Sallygardens Smallholding

Making Time for Air Dried Hams

Sometimes when all the pork comes back from the butcher it can be quite overwhelming deciding what to do with everything. By the time you've made a years supply of various sausages and salami there's little or no energy left for much else. Something we tried with our last pigs which were butchered in February was so freeze the joints we intended to air dry. We recently defrosted them when a few rainy days arrived and so a little time indoors was well spent preparing the hams. Once they have been frozen and defrosted they only need half the curing time in the salt in comparison to fresh pork.

With our first hams we followed the River Cottage dry cure recipe but this time we tweaked it a little, changing the amount of sugar (within safe curing guidelines), juniper and bay, and adding a couple of other herbs and spices.

I suppose with each batch we will tweak the cure mix and so I begin to appreciate how mixes become guarded secrets from various parts of the world where they have centuries of experience and have tweaked to perfection!

But somehow Leitrim Ham doesn't have the same ring to it as Parma Ham or Jamon de Serrano. Anyway, not that we'd ever want to part with it by selling.

Divine Salami

A couple of months ago we began processing the meat from the two most recent weaners we raised for the table. Some of it went into Ox Runners (large intestine casings) to make our very first salami. We experimented with three recipes; plain, garlic and last but not least peppercorn, garlic & port. I was glad we had the comfort of our book which reassured us that the growth of white, blue and green furry mould was perfectly normal and indeed a very good sign.  We decided against using the preservative salpetre which keeps the meat artificially pink but also reduces the risk of botulism in air dried meats. It's something to read up on and to consider carefully before you embark on processing your own pork. Time ticked on and the salami hung tantalisingly in the wood shed to air dry.

Regular groping of the salami gives a crude indication as to when they're ready to sample. Finally, eight weeks later, the time had come to cut down the first salami. Before sampling the bounty the mould is wiped off with kitchen towel and the salami rolled in wood ash. And the moment we waited for .... sheer bliss.

Fanfare ... Launch of Sallygardens Pig Rearing e-Booklet

When we first started offering pig rearing courses to smallholders here at Sallygardens we got a steady flow of interested participants. Its been a real pleasure meeting other like minded people setting off into the world of self sufficiency and more often than not the teaching and learning has been a two way process. Many of our visitors have had expertise in other areas of interest to ourselves. Some have even kept pigs before on an intensive commercial basis and were delighted to see how things might work at the opposite end of the scale.

What I hadn't anticipated was the high level of interest expressed by people, not only from all over the country, but also from abroad. Since many folk can't travel to us for our two hour course, and at times we don't have live pigs on the smallholding, so we decided to offer an alternative in the form of an e-booklet that covers all the topics you need to start with raising weaners for the table. It's aimed at the smallholder and currently includes details of Irish agricultural law, but as requests for the booklet are received from abroad I'll be adding sections for the UK, USA and Australia.

Heres an introductory paragraph from the booklet:
Why I decided to write this booklet
We began life on our smallholding in the Spring of 2005. With no previous experience of livestock, and only a dabbling in fruit and vegetable growing, the learning curve was exponential! Hours, days, even months were spent researching everything from pigs to potatoes. Books, forums, websites and friends were, and still are, valued sources of information. As we progressed we collated all the collected knowledge in various files and boxes … this booklet is a distillation of all those nuggets of wisdom, something we wish we had found presented to us in one useful source! I hope that in these pages you will benefit from our research and save yourself hours of time, with information at your fingertips, direction to further sources and plenty of inspiration.

If you wish to buy the e-booklet please leave a comment on this post and I will contact you directly with a Paypal invoice or you can arrange to post a snail mail cheque. The e-booklet will be emailed to you on receipt of payment and costs €8 for an emailed version, or €10 for a hardcopy printout (A4 pages) plus postage.

I'm also working on similar e-booklets about goats, and another on poultry.

Sausages Galore

The pork has been collected from the butcher and has all been labelled, bagged, and relevant parts made into sausages, salami, black pudding (boudin noir) and pate. Sausage making is a bit of a marathon task so once your pigs are booked in for slaughter ensure you keep a few evenings or days free to deal with it all. Its difficult to predict when your meat can be collected. It takes anything from a day to a week for tests to be returned to the butcher, and he won't carve the carcass until then. This gives the pork time to hang, which is ideal. The meat can't be released until he receives this clearance. This can be problematic if you wish to make pate, as the liver is past its best after 48 hours. Your butcher may be able to vacuum pack it to stretch out freshness a little.

On this occasion we made a range of sausage flavours including lemon & oregano, garlic & rosemary, plain, white pepper, Toulouse, sage & onion and apple. This is the first time we did some sausage making with the children around, they really enjoyed helping out and they seemed all the more eager to taste their efforts at lunch time.

Its been our first time making our own air dried salami so fingers crossed and recipes followed diligently so as not to poison ourselves! Its certainly unbelievably satisfying to see them all hanging in the wood shed. Six weeks of waiting before we can delve in for a first taste.  We tried three flavours .... garlic, peppercorn and port. It seems from my book, but not others, that an important ingredient is the addition of acidophilus which gives the dried sausage its familiar white/green powdery coating which is in fact a  'friendly' mould. Its proliferation prevents, through competition, the growth of dangerous moulds or bacteria.

There will also be more air dried hams hanging in the wood shed, but this time around they will be a little more protected from possible interference!

Farewell Dear Pigs

Its a bitter sweet feeling when the time comes for the pigs to go to slaughter. They have already spent four months here with us, now being six months old. They have felt the sun and rain on their backs, rummaged in the undergrowth and foraged freely for earthworms and roots. Like it or not you can't help bonding with them and forming a real fondness for their gentle nature.

When the day comes its time to reflect on whether or not we are doing the right thing. I honestly address this question each time we get to this point, and each time we decide whether or not to get pigs again. I can't say that we will always choose this path, but right now we do. I have been a vegetarian in the past. and could well become one again. We certainly eat far less meat as a family since we began raising our own, probably every fourth day or so.  It seems wrong to daily trough our way through something we value so highly as if it grew on trees. When eating this meat the fact that it was very recently a living breathing creature is very much in the forefront of the mind and that knowledge means that we never waste it, its eaten with reverence and its shared with friends on special occasions.

Apart from the usual practical preparations for transport and taking the pigs to an abbatoir, theres also decisions to be made about how you wish the meat to be returned. Providing the butcher with a cutting list is essential, and it will be tailored to your own eating habits. We like to get roasting joints from each of the limbs ... two of those will be air dried hams, one will be cooked and sliced to provide picnic ham ideal for sandwiches or pasta dishes. We also request quite a bit of diced pork for stir fries, chops and plenty of ground pork for making a variety of sausage flavours. Back fat is all kept for adding to sausages, air dried sausages, black pudding and other delicacies. Even trotters, ears and tails can all be used. 'Eat everything but the oink', as they say.

Liver pate is the first delicacy to be prepared the evening we get the meat back. Sausages follow the next day. The remainder is frozen and we only salt each piece of meat as we need it.  If anybody is interested in reading our cutting list you can find it here in the Sallygardens Forum, and if you'd like to share your cutting list there too, that would be great.

Culinary Heartbreak

As you know our first ever home reared air dried ham venture was a huge success and we are still licking our lips and patting ourselves on the backs.  The joint lasted a couple of months. It weighed roughly 1500g, and comparing the cost of something similar such as prosciutto or parma at €80 a kilo, ours would have been roughly valued at €120.  Is that too cheeky, comparing our own ham to such famous delicacies?!

Having finished our first air dried ham at Christmas, we were savouring the moment of cutting into the  next culinary extravaganza with anticipation. Our mouths watered at the thought of it and one day we could hold off no longer. I tripped out to the wood barn to cut down the next ham, and shock horror ... a huge hole chewed into the side of the muslin where some blasted unidentified creature had been helping itself to the most delicious and expensive  meal in its entire life. The whole thing was a disaster, it looked like a gaping leg wound, there was nothing salvageable. I hope theres a rat, or a cat out there, suffering badly with gout after its selfish over indulgence!

We've no idea what creature was responsible. What makes it more infuriating is that it was nobodies fault but our own. When the first ham was taken down it shifted the balance, so that the second ham swung to the side of the cage and was touching the edge. This provided any creature a perfect ladder down to the food source. Next time we will be far more careful, and instead of string to suspend the joints, I will use fishing line.

But the story doesn't end there, no, there's another link in the chain ...  butterfly wings and all that. Having decided democratically that it wasn't worth eating the remains we gave it to the dog. She devoured it and, not surprisingly, was very very thirsty. That night our children came down with a particularly aggressive vomiting bug and when I went to the kitchen at 5am to collect puke buckets I noted, with due agitation, that the entire kitchen floor was flooded. After a process of eliminating other possible culprits such as burst pipes, or rising water under the house, I had to concede that it was indeed the dog (the one looking sheepish in the corner) who was responsible for the flood. She has always had a bladder of steal, but unfortunately the huge salt intake from the ham, followed by the volume of water she needed to drink to quench her thirst, all proved to be too much.  Mind you, after cleaning up the consequences of projectile vomiting bug from the girls bedroom (even had to put curtains in the wash), dog wee was an altogether more pleasant and light hearted task.

When the meat has been raised and cared for by us, and when we have seen it walk in our woods for months, and in the end been directly responsible for taking its life to sustain us, it really does ache when something like this happens and it goes to waste.  A loss is felt and a failure in terms of respect to the pig.

Air Dried Ham - Time of Truth!

We have been busy felling a few trees that were growing dangerously close to the house, which look even more threatening since we put our precious solar panels on the roof. The job entailed cutting the timber down to firewood size and storing it in the wood shed. Hanging in there are two tantalizing salt cured air drying hams. With each wheel barrow load our curiosity grew as to whether or not the meat was a success. Strictly speaking, we had decided to cut one down at Christmas and see if it had worked, or gone rotten. One of the hams is much smaller than the other, and by the end of the third day I decided to mention what we were both thinking to Dan. Sure wouldn't it be better to try the smallest one now, and if the experiment hadn't worked, then at least we wouldn't be disappointed at Christmas!

Full of excitement we cut down the smallest ham. It did smell meaty but our untrained noses couldn't tell if it was off. We tentatively opened up the three layers of muslin which was mottled with black patches of mildew. When the meat itself was revealed our excitement was deflated by further confusion. The meat did not look in the slightest bit appetizing,  instinct told me to throw it in the bin. There was even a small collection of maggots on the flesh, although they had not done much damage. The fat was waxy with black, white and pink blotches. The flesh was slimey in parts with a greenish tinge. We were fairly devastated it hadn't worked.

Before resigning it to the bin we sought out Hugh Fearnley Whittingstalls chapter on the subject. He was adamant that there would be a very distinctive and off putting smell if the meat was rotten, which wasn't noticeable on our ham. We decided to press on and so gave it a few scrub downs in apple cider vinegar .... with removal of 8 maggots and the covering slimes, the meat began to look more appetizing. I sliced off the outer flesh and oh my gosh when we saw and smelled the translucent ruby red ham inside my mouth began to water involuntarily. Yet still instinct told me not to eat it, so I just ate a tiny sliver, and Dan refrained incase he was needed to bundle me to the nearest doctor with food poisoning the following day!

24 hours later and I couldn't wait to eat more, my stomach was still intact! This time Dan also indulged and the taste experience was out of this world. Slicing wafer thin slivers of our very own home reared free range organic air dried ham was out of this world. Its an indulgence for late at night after the children have gone to bed, to savour with fine cheese and a full bodied glass of red wine, and a roaring fire. Next time we will have the confidence to air dry several hams.

Pigs Have Landed

They arrived late evening and are already happily unzipping the overgrown lawn/There was the usual squeeling blue murder when carrying the little hogs from vehicle to paddock. All weaners seem display this vocal trait the moment their little trotters leave the ground. This caused some neighbours passing on a leisurely evening stroll to promptly come to our rescue. They thought one of the family was mortally wounded!

One hour in situ, so far remaining on the inner periphery of the fence!

New Piglets Arriving Soon

Preparations are in order for the arrival of two new Gloucester Old Spot piglets later today. Theres quite a bit of excitement as we are all looking forward to having pigs on the premises again. The fear and dread factor is not hiding at the back of our minds this time as we now know what to expect (famous last words!). After our first three weaners we are changing our set up slightly, having a little bit of experience under our belts.

The biggest change will be the type of fencing we use.  We found that once the pigs had grown a protective layer of wiry hair on their bodies, the battery operated electric fencing just wasn't strong enough. So this time we have invested in a mains operated fence which gives an altogether more persuasive jolt. There will be no more testing the fence by hand with this little beauty! As long as we have enough strands close enough together and high enough to prevent pigs jumping over 'we should be alright'! Incidentally pigs can very quickly learn the timing of a fence pulse and dash through between jolts. They can also leap far higher than you might expect too. Don't be fooled by their heavy clumsy appearance, its all a trick to lull you into a false sense of security. They have the wisdom of an elephant and the dexterity of a  monkey!

For the first couple of weeks we plan to keep the piglets in our front garden. Yes you heard correctly! Our lawn is enormous, too big, and I've been thinking of ways to reduce the area that requires lawnmowing a. to reduce the impact on the environment with our ridiculously incessant petrol powered mower and b. mowing half an acre is too much like hard work! So the pigs are the first step in managing this piece of lawn ... they will clear it and turn it over as its now thoroughly overgrown. In two weeks time we will rake some wildflower and meadow seed into the soil. Next year that section of the lawn will hopefully be a symphony of colour and insect life ... and very importantly will only require cutting once or twice a year. Once cut it can be dried and used as hay for the goats.

 

Click on the meadow for advice on how to create a wildflower meadow. For Irish flower seeds try www.wildflowers.ie

Air Cured Hams

I have to admit that the thing I am most excited about in our charcuterie adventures, is the prospect of producing our very own air cured ham.  My mouth pours saliva like a fountain when I think of the delights of Parma or Seranno. To think we may have a Sallygardens version in a few months time is too much excitement to bear!

We selected two fine hams, unboned, which is a bit risky as its more likely to succumb to rot. They were cured in tubs of dry salt for five days, then wrapped in three layers of muslin (to ward off flies), tied securely with butchers string, and hung in a dry airy place. The more windy it is, the quicker the ham will dry out, but it mustn't get wet.

I often stroll past the woodshed and longingly glance in at the hanging meat. Dangling curiously in the shadows, shafts of sunlight slice through the slatted corrugated iron, and sometimes its all a bit too Blair Witch for me. How I wish I'd never watched that film!

We are planning to crack one open for Christmas ... oh the anticipation is all too much. And when we do finally cut into it, with a fine bottle of wine poised for culinary climax, perhaps after all that ... they may well have rotted. Thats the gamble. At least we will have the bottle of wine with which to drown our sorrows!