Europe, specifically France, Germany, and Spain. Dry cured meats there are harder and chewier (salami) and have a velvetier texture and stronger flavor (prosciutto), are more rustic, than the American cured meats I knew at the time, and it wasn’t unusual for an afternoon snack during those travels to be baguette, cheese, and cured meat. Maybe some butter. But no lettuce. No adulteration with mayo or tomato or mustard.

The trip we took to Barcelona, Spain was particularly memorable in this regard because of the dizzying number of small meat shops as you explored the neighborhoods. Without exaggeration, there seemed to be one on every street corner. Shops and even restaurants would have dozens, sometimes hundreds, of curing ham legs hanging from the ceiling. It was quite an awesome display and one I never forgot.

These are prosciutto hams hanging at a meat vendor at the famous La Boqueria market in Barcelona. If you do the conversion, it's about $100 per pound. They are all about acorn-fed hogs there, and truly, the meat does have a buttery, nutty quality to it that is divine. Worth every penny.

Once back in the States, I started buying these items, but if you also have developed a taste for and indulged yourself with these fine, artisanal meats, you know how exorbitantly expensive they can be. I looked online the other day to see how much a whole prosciutto ham would cost – just to see – and it was in the $800 range. Mama mia.

My first time dry curing was, again, inspired by my cousin Bill. I don’t recall which came first for him, the recipe for carbonara (a classic pasta dish that includes guanciale, or dry cured hog jowl) or the recipe for the guanciale itself, but he mentioned he had a guanciale hanging in his basement, sent me some pictures of it, told me how he did it, and I was instantly intrigued. I did some research and found Salumi: The Craft of Italian Dry Curing by Michael Ruhlman.

Salumi by Michael Ruhlman

With the help of the book and this guy’s dry-curing blog, I was able to put together a room in my basement where I could give this curing thing a shot. There are a few ways to put together a curing room or “box” but the main ingredients are temperature control (50-60 °F), humidity control (65-75%), and air circulation. Finding a room in your house where you can do this, one that is already cool (likely in your basement) and free of any pests like mice and bugs, is the path of least resistance. The other option is converting a refrigerator for this purpose, which Matt also describes very well in his blog.

Matt Wright, spunky Brit and author of the blog Wright Food

Even though our basement is finished, we do have a small room that is not hooked up to our heating system, which means it is already in the temperature range we needed for curing. It was probably intended for use as a storm shelter or wine cellar. So all it needed was humidity control and a fan to move the air around. Normally, humidity in that room sits around 40%. So I bought an ultrasonic humidifier and then a humidity-control device that turns the humidifier on and off automatically to keep the humidity in the range that I set.

Dayton humidity controller -- plug the humidifier into this and it will automatically turn it on and off to stay within a certain range of humidity set by you. 

Ultrasonic humidifier

 Following Bill’s lead, I also chose hog jowl as my first dry curing project. Pretty easy and exciting. Basically all you do is dredge your meat in salt that’s been mixed with pepper and herbs/spices, press the salt into the cut of meat, shake off the excess, and put it in a ziplock baggie. Let it sit in the fridge for a few days, flipping it and massaging the juices around about midway through. After refrigeration, rinse the meat well, weigh it, put a string through it, and hang it in your curing room or box. Weighing is important because doneness is determined by weight, i.e. when it loses 30 percent of its weight, it’s usually done. People who want their meat chewier can go a little more than that.

The cuts from a pig. What they are referring to as the "butt" is called the coppa when used for dry curing.

There are a couple other cuts (besides jowl) that really are this easy (e.g. the coppa (neck), and the pancetta (belly)). Apparently, you could just hang them in your kitchen and be alright. But the big boys, namely the bone-in prosciutto (back leg) and spalda (arm), are a lot more challenging. This is because the piece of meat is bigger, and the drying process must be gradual in order to allow the moisture deep in the meat time to come out. Otherwise, the meat will rot. Bleck.

My first guanciale (hog jowl)

It can be eaten raw at this point, but we rendered it like bacon. Some people liked it, some didn't. The people who grew up in the country kept calling it "side pork." I personally thought it was too salty to be rendered and eaten simply as bacon. It is probably best in a pot of beans or in carbonara. One is dark on the outside and the other is light I think because the light one was given a final rinse with a dry white wine before hanging.

So far the experiment is has been successful. We waited about five weeks to try the first jowl. The second wave of meats we cured was a few flat pancettas (usually it is rolled but that would have required the use of nitrates) and some unidentified piece of meat that I got from my hog butchering class. In the third round of curing, which are all from the pig we butchered here at home, I have many more meaty cuts like the loin and the neck. These have a much lower fat content than the other cuts I have cured so I am really excited to see how these have turned out. I do intend to dry cure at least one piece of each animal we butcher. That includes some of the deer meat we just got, the cow we have coming in March (beef that has been dry cured this way is called “bresaola”), and hoping for a wild goose breast to make some gnarly goose prosciutto.

Cuts that I currently have hanging in my curing room. The tags indicate the weight. It usually only takes a few weeks for smaller, bone-out pieces to lose about 30 percent of its weight.