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I recently wrote a feature essay for Real Simple magazine. The essay, and some lovely farm photos by Frederic Lagrange are in the August 2010 issue.
Eu escrevi recentemente uma matéria para a revista americana Real Simple. A matéria, com belas fotos do fotógrafo Frederic Lagrange já está nas bancas dos EUA!
Actually, it is three logos; one for each of our product lines. We will use one for our coffee products, one for pork products, and one for our honey. Yaguara means “jaguar” in Tupi-Guarani, the language of the indigenous people who lived on our farm centuries ago. Since our farm is called “Valley of the Jaguar,” in honor of the big cats that roamed here only a hundred years ago, we liked the name Yaguara.
Português
Yaguara significa “Onça” em Tupi-Guarani. Por isso, é o nome que nos selecionamos para nossa linha de produtos ecológicos. Séculos atrás, onças percorriam este vale. Tribos indígenas instalaram-se nesta várzea por causa das suas terras férteis e seus nascentes de água doce. Hoje, o objetivo da Fazenda Várzea da Onça é de produzir café de qualidade e proteger o ecossistema que nos sustenta. Por praticar agricultura sustantável, a fazenda Várzea da Onça proteje não só a qualidade do nosso café como também a qualidade da vida que o envolve. Várzea da Onça é um refúgio para as mais diversas espécies de árvores e plantas nativas, orquídeas, pássaros, e anfíbios. Por preservar a natureza, a terra, e os nossos recursos, estamos promovendo sustentabilidade ambiental e ecológica.
Embrace the sausage. This is what Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn say in their curing, salting, smoking, and sausage-making bible, Charcuterie.
A few months ago we hosted a sausage-making workshop organized by SENNAR, an education program sponsored by the Brazilian government. Everyone participated—me, James, my sister Tatiana, all of our employees, and Oscar. (He’s a chef in a dog’s body.) Before moving to the farm, James and I also took a great sausage-making class at Chicago’s Kendall College.
Unruly class member
Class disciplinarian
All you need to make sausage at home is an electric mixer with a meat grinder attachment (most Kitchen-Aid’s have this), some hog casings, and tool to stuff or encase the sausage. Actually, you don’t even have to encase the sausage; you can simply mold the ground sausage meat into patties or fry it in a pan to add to pizza and pastas.
Hog casings are pig’s intestines that have been washed and treated. The membrane encasing sausage meat is intestine, or a synthetic collagen made to resemble intestine. You can buy real or synthetic casings at The Sausage Maker, an amazing online store for all of your sausage needs. (My former catalog of choice used to be Anthropologie. Now I spend my free time drooling over curing salts and sausage prickers.)
Back to casings—we get ours from our pigs, which we kill and butcher on our property. First, we wash the intestines thoroughly with water, then turn them inside out with a bamboo rod and wash them again. After about seven to ten washes, we soak the intestines in water and limejuice. Why all of this fastidious washing? Because the intestines run from the stomach to the anus and are filled with digested materials on their way out of our bodies. (In other words, intestines are filled with poop.)
Then we take a small plastic spatula with rounded edges and scrape the cleaned intestines. We learned this scraping technique at our SENNAR workshop. It’s miraculous! Basically, the plastic spatula scrapes away the intestines’ lining, making them translucent and as thin as rubber bands. After scraping, we wash them again, inside and out. Now they are ready to use for sausage. I am amazed by how fine and light yet incredibly strong casings are. Their strength allows casings to hold in all of a sausage’s delicious fattiness, and gives the eater that amazing snap when biting into a sausage.
In homage to our workshop, here’s a great recipe for fresh Italian sausage. What is a “fresh” sausage? It’s one that is cooked and eaten hot. It is not cured or smoked, and has no curing salts in its ingredients.
Fresh Italian sausage
4 lbs lean pork butt, cubed. (The butt is not the pig’s rear end but its shoulder. The shoulder has lots of nice marbling, which is great for sausage.)
1 lb pork fat, cubed
5 tsp coarse Kosher salt
5 tsp fresh black pepper coarsely ground
2 cloves garlic, finely minced
2.5 tsp fennel seed (Yum. This adds such dimension to the sausage)
1 tsp anise seed
Crushed red pepper flakes to taste
Medium hog casings, if making links.
First, it is imperative to KEEP YOUR MEAT COLD during the entire sausage-making process. Sausage that gets too warm will “break,” meaning the fat and protein will separate from each other when cooked, and you’ll get a mealy or crumbly texture to your cooked sausage. You want a smooth but firm texture. You want your sausage to glide not crumble! So I recommend cutting up the cubes of meat and fat, freezing it, then defrosting it just a little bit. You can put it through your grinder nearly frozen, and it comes out much better than at room temperature.
First, mix the spices together in a bowl. In your meat grinder, grind the chunks of nearly frozen meat and fat together using a coarse grinding disk.
Use your mixer (with either the palette or bread kneading attachment—not the whisk) to mix the ground meat and the spices. Ideally, this mixture should become a sticky ball, where the fats, meat, and seasonings make a “primary bind” as the charcuterie boys call it. The more you knead your meat mixture, the more the meat’s protein (called myosin) develops, and the stickier it becomes.
OK, so you have your perfect sticky ball of meat. Take a little, golf ball sized round, make a patty, and fry it on the stove. Eat it. Enjoy it. Have some wine. This is your taste test, to make sure your seasoning is on point. Before you stuff a sausage, it’s best to test it. This way, you can add more seasoning (or more meat if it’s too salty) before you go through the trouble of stuffing.
Stuffing:
The same mixer you used to grind the meat also comes with a plastic stuffer attachment. Wet your casings, slide them on to the nozzle, then turn on your machine and stuff. When your casings are filled, twist them or tie them into links. Then prick these links with a needle, knife tip, or sausage pricker to get out air pockets.
Listen, I’m not going to lie: stuffing is hard. The casings are slippery. The meat squirts out in uneven clumps. It takes practice. My first links alternated between fat little maki rolls and weirdly pencil-like things. Oh, well. They all tasted good.
Refrigerate your fresh sausage and use it within 3 days. Or, as our Kendall College teacher said, immediately if you are using store-ground meat. (It is not as sanitary as grinding your own.) Or you can wrap sausages individually and freeze.
Here’s an inspirational little quote, to get you excited about your sticky balls:
“Sausage involves craftsmanship in the kitchen, care from the cook, and devotion from the eater. There may be no finer package of protein, fat, and seasonings than that which resides within the transparent but resilient hog casing—and none more humble.”
–Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn.
It is June and the coffee cherries are beginning to ripen. This is early for us–usually the cherries ripen in early August–so the coffee harvest will begin this week. We have six people coming to pick the ripe coffee cherries tomorrow. Hopefully we will have more people helping us with the harvest next week.
É Junho, e os grãos de café estão começando a amadurecer. Geralmente as cerejas amadurecem no início de agosto. Mas em 2010, a colheita do café vai começar esta semana. Temos seis pessoas que vêm para catar o café maduro amanhã. Esperamos ter mais pessoas nos ajudando com a colheita na próxima semana.
Is the only thing that helps me through a tough day.
This is Oscar receiving his daily massage from Olga, his Russian masseuse.
Mona gave birth to 16 little ones, which was more than any of us expected. But many have died. (Three were stillborn, four died soon after birth from weakness, and Mona sat on one.) Now we are left with 8 and are trying hard to keep them healthy. We’ve learned that large births are sometimes more a curse than a blessing. Mona has only 14 teats, so there isn’t enough milk for more piglets than that. But hopefully these 8 will stay strong.
We’re on high alert tonight. Our lovely (and very pregnant) sow Mona will probably give birth in the next 12 hours. I’ve whispered in her ear to please try to push those piglets out sooner (how about 7 PM?) rather than later. But Mother Nature doesn’t care about my bedtime, and the piglets will arrive whenever they please.
How do we know that it’s Mona’s time? First, she lost her appetite. Next, she started breathing heavily. Milk began to leak from her teats today and (read no further if you’re squeamish–this is a farm blog, folks!) her vulva is really swollen and red. (The picture above says it all, really.) We’ll check her periodically to see if her water has broken. If it has, that means piglets are on the way. Births can last anywhere from 1-5 hours. Sometimes there’s a long wait between piglets, and sometimes they slide out one after the other. I’ll let you know how Mona’s birth goes. Hopefully we’ll have 8-12 new additions by morning.
Maria, Tamires, Frederic, James, me & Yacob on the farm
In preparation for an essay I wrote for an upcoming edition of Real Simple Magazine, photographer Frédéric Lagrange and his assistant Yacob Vincent visited the farm to shoot some photos of all of us. It was a great shoot, and the dogs (especially Lorenzo) were top-notch models. Lorenzo (who literally trembles and then hides in the bushes when we tell him it’s bath time) decided to swim in our pond (???!!!) for Frédéric. He performed some water ballet, waving his paws and flicking his tail, as if this kind of thing was perfectly normal.
Many thanks to Real Simple, Fréderic, and Yacob for the photos. I hope they turn out well!
May means the beginning of winter here, and winter means rain. We’ve gotten some good rainfall lately and have started to plant coffee seedlings in open areas of the farm. Our coffee is Arabica typica, a variety that grows long and spindly and likes shade. It also takes five years for a seedling to mature a produce coffee cherries. We have two methods of getting coffee seedlings:
1) Planting coffee beans in our nursery
2) Taking young seedlings that naturally grow under adult trees from the ground and planting them in other areas.
Lorenzo managing the 2010 planting
We’ve planted 9,948 coffee seedlings so far and hope to plant more next week. After we plant coffee, we’ll plant more hardwood trees in open areas. We’ve got hundreds of tree seedlings in our nursery ranging from Jatobá to Brazil Nut trees. (I’ll write more about the Brazil Nut trees in a separate post; this is the first year we’ve attempted to propogate them from seed, and they are amazing little things!)
Português
Maio é início do inverno aqui, e o inverno significa chuva. Começamos a plantar mudas de café em áreas abertas da fazenda. Nosso café é arábica typica, uma variedade que cresce longa e fina e gosta de sombra. Leva cinco anos para um pé de café produzir cerejas. Temos dois métodos de obter mudas de café:
1) Plantação de café em nosso viveiro.
2) Arrancando mudas jovens que crescem naturalmente de baixo de árvores adultas.
Nós já plantamos 9.948 mudas de café e espero poder plantar mais na próxima semana. Depois que plantar café, vamos plantar mais árvores em áreas abertas. Nós temos centenas de mudas de árvores em nosso viveiro, variedades como Jatobá, Castanha do Pará, e Tamboril. (Vou escrever mais sobre Castanha de Pará em outro post. Este é o primeiro ano que tentamos propagá-los a partir de sementes, e eles são incríveis!)
Considering the Snail
by Thom Gunn
The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth’s dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,
pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail’s fury? All
I think is that if later
I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.
Rich Chocolate Cake made with Lard
I found this recipe in a 2000 New York Times article. It’s probably the best chocolate cake I’ve ever had–rich, moist, and not too sweet. If you use good lard (not burnt or with a piggy flavor) you’ll never be able to tell this cake was made with pig fat and not butter. We ate the cake so fast, I didn’t have time to take a decent picture!
2 egg yolks
6 tablespoons lard
1 cup brown sugar
4 oz unsweetened chocolate
1 egg white
1.5 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla
Beat egg yolks. In another bowl, cream lard with sugar. Add yolks until smooth. Melt the chocolate in a banho maria (hot water bath) and let it cool to room temperature. Stir your room temperature chocolate into the lard-egg yolk-sugar mixture. In another bowl, beat the egg white until it’s frothy. Gently fold the egg white into the batter.
Mix the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt) together. Add half the dry ingredients into the wet mixture. Then beat gently while pouring in half of the milk and vanilla. Repeat with the other half of the dry ingredients, milk, and vanilla.
Prepare a cake pan with butter and flour. Pour the cake batter into prepared pan. Bake at 350 degrees checking every 20 minutes or so, until a toothpick comes out clean from the cake’s center. While you’re waiting for the cake to bake, lick the leftover batter from your spatula and mixing whisks. (My mom says that a good cook doesn’t lick, but I can’t help myself.)
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