Grocery Guy

Labor Day: Kegs and Cluckers!!!

2009-08-31T15:25:00.002-04:00

Want to sleep out under the stars without leaving New York City?

Want to enjoy some Brooklyn Brewery's finest suds while chowing down on a BBQ pulled chicken sandwich, smoked by butcher Tom Mylan?

Want to enjoy some warm peach pie from Sweet Deliverance and dance the night away with DJ Sam Kim? How could you not?

Come spend Labor Day at the Queens County Farm Museum. Camp out in the orchard, eat a down home dinner of smoked chicken, pickles, baked beans, corn on the cob, coleslaw, pie, and more from Sweet Deliverance.

Brooklyn Brewery will provide their Autumnal offerings, Oktoberfest and Post Road Pumpkin Ale, in addition to the tried and true Brooklyn Lager. Your $80 ticket covers the cost of beer for the whole night.

And wake up the next morning to Bloody Mary's, biscuits, fritattas and coffee.

Join us on the farm anytime and we'll set you up in the orchard at 5p.m. We'll have dinner, bluegrass, a DJ and dancing, a camp fire, pie, watermelon, capture the flag, breakfast the next morning and of course, enough kegs and cluckers to go around and then some.

In the morning we’ll be serving a breakfast that includes frittatas, biscuits, bloody mary's, coffee, and fruit.

Food, beer, music, games, a camping spot and parking all included in your $80 per adult ticket. Kids and families are welcome. Tents, which you can rent here, or car camping is fine. Transportation is up to you. Get tickets here.

NOTE: We will not be renting tents the day of the event. Please visit our friends at Tents & Trails to rent a tent for the camp out.

The farm is open to visitors all day, but the fun and food will really get started shortly after 5 pm, when the gates close to the public.

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WHAT: Chicken BBQ & Camp Out at the Farm
WHEN: September 6th and 7th, 2009
PRICE: $80 per person
FOR: Beer, Food, DJ, Live Music, Games, Campfire, Parking, Camping Spot, Breakfast, Coffee

Book: Moro or Why You Should Stop Buying Cook Books You Can't Actually Cook Out Of.

2009-03-02T17:49:00.008-05:00

I'm not sure what it is but it seems like the British, the Japanese and hell, even the Canadians are better at putting out really awesome cookbooks than we Americans. I'm sure that there are plenty of junky foreign books out there but I haven't seen them.

Part of the problem I have with American cookbooks can but summed up by this experience: Every time I look at my Amazon suggestion list, there it is, looking at me like I want to buy it:Under Pressure: Sous Vide. Why? How many people have $4000 worth of food technology sitting around their apartment? Who cooks like that? Who has the room?

The answer is that obviously cookbooks have lapsed completely into the realm of lifestyle literature. They're not written to be cooked out of but simply read as a type of pornography.

That's not really a dig, literature is important in it's ability to inspire the reader, but literature (or pornography) also can't help you make dinner unless you're looking at the kidney recipe in the beginning of Joyce's Ulysses.

Anyway, real cookbooks with real recipes are where the British seem to be whipping our asses in the last few years and Moro is one of the books that has been doing it. Moro is a restaurant in London that mixes North African flavors with the food of southern Spain.

Great. That doesn't sound douchey at all.

But, then you open to the first few pages and here's a bunch of bread recipes. Simple recipes to make good bread from scratch. You have my attention. Now a tortilla recipe Next is how to make your own membrillo (quince paste) again simple, again from scratch. Then yogurt. Then yogurt cheese and Harissa and on and on.

I'll admit it, books that teach me how make things most people buy are a major turn on. Moro could have gone on to talk about how to poach horse turds for 24 hours in an immersion circulator and I would have still slept with this book under my pillow for a few months.

But it doesn't.
Instead it starts dropping the People's Elbow of flavor and simplicity. Poached eggs with yogurt, fried sage and chili flakes? Fried liver with cumin? Roasted pork belly with fennel seeds?

Even if they all tasted like throw-up I would still make myself a Moro t-shirt with a magic marker like it was 1992 and they were Fugazi. Why? because they are real recipes that I would enjoy making and moreover could make with nothing more complicated than a knife, an oven and some pots and pans. What's better is that the cooking directions could be given to you over the phone by someone playing Buck Hunter and guzzling Wild Turkey.

Anyway, I was going to talk a little about the recipe for mackerel a la plancha that is in the above photo but it's early in the morning, I'm hung over and I lack the words to describe how awesome butterflied mackerel, cooked in a skillet and dressed with minced garlic, paprika, shallots, olive oil and parsley is. Forget about how cheap and sustainable a fish it is and how few really great recipes for it exist in today's stupid, tenderloin-centric food culture.

Put your French Laundry cookbook on eBay. Buy this book before the warm weather hits. Cook like a real person instead of of a precious gaylord.

Get Mezze

2009-02-16T14:40:00.002-05:00

It seems like everyone I know is broke right now. It seems like even if people aren't broke, they feel kind of ashamed of blowing all that money on records, pot and sex furniture back when the economy was doing ok.

It also seems like every swinging dick in the world is writing some kind of cooking-on-a-budget piece that is about dressing up pot roast or telling people to switch from boneless/skinless breasts to boneless/skinless thighs.

Bullshit. How about we eat a little less meat and do it with style!

One of my favorite jams in the less-is-more category is a mezze plate. Baba Ganoush, hummus and couscous or tabbouleh salad with a little bit of kibbe or braised chicken in the middle, what more could you want out of dinner, or life for that matter? The best part is that if you're really caught short you can skip the meat and no one will really notice.

Now

For the basics of this recipe you'll need:

Baba G

1 big purple eggplant or a few small ones
Garlic
Salt
Pepper

Hummus

1 can Chickpeas/Garbanzo beans
Tahini
Garlic
Salt
Lemon juice
and a Food Processor

For Kibbe recipe check here

Start Your Oven

First thing you want to roast your eggplant until it is soft and mushy (about 45 minutes at 350' for an average big eggplant) and set aside to cool. Meanwhile puree a clove or two of garlic with your can of chickpeas (liquid included!), a tablespoon or so of tahini and a good drizzle of olive oil. Check the seasoning and adjust with a few pinches of salt and the juice of half a lemon. If you go overboard on the lemon just add more olive oil.

Next take your cooled and peeled eggplant and jam it into the food processor. Don't bother to clean out the processor as you'll need the leftover hummus to give your Baba some body. I know that it might not be totally cricket in Morocco but I even add a little extra hummus or tahini to make sure the texture is right. Add your clove or two of garlic and some olive oil and let it go until pretty smooth. Taste, adjust seasoning with lemon and salt and add more olive oil if needed.

Now all you have to do is make a salad with couscous or quinoa or some other grain/pasta. I like lots of chopped cilantro instead of parsley along with lemon juice olive oil and a bit of minced shallots and salt.

Plate

Now plop your various delicious goops in thirds around the plate, drizzle with olive oil or good quality sunflower oil, chopped cilantro and drop a big scoop of kibbe or stewed Moroccan chicken in the middle and eat with pita bread (if you want to make your own you can make them in a hot oven on a oven stone using any decent yeast rising pizza dough recipe). Grand total for the meal, meat included, is about $8 most of which is the half pound of ground lamb. Go meatless, make your own bread and you could be staring down the barrel of a super-tasty dinner for like $4. Fear, uncertainty and doubt never tasted so good.

For the Cheap Seats

2008-12-17T11:45:00.005-05:00

It's not like it's a big secret that everyone is fucking broke right now. I mean, the media went straight from obsessing over Hillary voters who jumped ship to McCain to "Soon we'll all be eating dog food," stories.

With that in mind Brooklyn Based, my other endeavor, put together these holiday discounts. Even if you don't live here there are some web deals, like 10% off a subscription to the Diner Journal where you can read more of my work (and Tom's too) or 15% off online orders at Brooklyn Kitchen. It's pretty sweet, really. So check it out. And sign up for BB if you haven't already -- show a little Brooklyn pride.

Yes, a Chili Recipe

2008-12-10T17:29:00.003-05:00

I figure that I have been pontificating enough about making chili that I'm required at this point to actually come correct and put forth a recipe for it so that I can be further judged. Like I said, it's not really nuero-science. It's just dried chilies, spices onions garlic corn meal and good ground meat.

Anyway, lets start with the most important part which is the chilies. For a 3 gallon batch you'll need a small plastic grocery bag made up mostly of guajillo (juajillo) chiles and a fist full of puja (puya) chilies. New Mexicos are OK and anchos, chipotles and mulatos are to be avoided as they make a dark and bitter flavor that tastes like chewing on spicy aspirin. The more heat you want the more puya you need but keep them separate for the time being.

Now take your chilies and pull off the stem and shake out the seeds. If your anal and also want a milder chili you can also remove the white veins too. Make sure to get all the seeds as they'll ruin the whole deal if you get one in your teeth. Once you have your deseeded chilies you want to boil water equivalent to the volume of chilies and the turn off the heat. Make sure that the pot has a lid or when you add the chilies you'll pepper-spray your apartment with the spicy steam. Now add the chilies, punch them down and put on the lid. Basically you want to wait until the pot has cooled to the point where you can touch the sides with your hand (45 minutes or so) and then puree the whole shiterie with an immersion blender until it's smooth. This might be a good time to run the paste through a china cap to get the big chunks out but if you're not trying to impress anyone with your flawless French Laundry chef skills skip it.

Another alternative if a) if it's late Summer and b) you're lucky enough to have a farmer that raises flavorful, ripe red peppers you can fire roast the skins off them, de-seed them and make a puree of fresh chilies, though you might need to add dried ones to add some bottom end.

Anyway, next you want to brown your meat. I like ground short rib, brisket and some pork scrap but really it doesn't matter that much. Ideally I would also throw in a small amount of lamb to give it some gamey punch, just don't over do it or it'll start tasting like kibbe. I like add a little salt, pepper and toasted, freshly ground cumin at this point. Again, don't over do it you just want to make the meat suck in some flavor but not make it bitter and over spiced. Brown until, well, brown.

For some reason I like to saute the ton of diced onions and garlic separately, though I don't think it matters that much. If you're going for that perfection fetish shit you could immersion blender this stuff after it's cooked and then add it to the meat.

Now add your chili paste and more cumin and maybe more black pepper. Taste it you fool! It should be tasting nice but raw and not quite integrated. After it simmers for a while taste it again and correct the seasoning. Usually I find that it either needs more garlic, heat (add powdered cayenne), cumin or black pepper and salt.

You're chili should have simmered a good while now. Time to add hominy. I like white hominy but hey it's YOUR chili. You want the water in the can and everything unless the water tastes like a can. At this point your should gradually add corn meal a few tablespoons at a time. Let it settle in for ten minutes and then reevaluate and add more if needed. You're shooting for Hormel consistency here no further explanation needed. Too thick? Add beer or chili water or stock. Too fatty? Add some white wine vinegar or cider vinegar.

Done. That wasn't hard was it?

A Few Thoughts on Chili

2008-12-05T08:13:00.006-05:00

First things first. As you may or may not have read on some of the various blogs in our fair city, I am making chili and selling it at the 3rd Ward Craftstraviganza this Sunday. Because I was alerted that some people might have gotten the wrong idea about what this thing was from reading the daily candy or something: I am making chili, not the Diner or Marlow and Sons. Clear? Yeesh.

Anyway, chili is like risotto or some other thing that is supposed to be super-hard to make well but really is stupid easy, so long as you abide by the Five Pillars of Chili:

1) The red color in your chili should come from dried chiles (pasilla and guajillo are my faves with a bit of puya) that have been de-seeded, soaked in hot water and then puréed with their boiling liquid and maybe some garlic. Powders? Non! They make the chili too spicy long before they give it the depth of flavor you get from the paste of a shit-ton of dried chiles.

2) Cumin is important. Toast it whole and grind it for best results. Don't go crazy with it.

3) No black beans. Black beans are stupid and they make your chili go from a fetching bright meaty red to a dried blood band-aid color.

4) No tomatoes. Unless you need the acid from the tomatoes to balance a particularly greasy grind of meat I would stay away from them.

5) Cornmeal. It seems like cheating to thicken chili with corn meal but what it really does is give your chili a texture that is so round and perfect that you would swear it's fake.

Someday this War is Going to End

2008-12-01T13:41:00.007-05:00

The seven words from Lt. Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now have been used and even been abused to comment on the state of gentrification in New york as it pertains to the sales of luxury condos.

My father really liked Robert Duvall's character. Mostly, I think, because of that one short sentence. Kilgore's realization on the beach of the Mekong Delta summed up in a few words what my father had been trying to come to terms with since he boarded a plane and left Vietnam for good in 1971: War was fucked up but it was also kind of awesome... for certain kind of guy.

Kilgore and my father were those guys. They thrived on chaos because it was also freedom. How does anyone make sense out of track homes and EZ Bake ovens after spending years not knowing which breath would be your last?

Tying this profound and brutal truth to the kind of dooshy lifestyle-porn that me and thousands of others, online and in print, create is so ridiculous it hurts my heart's colon. However it is how I felt this morning when I woke up and started thinking about what stories I was going to try to pitch to who and in what order. Suddenly it didn't matter. Suddenly I realized that this wave of food-dork-chef-worship-foie-gras-ramp-sandwich-bullshitfest had to end somewhere, had to end sometime.

Why am I thinking this way? I guess it has to do with a few relatively minor and seemingly unrelated things happening in the last little while:

One: Gael Greene gets canned from NY Magazine

Jesus fucking Christ! Look, I don't even like Gael Greene. I tried to read one of her goofy memoirs where she fucks a bunch of chefs and couldn't even pretend that I was going to make it through the thing. But I mean, shit dude, it's like firing Dan Rather from CBS or, oh wait, that did happen. Anyway, she wasn't even making that much money (word on the street is under $50k) from what can be gleaned from the rumor-mill and she'd worked there since 1968. Which brings me to..

Two: Sarah Vowell publicly eviscerated in the NY Times.

Sure, I know, I'm being a little naive here. People get slaughtered by the Times or the NYRoB all the time. Right. I get it. I just never thought Sarah Vowell would get it. I mean for years I've been secretly whispering to people at parties "um, can I ask you a personal question? Do you actually like Sarah Vowell or do you just pretend to so you can have sex with girls that look like they were exported from 1996?"

I guess I just thought that everyone had agreed to say nothing about Sarah Vowell until after she was dead, you know, like everyone knowing that Liberace was queer as the day was long (including my grandparents who used to sell him dogs) but not really saying anything until 1987.

What does Sarah Vowell have to do with food writing? Nothing at all. But it does mean that in the rapidly contracting world of publishing and journalism (as we used to recognize it) is so fucked up and freaked out that it is eating it's own young. Look, if people start telling the truth now what's next?

Is Alton Brown finally going to freak out and go into an hour and twenty minute monologue about all the ways in which all the people involved in the Kabuki-turd-circus known as the Food Network are without any value, integrity or worth?

Lets be honest: Lying is the sub-prime, leveraged mortgage backed security, credit default swap of the media world. If everyone started telling the truth about how most people are totally full of shit where would it end? I mean, the only person left standing in food would be, I don't know, Paul Bertolli and Harold McGee maybe? Not really that bad of vision of the future in my opinion but still.

Three: My Best Friend, who doesn't give a shit about food, Sends me an email recommendation from the iTunes podcast store about a show about foie gras

This is when I knew it was really over.

How does one see a crash coming? It's easy. Whenever people who wouldn't normally care one way or the other about anything (your parents for instance) are suddenly doing stuff like:

A) Getting an E-Trade account (crash 1999-style)

or

B) Watching Flip-That-House (crash 2007-style)

and now

C) Sending you quasi-esoteric-foodie-bullshit (cultural backlash it-can't-be-long-now-style)

Anyway you slice it, the end draweth nigh for us my twerpy little shit bags. You can't argue with the facts or the signs. I hope we're all capable of becoming some real hard, pipe-hitting food journalists within the next few years because the days of getting floated on a cloud of web 2.0 titties is about to end.

Am I saying that food journalism, if that's what you call food blogging in it's typical form, is going to dry up and blow away? No! Of course not... I think.

I guess it could but more than likely it's just going to contract back to the ghetto from whence it came. Irritating rich people talking bullshit about lame places that serve crap food on nice China to other irritating rich people with a small trickle of really good, classic shit sneaking out the door along with it. Maybe they'll stop giving away book deals to every swinging dick and make the rest of us get back to the hard work of trying to say something real and lasting about the food we eat, how we prepare it and why we eat it. If you need a fucking book to tell you how to make food from a combination of canned goods (A Man, a Can, a Plan, etc.) or need to buy another extreme food, beaver testicle cookbook (here I'm thinking of the Nuge's Kill It and Grill It and on and on) then, well, actually, now that I think of it, those books might come in handy when the revolution (apocalypse, blood-barfing zombie attack, peak oil, whatever.) comes and the only things you can eat are either in cans or found skulking around Central Park and you have to shoot them with a bow and arrow like a painted Montagnard in the service of Col. Kurtz.

Yes. Someday this war is going to end.

I could think of worse things.

Boneless Thanksgiving

2008-12-01T11:36:00.007-05:00

This was the third annual T & A Thanksgiving Freakout spread... right before most of our friends showed up late with a bazillion sides, cheese and appetizers.

Let's just say that our cup totally fucking overfloweth this year, which is funny because we sort of phoned-it-in with only three desserts, a metric ton of stuffing, garlic red-skinned mashed potatoes and a 30 lb boneless turkey(!)

I won't lie to you and say that I didn't have a moment of light bowel evacuation when I opened up the offal-party-pack box last Tuesday to discover that when I talked to Josh at Fleisher's and said "Bigger is better for me" he would translate my words to mean "Could I get the biggest fucking turkey that has ever walked the earth?"

Apparently the kids at the 4-H club that raised my turkey must have fed this bastard snickers bars, muscle milk and, presumably, smaller turkeys. What was a Grocery Guy to do with a turkey so big that smaller fowl orbited around it except... completely de-bone it!

I'm not going to bore you with a long procedural break-down of how to de-bone a turkey here because I have actually already written one (Gasp! For real money!) here.

What you do need to know is that once you manage to get your turkey all floppy and boneless (A-train, when she first opened the door to the fridge shrieked "There is a dead, naked fat lady in our ice box!") you'll need to stuff it with something, making sure to get into all the nooks and crannies of the boneless thigh, etc., and then sew it up using (in my case) an upholstery needle I borrowed from Harry at Brooklyn Kitchen.

Just make sure that your stitches are about 1/2 inch a apart, tight and even. Run them from the base of the back up to the neck flap and then turn the turkey over to lace up the cavity. Last chance to add something goofy like fresh rosemary or lemon zest to the inside of the bird!

Once you're done you can gently set it in a roasting pan. Our typical roasting pan was WAY too small for our bird this year and so we ended up flopping it into a tin-foil hotel pan, which it completely filled!

I think you might think that you know that you think that you know how big a turkey would have to be fill up a hotel pan but, really, you have no fucking idea! I know I didn't.

The worst part was that, besides it collapsing the baking rack in my oven that was BARELY able to fit my turkey inside it, NO ONE could even begin to give me any clue how long to cook a boneless, 30 lb turkey for or at what temperature. Turns out it doesn't fucking matter that much. The turkey was reading 180' inside the breast only three and a half hours in but, unfortunately it had to sit in the oven warming for 2 1/2 hours while we waited for all of our tardy, drunken houseguests to show up.

No matter! The theoretical genius of the boneless turkey turned out to be borne out by empirical fact: despite spending more than 5 hours roasting away in my crap-trap oven it was tender, juicy and as flavorful as a turkey could possibly be.

For the record: I would say that you can cut the text book cooking times by 30% by removing the bones so long as your stuffing is warm when you put it in the cavity.

I've Given You All My Good Advice

2008-11-26T19:50:00.006-05:00

If you're ever going to listen to me about anything now would be the time to tune in. You might notice that this year we've done exactly jack and shit as far as run up recipes for Turkey Day. Turns out Grocery Guy readers are not going to pay for me and the A-train's wedding so we've been busy writing for money. Nothing against your broke-asses but it's a hard world out there. Besides we've already done Thanksgiving recipes so use the search feature and pretend that you know how websites work.

Anyway, if you find your stuffing lacking a certain something every year you probably need to make an early morning run to your local C-Town to pick up a little box of Bell's poultry seasoning.

What's in it?

I don't know and I don't care if it's made of the powdered bones of Darfurian children and Melamine. I would still use the shit out of it because it can even make stuffing with stupid shit like dried fruit in it taste just exactly like StoveTop with almost no effort other than making the trip to the store and dosing your stuffing liberally with it.

Bell's poultry seasoning could make dead cockroaches, mouldy bread and pig urine taste like you got it out of the steam table at Boston Market.

If you sprinkled Bell's poultry seasoning on your deceased grandma if would bring her back to life and smell deliciously of sage and marjoram and then she would fix you dinner.

Barack Obama uses it instead of Gold Bond on his junk after a tough game of hoops.

Kilgore Trout used it to brush his teeth.

Later in life Vanilla Ice actually admitted that if there was a problem yo, Bell's could solve it.

Even Martha Stewart bows at the feet of Bell's poultry seasoning.

Chuck Norris actually stole all of his facts from Bell's poultry seasoning.

Prologue for Cheap, Sharp, Lasts Forever

2008-11-24T10:47:00.003-05:00

As some of you might have noticed, Ahem, I have a piece in this weeks New York Magazine about buying a cheap yet functional and attractive chef knife. To NYMag's credit they didn't give me very much room to prattle-on about knives in general or cheap knives in particular and, through a combination of brutal, Daniel-Craig-in-Casino-Royale-style beatings and bribing me with money, somehow reigned me in long enough to produce a very tight and focused little article.

I'm almost proud of it. I, well, uh they obviously cut out all of the parts eluding to wizardly Jethro Tull lyrical references and the article deals not at all with my ongoing love-hate relationship with the band Kyuss. But then I suppose this is really the difference between a blog for fun and a magazine for profit. When money is involved Cross eyed Mary gets tossed into the street.

ANYWAY, a few quick, efficient notes expanding on my terrifyingly small piece:

The Knife

While the 8 inch Forschner in the article is one of the best cheap knives you can get that doesn't look stupid there are other options. Personally I like to have a little bit bigger of a knife for chopping onions and such which is why you might want to consider the 10 inch or even the 12 inch version of the same knife depending on how much length or girth you might be making up for.

Anyhow, the point I was trying to make in the article was really that you should spend less on the knife and more on the maintenance of the edge so you have a knife you actually enjoy using.

The Steel

I'm not sure how much more clear I can be about this: If you don't have a quality steel and know how to use it to keep your knife sharp you're SCREWED. First, what is a quality steel? Ok, you want a basic name brand steel made by Forschner or F. Dick. I am sure there are other good makers out there but I haven't used their steels and thus don't trust them. A shit steel will do nothing for you while a good steel will save your very culinary life.

Anyway, what you want is a 10 inch medium cut steel from either of the above mentioned manufacturers. These don't have to be fancy looking. A plain plastic handled steel will run you $30 and last forever. That said, you might want to pay more for a pretty hardwood handled jammie, keeping in mind that you're going to be looking at it everyday forever.

Using the Steel

It's not hard but it isn't easy. First figure out what the bevel of your knife edge is. Huh? Right. Generally American and European knives have about a 20' angled bevel while Japanese knives have something more like a 17'-15' bevel. Ultimately this is just to give you an idea as to what angle to hold the knife at in relation to the steel while you VERY GENTLY glide the blade down the steel simultaneously drawing the knife towards the hilt of the steel and across the the length of the blade. It is totally OK if this makes you nervous to do the first dozen times you try it but keep it up because eventually you'll get good at it and it will make you look really cool.

Keep in mind what you're trying to do here which is to re-align a beat up edge that has been knocked off the axis of the blade but is not actually destroyed. So what is going on when you lightly drag your knife across the steel is kind of like styling that Faux-hawk you had three years ago: make it pointy and tall. Obviously you can't see it but you can feel it when you test the blade for sharpness by cutting a piece of newspaper by dragging the blade perpendicular to the edge of the paper. If it cuts right through and doesn't hang up anywhere then you're great but if it does hang up then you know where on the blade you need to re-hone and then try again.

The key thing to note here is that you should keep at it and know that you really can't fuck up your knives too bad even if you're a complete retard. When in doubt ask the chef at your favorite restaurant to show you how to do it.

So Dull

Eventually, no matter how well you take care of your blade, your knife is going to get dull. It only takes one or two people cutting a pie on a Pyrex plate to say goodbye to your edge and then you must have it sharpened. There are many ways to make that happen for yourself that include accruing hundreds of dollars in exotic whetstones and practising furiously to perfect your technique. If you suspect you might have Aspergers-lite this is your jam. If you are like most people, BUSY, then you should just get in the habit of dropping your knife off every few months to have it professionally sharpened by someone who knows that they're doing.

The guy you end up with should not be a "Grinder" as the run of the mill destroyers of blades are known. You want a guy (probably at a housewares store) that has a water-cooled powered wheel like a Tormek.

While you're there think about what this guy can do for you. If you usually only slice veggies and wished your sliced through them better have the guy put on a 17' bevel. If you tend to beat up your knives more and want to go longer between sharpenings then have him put something more like a 22' bevel. This is the same guy that can re-shape and make new again an old knife that your grandma doesn't use anymore. Chances are if the knife is old and made from stainable carbon steel you will have one hell of a knife.

Protect the Edge

Last thing. Get a plastic sleeve, case or something to protect the blade of your knife from getting banged around if you don't have a magnetic rack or knife block to store it in.

Leaf Lard Party

2008-11-02T16:25:00.003-05:00

Here's my weekly ritual: the chopping of the leaf lard. Leaf lard, as if you didn't know, is the layer of fat that lines the gastrointestinal cavity of a pig. When the pig is slaughtered leaf lard looks like milky, half set, jello and when chilled it hardens to a waxy firm leaf-shaped solid. If you ever wondered why crisco was developed it was because leaf lard is awesome but relatively hard to get if you weren't killing your own pigs. Rendering leaf lard is pretty easy. Just chop it up, as shown, and place it in an oven safe pot with a half inch of water and place in the oven covered at 350' until the fat has rendered and the cracklings are golden brown. Strain and chill the lard and save the cracklings to sprinkle on top of a salad or flavor corn bread with. After the fat has solidified seperate the white lard from the liquid. Failure to do so will give you bad lard. Use in any recipe that calls for crisco.

Pictures from the Brooklyn Based Pig Roast

2008-10-17T08:31:00.002-04:00

This is where I thank everybody who schlepped out to the weird industrial nowhere between Carol Gardens and Park Slope that is the Yard last Friday. Special thanks to Kelly and Annaliese of BB, Josh from Fleisher's for talking words and Harry and Taylor for helping out and bringing me Tequila.

If you didn't go and want to see what you missed click Here.

Pochetta, July 2007

2008-10-09T08:36:00.002-04:00

Brooklyn Based Pigtoberfest Pig Roast Oct 10th

2008-09-30T20:20:00.005-04:00

Yes, that's right kids! Another exciting whole hog roast hosted by me, Brooklyn Based and my Moo-Ru, Joshua Applestone from Fleisher's Meats October 10th at the Yard in Gowanus located on the lovely Gowanus canal. We will be putting the Pig in Pig Roast and the Anus in Gowanus with bands, beer and slow roasted pork tacos 'till you drop. Starts at 6 PM and goes to 10 PM. Click here to get tickets before they sell out.

To All The Pigs I've Roasted Before

2008-09-30T20:09:00.002-04:00

My will to be weird has gotten me lots of places in life and turns out a lot of the places are pig roasts. For some reason the stubby finger of fate has decided that I know how to cook a big dead animal, a kind of all-or-nothing venture where it either comes out great and the crowd throws you on it's shoulders or it sucks and you are comforted with half-hearted compliments.

Really it's pretty easy to cook a whole pig as long as you have enough time and some sort of proper cooking device (this, as it turns out is more difficult to find then you might think. I finally, through sheer incompetence-is -the-mother-of-invention, landed on my preferred ghetto-stylish way of cooking a 200 pounder trying to figure out the 3rd Ward pig roast set up consisting cinder blocks and re bar.) and the rest doesn't matter.

This was the first pig I roasted at Mark's house in Mastic Beach that we, for obvious reasons, dubbed Space Pig or Pigglestar Galactica. I was a wee 40 or so pounds and it fit nicely on his 55 gallon drum BBQ. We lined the center with water filled disposable tin bread pans to catch the grease and built the fire around the edge. I can't remember this roast very well but I have heard that it took about 5 hours.

What's this? A Pig tamale with a side of boobs? Yes it is.

Once again at Mark's for his birthday in Mastic.

To be perfectly honest I had nothing to do with this pig roast except the carving and the New Mexico chili marinade but it turned out great. The recipe is simply a stone lined grave with a fire built in it, shovel out the coals and lay the pig (wrapped in corn husks and chicken wire) in the pit before covering with a canvas tarp, dirt and build a big fire on top. After 12 or so hours dig it up, unbind it from the wire, carve and serve. Aside from the necessity to dig a pit and the various complications it is my favorite way to cook a pig. Too bad all that oil leached into the ground in N. Brooklyn or I might do it in the city.

Oh, a spit roasted pig! How romantic? It conjures up images of Lord of the Flies-esque gay orgies and ritual sacrifice... and not much else. Spit roasting takes FOREVER and, frankly, sucks big time unless everyone is too drunk to care when the fucking thing is done and then doesn't care if it is slightly rare. Avoid.

Anyway, look out for my next pig roast at the Yard in Gowanus on October 10th where we will do another cinder block 3rd Ward-style Mexxie pig with all the trimmings.

I do parties.

In Brooklyn We Stay(ed) Home

2008-08-29T08:05:00.006-04:00

For anyone that doesn't know it, this Saturday is the last show at the McCarren Pool.

The City is going to turn it back into a pool and my favorite venue in the city will be no more.

I'm going to be out of town cooking dinner at Guy Jones farm on Saturday instead of seeing Sonic Youth end this brief era but I was there for the first free show with Les Savy Fav long before the beer vendors and big sound system.

Hey Look! I'm on TV... sort of

2008-07-21T09:31:00.007-04:00

Here's an interview I did while I was chain smoking, stressed out and totally wasted at the UnFancy Food Show 2: electric bugaloo.

Notice how I am continually distracted by any small, shiny object like some sort of 240 lb. turkey; glancing around looking for anyone I know at a party so I can say "Excuse me. I'm sorry, I'll right back!" and hurry off never to be seen of again.

Grace Piper was nice as pie and I certainly don't have anything against her but being interviewed when I'm not sure if I'm actually slurring my words or just thinking I am, makes me really nervous.

Anyway, I'm Tom Mylan and I endorse this message.

Pig Roast in Bushwick or how Taylor from Brooklyn Kitchen saved my Life by Showing me how to Run from Danger

2008-07-19T20:00:00.015-04:00

"Hey! Is that FIRE coming out of that gas tank?"

Yes. Yes, it was fire coming out of that gas tank (to be clear, the gas was for the BBQ that they were roasting corn on. I would never roast a pig on gas.)

Anyway, Sunday was filled with so many memories: heat exhaustion, a 200 lb. pig engulfed in flames by a massive grease fire, cutting up said pig once finally cooked (we got started an hour late because there was no lighter fluid) while being watched through the windows of the 3rd Ward like I was in an operating theater and then, of course the two and a half hour scramble to fill enough tacos for the pig maddened crowd.

The Death Experience? Right. Sorry.

Anyway. After I spotted the flaming gas canister and Josh (the guy manning the grill) turned off burners, I doused the flame with a bottle water and pulled the hissing tank away from the underside of the grill. Sure there's a huge pig roasting fire only twelve feet away. Sure the hissing coming from the canister is the sound of compressed propane leaking out through a defective valve. Me worry (or have multiple flashes of dying in a ball of fire)? Nope. I just pulled the tank out and as soon as it hit the concrete the valve totally blew out sending the tank spinning violently on the ground powered by a huge jet of compressed gas.

What do I do? I froze, thinking "this is how I die, like a stupid person. My only hope is that we make the cover of the Post".

Then I caught sight of Talyor from Brooklyn Kitchen sprinting like Ben Johnson towards the gate to the street. Yes. That's it. Run like there's about to be a horrible fire in a narrow side yard! And run I did. So hard and so fast that I didn't even realize until about a minute after the danger had passed that I was still holding my bottle of tequila.

The Answers: Knife

2008-07-07T10:44:00.014-04:00

I'll level with you: I do not like Mark Bittman.

To be clear, lest the harpies of the Interweb should come swooping down upon my soul, I respect Bittman but I do not love him.

He's a smug boomer and thus rubs me wrong on an atomic level. It's not his fault. Who's fault is it? James Taylor, Alice Waters, Dennis Hopper and Steven Spielberg. All the people who did one or two cool things when doing cool things was still pretty easy and then coasted for decades with a wry smirk on their faces.

Mark is not guilty of those sins, except the smirk. His cookbooks are perfect for cooks who like to skim recipes for basic ideas and are broad enough that you're likely to stumble upon something you haven't thought of cooking before; most restaurants have a copy of one of them kicking around, covered in grease. His TV show is usually both interesting and entertaining and, most importantly, he wrote the best article of 2007 in the NYT's normally snore-worthy food section.

For those of you that don't remember: in May last year he wrote a long article about equipping a home kitchen to cook almost anything for under $300. This article was so smart, complete and anti-precious that it was singularly responsible for me reading the Dining Out section for the next ten months despite the fact that I rarely found anything I wanted to see (a brief aside: The NYTFS is, 8 out of 10 times, not written for people who are interested in food. It's written as straight up lifestyle-porn. No big deal, I've quit expecting anything worthwhile out of it and am thus pleasantly surprised when they put out a meaty article.).

Anyway, as a Homage to/Rip-off of Mr. Bittman's single handed attempt to keep me skimming every Wednesday's paper for something of weight I have decided to kick off the Answers. Today I'm starting with my favorite kitchen object: the chef knife.

Over the last two years I have talked a lot of shit about kitchen knives none of which was totally correct. What can I say? In the last four years I went from cutting food with a knife our Dominican neighbor lady gave us in pity to having a $1500 knife collection and helping design a chef knife for production. Hopefully, in penance, I'll be able to right those wrongs and shed a little light and sanity on the most deeply fetishized kitchen appurtenances.

What are you after and what do you want to spend?

These are the questions you must answer before you even pull you WaMu gold card out of your money clip. You'll need to take a cold and unflinching look into the nature of your heart. Are you buying a knife to mince shallots or are you looking to consume, collect, and seem special? Either or both are fine. Just know what you're getting into.

Selling Plasma to buy Beer

First we'll cover knives for the really cheap seats. You know who you are: rolling cigarettes out of cans of Top and buying your veg at the end of the day from farmers who would rather give shit away than load it back on the truck.

First you need to decide: carbon or stainless? Carbon will be sharper but can and will stain or even rust, stainless at this level will not be quite as sharp but do the job well and will not require the knife to be washed and immediately wiped dry like carbon.

Single, male and on the Autism spectrum? Carbon steel.

Overworked, underpaid and not have time to pamper yourself, let alone a knife? Stainless.

So what should you get for $20 or under?

For stainless a Forschner 8" Fibrox, beloved of the Cooks Illustrated people and also the same knife maker of all the knives in my butchering kit. They're tough, easy to sharpen, cheap and ugly. You can get them most anywhere including the usual suspects of drunken, late nite online purchases. This knife will not get you laid or make you look cool but will do anything short of carving a giant Russian squash.

Carbon? That pretty much assigns you to a trip to Chinatown to get a carbon steel veggie cleaver or get one from Wok Shop or Galasource. These cleavers, as stated in previous reviews, will make short work of chopping onions, mashing garlic cloves and hacking apart large woody pumpkins and make you look like a disco pimp while doing it... so long as you don't cut off your fingernail.

First Real Job after College

So you have more than twenty bones to blow on a cutting object? Swell. What does that mean? I would guess say $50- $120. Here in fifty-to-buck twenty land the world is your oyster. You can get some very good knives. Here I'm going to recommend you stay Japanese. My personal favorite is the Mac Dave Gould special Mac's MTH-80.

As much shit as I talk about vintage carbon steel and Chinese cleavers this is the knife I have rarely put down since trading Dave a fancy Japanese chicken knife for it two years ago. It's size, balance and edge holding capabilities are unlike any knife I have felt like I could use every waking moment and not fuck up. Yes this is a tough knife. I'm not saying you can't destroy it (I've seen a line cook that will remain nameless destroy one in a matter of seconds) but you'd be hard pressed to do it outside a restaurant kitchen.

Still feeling Carbon-core? The best for the money are Kikuichi carbon steel Gyutos you can get at Marlow and Sons or Brooklyn Kitchen. Actually my MTH-80 is finally dull from a spate of drunken meat slicing in a ceramic plate during my last BBQ and my trusty, patina coated Kikuichi is picking up the slack. You watch the Cooking with Lydia show? Look next time, she uses the exact same knife. That said you will need to sharpen this knife and all carbon steel more often than most stainless.

I'm Rich Biatch!

So you've finally made it huh? You methodically slice chive batons in your brownstone's custom kitchen complete with a six burner Wolf stove and a decorative cast concrete island? I think you should go custom. I'm newly in love with Joel from Cut Brooklyn and his crazy handmade chef knives. Every knife gets about 10 hours of hand work into them and they are as sharp or sharper than even the highest-end Japanese knives I've handled. Want more? He'll even sharpen them back to their original edge for free if you live in the city and can drop them by his shop. Find anyone else that can or will do that. On top of that Joel uses newer alloy, ultra-tough steel that keeps it's edge longer provided you don't do anything too dumb to it.

Too new looking for your steampunk ass? Try your hand at some vintage Sabatiers. The ones in the picture at the top of the post are my personal collection of expensive and hard to find French steel. Top to bottom they are a Four-Star Elephant Sabatier Nogent 11" an unmarked 12" (probably a Trompette or Elephant from the 50's) Sabatier and a cleaver-spined Massiff Nogent from Tichet. These are not for everyone. They require constant steeling and are heavier by twice of any of my other normal sized knives. They do however give you a knife you would feel OK about using in hand-to-hand combat or splitting a live lobster.

Final note: Just because I recommend these knives they are not the be-all/end-all of knives. There are more good knives out there than ever before. That said cheap Chinese import copies have also flooded the industry with a lot of total crapola. If all your budget will afford is a $10 Bittman-special Dexter with a white plastic handle then fine. If you want to spend $10K of a hand welded mini Samurai? Bully for you my man. Just remember that the most important thing is to learn how to use your knife well and, most importantly, keep it sharp! Sharp! Sharp! Which, conveniently, will be the subject of the next post so stay tuned.

p.s. If you have a favorite knife please write in and let us know.

Jasper Hill January, 2008

2008-07-06T07:59:00.003-04:00

In case anyone wonders why anyone would think I would or could kill, skin and roast a rabbit at a bar while 20 beers in; this is me and the ever-hardworking, indulgent and lovely A-train's Winter vacation photo montage.

After Andy "stunned" (if stunned is how you describe getting a .223 to the dome) their last pig, Brick House, I had to stand on one of it's trotters while holding the other with my left hand so I could stab it in the heart.

Still life with snow comma blood. I was not feeling so well and the pig was feeling nothing

Dead Pig: still life with Kubota or how to bleed out a huge pig

Before we get to any of the gruesome work of gutting we spent well over an hour scalding and scraping the bristles off the whole hog with pocket knives. It was like shaving a bear with a travel razor.

Oh the thing in my hand? It's the pig wiener of the ever vexing wiener/butthole problem. You had to be there to think that it's funny, mostly because it was 5 AM and 3 degrees outside.

Andy and I had just sawed through the breast bone of piggy and were carefully separating the gut bag from the leaf lard/kidney fat on the inside of the cavity.

Almost there. I saved you from the full on entrail-porn shots. Thank me later.

To get the pig into A) more managable sized pieces and B) facilitate quicker cooling we sawed the pig in half along the spine.

Finally! One beautiful 260 lb pig.

Ready for shipping back to Brooklyn.

A Night of Testicles

2008-06-24T08:06:00.003-04:00

In case you couldn't guess, the items to the left being modeled by Matt are indeed pan-fried testicles. Radically undercooked, pan-fried beef testicles to be precise.

I'm not sure if you've ever eaten testicles before, let alone undercooked ones, but they taste like liver... and balls.

All I can do is thank God that I ate them at the 2nd annual Fleisher's Butcher Blackout and so was well on my way to being blacked out when their distinct, musky meat met my lips.

Some of you might remember last years BB which ended with Josh being tattooed with a sharpie by Aaron and Josh's brother Simon who we refer to only as "the Dude". This years was a bit more organized with slightly less wrestling, slightly more pool playing and nary a reference to Middle Earth.

What was the same as last year was me getting whupped at arm wrestling by almost everyone. It must have been the alcohol, but I keep forgetting that butchers are much stronger than cheese people. I guess I haven't been eating enough meat lately.

Anyway, other highlights of the evening (that I remember) were:

a) while I did get mercilessly beaten at arm wrestling I did no, at any point get suckered into playing pool and thus losing at yet another sport even if that sport doesn't necessarily require one to remove their shirt

b) a relatively long conversation between me and Julie about the pros and cons of being a functioning alcoholic

c) the dutch oven on the gas grill (full of either lard or tallow) that we then set about drunkenly frying almost everything in with the exception of the undercooked testicles.

Maybe next year.

A Tale of Two Cookbooks

2008-06-22T18:16:00.004-04:00

The first time I saw Stéphane Reynaud's book Pork and Sons I had an aneurysm. We were having dinner with the Fleisher's crew at Elephant, the pig forward restaurant across the street from the shop.

The owner/cook was passing it around and in our drunken pork fugue state we seemed to agree that it was the seventh sign of the pig apocalypse.

It was perfect: the book kicks off with a pig killing in the dead of Winter, new and vintage photographs of butcher ancestors and sausage making. The first section of the recipes part of the book is dedicated to blood sausage for Christ's sake!

Anyway I got my own copy not long after we got back from our trip and proceeded to pour over it's contents. The goofy pornographic pig cartoons, the weird relations, the great recipes for pig ears! I lent it to cooks at work. I slept with it beside my bed. It was the best cookbook in the world.

And then came Terrine. Where P&S was broad, it was focused. Where P&S was homey and goofy, it was relatively polished and studio-feeling.

Then there was the premise: Where rich family history and country-ass cooking prevailed in Pork and Sons, Terrine is about putting things into molds. OK, anything into molds: vegetables, seafood, fruit, cheese... I was not pleased.

I felt like punching Reynaud right in the dick for messing with my warm feelings about him and his food! Why would he give me this stylized turd after all we've been through together?

Well, that is how I felt about it in March when Terrine pre-orders shipped. Now I've had time to live with the book. Cool down a bit and let go of my notions that I wanted expressed in his follow-up book.

The recipes, when you're not fishing for fodder to use against Stéphane, are actually very good. The concept is pretty original and all he really intended was to make a thematic book about one of the most country of country cooking items. The type of food so close to his heart: Meatloaf.

I can respect that.

Fucking Shut it: it's lo-brow Pasta Time

2008-05-21T20:08:00.005-04:00

I sank my breaking knife an inch into my forearm yesterday so I'm a bit low on blood but it seems to me that everyone needs to just calm thyselves with a little kitchen meditation.

This is something I whipped together a few weeks ago for the A-train to help Salve her nerves after a long day at the news.

I'm more than aware that saying something like deconstructed carbonara makes me eligible for a poke in the eye with the gold plated eye stabbing fork but that is essentially what this is with a little Canadian white trash stuck in the middle.

Should I rewind? Three weeks ago I taught a hog butchering class at Brooklyn Kitchen and afterwords, with a knob of burning cash in hand, I became struck by a old fashioned manual pasta roller they had for sale there that went by the name of ATLAS.

Perhaps it was Harry's infused vodka or being punch drunk from a 14 hour day of meat carving, but I imbued it with a Jesus-like weight of my personal salvation and bought it. I awoke the next morning, amazed I hadn't drunkenly left it at Fette Sau where I wrecked tumblers of George T. Stagg after the event or the Northside car I poured myself into to get home, and began to plan my first foray into home pasta making.

Ahem, I have made pasta before but I tend to think a $40 hand cranker a far cry from the $1400 electric pasta wizard we pack at Marlow. Whatever the case this is how it went:

2 cups AP flour
2 big pinches of salt
2 whole eggs

I took this and whacked it in our trusty midget food processor until it broke it and then let it rest wrapped in plastic for 30 minutes (that lets the water distribute evenly). Next I rolled it out to about about 1/4 inch, so I could jam it in the pasta machine, with a wine bottle and proceeded through the numbered settings on the machine (from 1 to 8) flouring it between every third roll through.

After that it's basically go nuts with a knife and make whatever shaped pasta you think goes with your steeze. I cut broad, coarse noodles at uneven angles, thus was the shape of my heart.

Next I put a pot of salted water on the boil cut up some lardons of bacon (1/4 pound) and made them crispy in my neglected French carbon steel egg pan ($9 on eBay) and set them aside. With the ample grease left over I slow cooked two eggs using the George from Egg method of cracking them in a hot pan, lowering the heat and covering them so the make a perfect, unblemished over-easy with all the aesthetic benefits of a sunny side egg.

I'm sure you see where we're going from here: sautéed sliced shallots and garlic and bacon tossed with the barely cooked freshed pasta (throw the pasta in, they sink, they float, they're done) and finished with a splash of pasta water, grated Canadian 4 year cheddar and a big beautiful egg.

Mash the whole thing up and eat. Man that's healing.

Why Did it Take This Long to get Free Wine?

2008-05-18T15:55:00.010-04:00

I'll level with you people: I hate people who read blogs.

Not because they're cyber-loafing desk jockeys or culture-poaching, media-vampires but because they never send us any gifts.

We've spent countless thousands of dollars on ridiculous amounts food, kitchen gear, meals at restaurants and travel to far away lands just so 200 people a day will not be bored for fifteen minutes at work.

I made a fucking proscuitto in my apartment for God's sake! We spent an entire week making all of our meals from stuff we bought at the bodega. Holy shit we've even made movies!! I'd understand if every food blogger in the world did that shit but they mostly just take pictures of stuff they made from a cookbook. Couldn't someone just phone it in and buy us some snuts off the GG Amazon wish list? Don't we deserve something? *

The answer to these questions for the last three years has been no. Somehow Jonathan Schwartz can get NPR listeners to give thousands of dollars to WNYC but we can't get someone to buy us a plastic food mill.

The drought is over!

This Thursday a strange package showed up at Marlow and Sons labeled only: Grocery Guy Folks on the UPS sticker. It was heavy and made uneven rustling sounds.

I was actually afraid it was a box full of foam packing peanuts and Black Emperor Scorpions sent to us by someone who perhaps relies on a certain someone we angered lately for their livelihood or book introduction.

To my surprise I was not greeted by vicious stings and gnashing arachnid pincers but by two expensive bottles of wine and a short note from a very nice and generous man from the winery.

It said:

"I usually tune in for the food stuff, but the 'nameless person' piece was gold (and fair). Well done. Enjoy in good health and good company."

Well, we certainly did. Thanks very much!

The labels on the bottles have been blurred to protect the thoughtful from an Inbox full of crazy emails.

*Camille, Brian and André are not included in this loathsome group of humans because they are made of solid gold bars and industrial strength black magic.

Prosciutto Therapy

2008-05-14T23:13:00.002-04:00

The A-train is a very understanding sort of lady. She's remained mostly mum through my lengthy, expensive and sometimes dangerous obsession high performance cutlery. She has simply sighed and shook her head when she came home to find that I had bought a hand crank, cast iron grain mill and was busy grinding corn to make polenta from scratch. She's even come to accept that I will, 5 days a week or more, come home smelling like meat.

However, even I thought I might have overstepped her boundaries when I came home bearing two hoof-on hams from Fleisher's Meat right before Thanksgiving almost two years ago. The plan was to turn the two hog legs with the power of salt and time into sweet delicious prosciutto-style hams.

What, you may rightly ask, made me think that our ghetto-fabulous loft was the proper facility to produce a salty pork treat that is more than a year in the making? The short answer is, of course, poor brain chemistry and bad training. The long answer is Paul Bertolli, Hugh Fernley Whittingstall and JaneGrigson. These food luminaries each wrote a book that deluded and inspired me to attempt the heights of the Charcutiers' art in the depths of East Williamsburg.
I will admit that trying to cure hams in my apartment ventures dangerously close to rubber cement-sniffing territory. In my defense it really didn't sound that hard: trim up a fresh quality ham, bury in salt and wait. I can do that, right? I thought out all the science and it seemed plausible. What wasn't plausible was showing up with the above hams the Wednesday before A-train's holiest of holidays and in the midst of her baking of countless pies.

As a brief aside, I rarely agree with the city of New York's decision to ban handguns from the five boroughs. What can I say? I'm a real peckerwood that way. However, that night I was glad that we were in full compliance with the law because I can pretty much guarantee that otherwise A-train would have shot me right in the face and then beat me with raw pork.

Alright, enough bullshit. How exactly does one make one's own apartment-style dry cured ham? Easy. Sort of.

Phase One: Salt

You'll Need

1 15-20 lb. FRESH good quality ham (Berkshire or the like) with the hock on up to and including the gambrel

8 lbs. of fine sea salt or additive-free Kosher

1/4 cup pink salt (Instacure #1)

1 Wood wine box or Plastic bus tub storage container big enough for the ham

1 ham sized wood or plastic board or lid

1 20 lb. weight (a cinder block in a plastic bag is good)

1 rolling pin, t-ball bat or equivalent

You got all that? Solid gold. Now either ask your butcher or remove yourself the piece of pelvis bone still attached to the hip socket at the meat end of the ham. It's vaguely comma-shaped and you need simply to cut closely around it and free it from the socket. Don't panic, you can't really screw this up too bad.

Next step you just need to trim the skin, fat and meat around the end of the ham until it looks, you know, hammy. What you're trying to do here is just remove some skin and fat so the salt has more contact with the meat.

Ready for this? Now take your t-ball bat and give your ham about 20 good whacks all over on each side to the soft tissue areas. Don't hit the bones as this will tend to infect the meat and don't get crazy just some nice firm whacks. Done? Now take the bat and use it like a rolling pin on the ham moving from the foot end to the socket end to squeeze out whatever blood is left inside.

Now mix up a couple of pounds of salt with your pink salt and rub this mixture into all the nooks and grannies of the ham and bone. This prevents it from going yucky on you and also keep your meat inside pink.

Done? Now line the bottom of the box you got with 3-4 inches of salt. The more the better as this will be soaking up the water removed from the ham as the salt does it's thing. Place the ham in the salt and then cover it COMPLETELY with salt so that it has at least 1 inch of snowy white covering it.

Place your lid on top and place your weight on top of that and store in the coolest place in your house. I recommend doing this during the Winter and putting in that cold drafty corner by the leaky window. Leave in this place for 25 days. Don't forget about it! After 25 days check on the ham and make sure it is firm all over. If it is not replace in the salt and leave in another 5 or so days.

Phase Two: Making Time

For this you will need an airy place like a fire escape, some cheesecloth or other light breathable cloth like a worn out cheap pillowcase and some hefty string.

First things first: before you hang it you must wash it. Wash or wipe the clinging salt off the ham and then rub it down with high acid white wine or white wine vinegar. Be thorough! This is to keep out the bad stuff.

It should look like this:

Now cover in cloth, tie up the top through the gambrel (that's the hamstring which will already be punctured by the slaughter house) with your string and hang somewhere with good ventilation and where rats or a similar beasty can't get to it. The A-train made me build a Metro-Shelf in our drafty corner to hold it and to keep it away from eye contact with her and most house guests.

What now? Wait. A long time.

How long? depends on your ham and how you want it to turn out. If you want it soft and sweet like a Parma ham you can age it 6-9 months or until it is firm but yielding to a gentle squeeze. If you want more of a Jamon Serrano you will want to hang it for a year or more until it is hard.

Variations on the curing process are covering the cut meaty face of the ham with warm lard that has been blended with rice flour and either crushed black pepper or fresh resinous herbs like thyme or rosemary.

Eventually A-train stopped worrying and learned to (sort of) love the Ham. It turned from a source of embarrassment to a point of weird pride when we had house parties and BBQs. I imagine that people, trying to remember our New Years 2006-2007, said things like " you mean the place with the animal leg by the window?" I however grew steadily more and more dubious about the ham in the corner. I suspected that it was vastly over-salted. It looked like a pig fossil. Everyday that passed I became more and more sure that it was going to taste like a tobacco flavored salt lick that would then cause it's eater to explode in a dazzle of cinders and ash like a vampire in Blade III. By the time Feaster 4 came around this April I had frankly given up. I took it to work to soak it in water for a week before smoking it for an Easter ham. It was then that I first carved through the dark ashy brown exterior and into the deep pink-red of the meat. I brought the first slice to my lips expecting the Blade III treatment and was totally surprised that it tasted like the best cured ham I had ever eaten!!

I was so impressed I carted around to my friends after work to have them taste it, just in case I had suffered some sort of delusional salt poisoning and they too thought it was very good. While the results ended up well the ham was half eaten by the time Easter rolled around but it didn't stop the attendees from previous shin-digs from, tentatively at first, eating the the ham down to the bone.

It might seem hard to believe that I hadn't learned my lesson after the pork debacle of 2006 but I eventually managed to come up with some even more gross and hair brained ideas but that's a post for another day.