Sadly, every sire’s reign must come to an end. This happened with Barto (Sir. Bartolomeu) recently, when he started shooting blanks and none of our sows were getting pregnant. Barto is a gentleman and a calm, kind soul and we’ll miss him. The sows will miss him, too, I’m sure. To make it up to the ladies, we decided to replace our kind, forthright Barto with Sílvio. Sílvio Berlusconi is a 75% Duroc stud (thus the red hair) who is suave, slim, and up to the challenge of having five wives. (See him in the photo above, giving Mona some loving kisses?) Sílvio is Prada to Barto’s Pendleton. He is Rémy Martin to Barto’s Sparkling Cider.
What time is it at the pig pen?
It is Bunga Bunga time.

No, we don’t normally paint our sows’ hooves hot pink.

Our sow, Mona, recently started limping and acting very crabby and agitated. Usually, Mona is our calmest sow, always ready to be brushed and petted. Upon investigation, we saw that her back hooves were overgrown and one had a crack in it. A cracked hoof is bad because bacteria can enter through the crack and, at worst, cause a systemic infection. Mona’s leg wasn’t discolored but it was slightly swollen and tender to the touch (she made this abundantly clear). We called our vet and he arrived with a Dremel rotary tool and sedatives. The rotary tool was basically an electronic nail file, which we would use to file down any overgrowth on Mona’s hooves. Mona is 300 kilos (around 660 lbs) and we were pretty sure she wouldn’t let us file her hooves without some drugs. The hardest part was getting Mona to even allow the vet to touch her (she is very sensitive to new faces, even those she’s met a few times). But, after about one hour, all of her hooves were filed and her cracked hoof was slathered with antibiotic ointment and wrapped in gauze.

We had to give Mona medicine each day for about a week. And also we had to spray all of her hooves with a hardener/hoof protector. The challenge was that this hoof medicine was in a spray can, and Mona hates the sound of spraying. (My only guess is that, to her, the spray sounds like a hissing snake.) The only way to treat Mona’s hooves was to paint the medicine onto them.

Each morning I gave Mona a good brushing to calm her. (She was still jittery from the vet’s visit, and I don’t blame her. Who likes to be corralled, sedated, and then have their nails filed against their will by a strange man?) As soon as Mona rolled onto her side, I brushed her with one hand and painted her hooves with the other. If I stopped brushing, she’d get suspicious and roll over and snort at me. After about 30 minutes each morning, she was all painted and ready for the day. The medicine just happened to be hot pink, which is a great color on Mona, don’t you think?

Doing Some Pig Whispering

The Area:
The Dehesa is a pasture area and a natural forest ecosystem that covers approximately 3 million acres of Spain and Portugal. In this area, Iberian pigs graze on mushrooms, herbs, grasses, pine nuts, chestnuts, and acorns or bellotas. The area is very dry throughout the year, with low humidity and cool nights. 4 months out of the year, from approximately October to late January, is acorn season. There are three kinds of acorns in the Dehesa: encina, quejigo, and alcornque. The soil of the Dehesa is not fertile enough for traditional agriculture.

The Breed:
Over time, the Iberian pig has adapted to the Dehesa. They have longer snouts, thinner bodies, and thinner ankles than their white pig counterparts. Ibericos have flat ears that cover their eyes to shade them from the sun while they forage. Pure Ibericos have a very long, slow growth period. In order to generate larger pigs in a shorter time period, Ibericos are now crossed with Duroc Jerseys, but only a 25% cross is allowed. In Spain, pigs are weighed in arrobas. One arroba equals approximately 11.5 kilos.

The Feed:
The Cebo or fattening period begins when pigs are 11-12 months, or 80-115 kilos. Pigs then eat for 3-5 months in order to gain approximately 50 more kilos. Some pigs are fed strictly man-made feed. Others are released into pasture to eat acorns. The acorn-fed pigs become the more expensive Iberico de Bellota hams

A Spanish Bellota or Acorn

Acorns contain oleic acid, which affects the pig meat’s fat and its taste. Pigs must wander the Dehesa and exercise in order to help fat deposits distribute throughout meat and not simply accumulate on the skin layer. A pig needs to eat 9.5 kilos of encina acorns to gain 1 kilo, 18 kilos of quejigo acorns to gain 1 kilo, and/or 14 kilos of alcornque acorns to gain 1 kilo. That is a lot of acrons over a 4 month period!

Differences in Ham Curing Methods and Pigs:
French and Italian cured hams are made from “white” pigs. These are the Landresse, Large White, and Duroc breeds. White pig meat is said to be sweeter than Iberico meat. But white pigs they do not have marbled meat like Ibericos, because they do not pasture graze or eat acorns. Because there is less marbling in white pig meat, it cures faster and runs the risk of drying out during a cure. French and Italian hams are cut to resemble a chicken drumstick, removing the hoof and hip bone. Spanish hams keep hoof and hip bone in tact. This is cultural and a matter of differing styles. I personally think the French and Italian hams look much prettier than Iberico hams. But the Iberico hams sure taste amazing!

Jamon from the Jabugo region of Spain

Jamonero in Madrid

We arrived in Madrid a little groggy, but resolved to stay awake in an effort to trick our jet lag. We accomplished this trickery by eating. And drinking. We went to Spain to gain an in-depth understanding of cured hams. So our first meal in Madrid was, you guessed it, jamon.

Hams are cured all over the world using slightly different methods. The French have Bayonne hams. The Italians have Prosciutto de Parma, Toscano, and Jambon de Bosses. In Portugal there is Jamon de Barrancos, which is very similar to Spain’s Jamon Iberico. In Spain there are several kinds of cured hams. The Iberico de Cebo (made from an Iberian pig fed man-made feed all of its life), Iberico de Recebo (made from an Iberian pig fed a combination of man-made feed and wild pasture during ts last months) and Iberico de Bellota (made from an Iberian pig finished exclusively with pasture grazing). There are also Spanish hams made from white (not Iberian) pigs that are called Jamon de Teruel, Trevelez, and Serrano depending on their area of origin.

We went to a great market in Madrid’s downtown and had our first sample of Jamon Iberico de Bellota. We learned that good Jamon should be thinly sliced and served minutes after slicing. It should always be served at room temperature, so that the fat melts in your mouth. Speaking of fat, it should be marbled throughout the ham’s meat—this is a sign that the pig is a true black-hoofed Iberian breed. The ham should be moist, never rubbery or stringy. And the flavors should be strong and nutty. (Much stronger than Italian prosciutto.) The best Jamon needs no seasoning, no side dishes, no dressings. Nor is it used as an accessory to a dish—it is not wrapped around chicken or scattered on pizzas. The best Jamon is served all by itself, and is eaten with your hands. It’s amazing food. And boy, did we eat a lot of it. (My pants barely buttoned by the end of our trip.)

Our first dinner

We visited factories, pig farms, butchers, bodegas, you name it. I even got to try my hand at slicing a Jamon, which is no easy task. (For events and parties, Spaniards hire professional slicers. There is even a ham slicing institute in Guijuelo, one of Spain’s ham capitals.) But I’m getting ahead of myself. More about all of that in the next few posts.

We are headed to Spain for 15 days to immerse ourselves in all things Jamon. Jamon is salt-cured ham. It sounds simple, but to produce a flavorful ham cured only in salt and essentially eaten raw takes time and practice. The Spanish have been curing hams for centuries. Their process depends upon the right breed of pig fed on right kinds of foods. It also depends upon patience.

On our farm we have pigs and plenty of patience. We also have questions about curing hams. Many of them. And who better to answer these questions than the masters themselves, the Spanish jamoneiros. During our first days in Spain, our guide will be an expert named Bosco (the brother-in-law of a friend) who will take us to ham-producing regions like Huelva, Jabugo, and Salamanca. Below is a map of traditional Jamon-producing regions.

Our hopes for the trip are high. We’d like to see some acorn-fed Iberico pigs. We’d like to unravel the mystery of mold: what kinds are good? What kinds of mold are dangerous or hallucinogens or both? We’d like to understand what makes the shoulder cure differently from the leg. We’d like to see a pig “sacrifice” as the Spanish call it. And we’d like to eat some great ham.

Since we are on a quest (hopefully not a quixotic one), I hope to meet one of my new idols in the food world, a Spanish farmer named Eduardo Sousa. He raises geese and creates humane foie-gras. He lives for his geese, he listens to them, he cares for them and loves them. And in honor of his geese he creates great food. Here’s a TED video where Chef Dan Barber talks about Sousa.

I probably won’t post while we are away, but there will be many posts when we return from our Jamon quest.

Agora em Português:
Estamos indo para a Espanha por 15 dias para mergulhar em todas as coisas relacionadas a Jamon. Jamon é presunto curado no sal. Parece simples, mas para produzir um bom presunto curado apenas com sal e comido cru, leva tempo e prática. Os espanhóis tem curado presuntos para séculos. Seu processo depende da raça do porco e a sua alimentção. Também depende de sal e paciência.

Nós também temos porcos e muita paciência. E, alem disso, temos muitas perguntas. E quem seria melhor para responder a estas perguntas de que os próprios mestres (chamados jamoneiros em espanhol). Durante nossos primeiros dias em Espanha, nosso guia será um mestre chamado Bosco (o cunhado de um amigo) que nos levará para as regiões produtoras como Huelva, Jabugo e Salamanca. Abaixo está um mapa de regiões produtoras de Jamon na Espanha.

Nossas esperanças para a viagem são grandes. Nós gostaríamos de ver alguns suínos alimentados com bolota Iberico. Nós gostaríamos de descobrir o mistério do fungo: que tipos são bons? Que tipos de fungos são perigosas ou alucinógenos? Gostaríamos de entender o que faz a pá cura de forma diferente do pernil. E nós gostaríamos de comer presunto, claro!

Quando estamos em nossa busca espero encontrar um dos meus ídolos no mundo gastronomico, um fazendeiro espanhol chamado Eduardo Sousa. Ele cria gansos e faz foie-gras. Ele vive por seus gansos. E, em homenagem ao seu gansos, Sr. Sousa cria comida boa e saudavel. Aqui está um vídeo onde o chef americano Dan Barber fala de Sousa.

Eu provavelmente não vou escrever no blog quando estamos na Espanha, mas escreverá muitos posts quando voltamos da nossa busca Jamonica!

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.

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.

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.)

These past couple weeks we’ve set out to make lard. In part because we want to be more sustainable and have lots of beautiful pig fat we’d like to use. Chef Rick Bayless calls lard “the voluptuous fat,” and says it rounds out food’s flavors. The only way to test the truth of this was to make my own lard.

What is lard, exactly? It is rendered pig fat. It used to be North America’s primary fat source until the 1950’s, when butter and margarine took over. Apparently in the 1950’s, doctors began to associate saturated animal fats with high cholesterol levels, giving lard a bad reputation. But this reputation is undeserved.

Good, pure lard is nearly 100 % fat. Butter is 81% fat and 19% other stuff (water, solids, yellow coloring, salt). According to a New York Times article on lard from October 2000, lard has less saturated fat than butter. “According to the Agriculture Department Nutrition Database, lard is composed of 42% saturated fat (which may increase cholesterol levels in the blood) and 54% unsaturated fat (which may decrease cholesterol in the blood). By comparison, butter is 43% saturated fat and 30% unsaturated…” Lard is not a villainous fat at all. But like any fat, is not bad for you as long as it’s used in small quantities.

So, why not render some lard? I read a book about farm life a few years ago when I was still living in the US, and the author was extremely earnest and energetic, to the point of being self-righteous. In one chapter, she scolded modern mothers for not making fresh mozzarella for their families. “It’s easy!” she said, and proceeded to list about two dozen ingredients and tools needed for such an “easy task.” At this point, I threw the book down. Making lard is probably unrealistic for most people. But if you have the time, some good pig fat, and a cast iron pot, it’s worth a try.

Pure pig back fat--should be white, thick, odorless, and look a little like fish.

Cubed back fat

Here’s what I needed to make lard:
3 kilos of pig’s back fat, cut into cubes
1 large cast iron pot
Water
A large metal strainer
Cheese cloth
A rectangular roasting pan

1. First, cut the pig fat into 1-inch sized (or smaller) cubes. The smaller the cubes, the faster they will melt.

2. Place the cubes in a large, cast iron or ceramic pot. Put 1/3 cup water for every 450g of lard. And please make sure your pot is large enough to hold all of the melted lard! You do not want an overflowing pot here. If in doubt, render less lard.

3. Place the pot in an oven set at 200 degrees F. After 30 minutes, stir the lard. After this, check your lard every 45 minutes or so and stir it with a long metal or wooden spoon. Be careful, this stuff is hot. My fat bits took about 4 hours to melt. The fat bits will never melt completely; they will turn golden and crispy. These are called cracklings. If you leave the lard in the oven too long, the cracklings will turn the liquid fat yellow and give it a bacon flavor. If you are using lard for Mexican food, this is exactly what you want. If, however, you want to use your lard to fry regular foods, make pie crusts, or bake, then you want the lard very white and practically odorless and flavorless. This means you must take the liguid out of the oven before the cracklings get really golden. My first batch came out better (clearer) than the second because I took it out earlier, even though the cracklings looked underdone. They weren’t.

Cracklings floating on rendered lard.

Cracklings after being strained and squeezed.

When it’s time to remove the lard from the oven, please be careful. This is hot oil—like, the kind of stuff Medieval people used to throw off castle walls to maim (and kill) their enemies. Don’t get Medieval with your lard.

I like a little held with this next step—someone sensible (as opposed to air-headed) and strong to hold either the strainer or to pour the lard. Line your metal strainer (I actually used a metal vegetable washer) with cheese cloth and set it on your roasting pan. Then pour the lard over the cloth-lined strainer. Once it’s poured, carefully use a spoon squeeze the cracklings against the cloth to get more fat out of them. Discard the cracklings (or eat tem if you want; whatever gives you a thrill.) Let the lard get to room temperature, then set it in the refrigerator. By the next day, it should be a solid snow-white block. You can scoop the lard from his block into small plastic containers, or cut the lard into blocks and wrap them in parchment paper and cling warp. Lard keeps for one year in the freezer and several months in the refrigerator. After the lard is made, what can you do with it? Well, I’ve made some really good stuff with my homemade lard. I’ll show you what, exactly, in the next few posts.

Rendered and strained-it looks quite yellow but will turn white as it cools.

Lard, the morning after.