This Sustainable House

Posts Tagged ‘Kitchen’

Below is the week 3 video of the ongoing TSH Aquaponics Video Series. This week we are just checking on the growth of the plants, as well as checking out the new gravel grow bed.

Week 2′s video blog looks at the ongoing development of the DWC as well as a first view of the new fish tank arrangement.

Enjoy!

One of the activities that I throughly enjoy is preserving. Be that storing peaches in light syrup, making an apricot jam (fantastic with a few vanilla beans) or brewing up a stunning batch of chutney. Preserving is a great way to store away the seasons excesses, and to impress visitors with their “take home” packs.

However there is a whole branch of preserving that I haven’t really ventured into, that of charcuterie or preserving of meats. Charcuterie originally referred to the production of pork products such as sausages, bacon & ham. However a more modern meaning is the production of meat products from any sort of animal.

Of course charcuterie isn’t just preserving, after all fresh pork sausages certainly qualify, however many of the products that are produced do in fact have a preserving effect… think hung salamis or legs of ham.

I decided to dip my toes into the water, so to speak, with producing my own bacon. Bacon was chosen as a starting point as it is one of those iconic meats imbued with so much flavor and memory. In fact, when I was a vegetarian (many moons ago) it was bacon that I truly missed not fillet steak. Also, bacon is a fairly easy meat to prepare requiring little specialized equipment or ingredients.

To make bacon all you need to do is coat pork (traditionally belly or loin) in a curing mixture allowing this mixture to draw out the excess moisture which could cause the meat to rot. This can then be sliced as it is, it’s called green bacon at this stage (Dr Seuss would be proud), or you can smoke it to add additional flavor.

The curing mix that I am using as 2kg pickling salt (don’t use table salt which has iodine added), 200g dark brown sugar, and ~1 tablespoon freshly cracked pepper. These are throughly mixed together and then handfuls are rubbed over the meat paying particular attention to cover the whole surface, including all the nooks and crannies. You can add saltpeter (Sodium Nitrate) into your curing mix, though I have chosen not to add this ingredient due to the link between heated nitrates, nitrosamines and cancer.

Once this is done, place the pork in a non-reactive container in a cool place. In 24hrs pour off any accumulated liquid, re-salt, and the replace. Basically you do this each day for between 5-14 days, depending on how salty you like your bacon.

Once the curing process is completed, then soak the pork in clean water for two hours. Discard the water and soak again for another hour in fresh water. Finally, hang the side somewhere cool for 1-2 days so that a pellicle can form. The pellicle is like a skin that’ll help preserve the meat for longer and allow an “attachment” point for smoke molecules, if you go down that path.

At this stage your bacon is good to eat as green bacon. Slice it, and enjoy!!!

Update: The very first streaky bacon side (made from pork belly) was tasted today. It has a very different taste to shop bought bacon and is quite salty. This isn’t terribly surpirsing as I salted it for 8 days, so the next belly will be done for 5-6 which should lessen the salt content. The one thing that you will notice with your home made bacon though is that it doesn’t shrivel away to nothing in the pan. Apparently this has to do with the copious quantities of water that is pumped into commercially produced bacon which is then released during cooking. In this case there isn’t any water to lose so it stays about the same size as the

One of the most important permacultural principles is that every important purpose should be served by multiple elements, and each element should serve multiple purposes. By following this principle we build resilience and efficiency into our systems.

As you know, I recently brought online a new element at TSH… the incubator! One of the reasons that the incubator was built the way it was is that the size allows for multiple uses. For example, whilst the device is running to incubate the chicken eggs, at a ‘cool’ 37.5 degrees celsius, there is also room for a few other items. Over the past week the incubator has produced several kilograms of natural yoghurt, and a couple of loaves of sourdough. Wonderful!!

It would appear that the temperature is just perfect to get all those lovely little micro-organisms pumping…

A little later, when it’s not in use as an incubator, it will also produce some lovely ales… keeping that temperature just right for the yeasts.

Can you guess what my second favourite sin is?

For those of you who keep up with the TSH website, which isn’t hard given the small number of posts I put up each month, you will recall that about 3 weeks ago I decided to bring to life a sourdough starter… The Mulloonian! The starter took about a week to get going, and over the past few weeks the community has started to develop and settle in. Who needs SIMS when one has a sourdough. In fact, the Mulloonian was going so well that I encouraged it produce a ‘sprog’ so there is currently two colonies in the fridge, excluding last weeks curry, one on organic wheat flour and the other on organic spelt flour.

However the one thing I haven’t yet been able to master is turning either Mulloonian into a nice loaf of bread. Each time I have tried, and admitadley I was trying with the bread machine, it produced an edible loaf with an excellent taste, but a very heavy texture. It could be that the Mulloonian still isn’t quite ‘ripe’ but more likely is the fact that I’m not quite used to it yet.

So this weekend the goal is to practice making sourdough. I have started with a semi-leavened light wholemeal loaf (pictured below) so as to start the weekend with a win. A semi-leavened bread is a bread in which you use both your sourdough culture AND commercial high yield yeast. The advantage is that the commercial yeast gives the dough a really big boost whilst the sourdough culture still imparts a wonderfully subtle taste. It’s the ideal bread for someone who isn’t all that keen on the strong sourdoughs. The recipe that I have used was loosely based on “The Sourdough Bakers” Light Wholemeal Bread. This is a very good site, and well worth a look if you are into sourdoughs.

The next step will be to get a full sourdough bread going in which commercial yeast doesn’t add that boost. This is a little trickier, and will take longer, as there is no certainty around how the culture will behave. Think of the difference between the Mulloonian and commercial yeast as the difference between a flower pollinated in the field by the wind, and one pollinated in isolation by a scientist in rubber gloves. The latter will behave fairly predictably but goodness knows what you’ll get with the former! And that’s the key point… I need to bake with the Mulloonian so as to get to know the community, understand it, and learn how to coax it to work for me. It’s about me understanding it’s needs and treating it accordingly, rather than just applying a mindless tool to the dough.

I’ll pop up some pictures of the resulting sourdoughs… assuming that they are worth photographing!

Semi-Leaven Bread

Like a lot of people, I love sourdough bread. The complex flavours, the aromas, it’s enough to get the mouth watering just by thinking about it. Wonderful!!

However the key to a good sourdough is the starter… a colony of living breathing organisms (fungi and bacteria).There are a number of ways to create a starter such as seeding it with a commercial/existing starter, using commercial yeast to kick it off, or relying on natural yeasts/bacteria in your local environment. It is this latter approach that I have taken to create… “The Mulloonian!”

The starter is being created by mixing equal quantities of water and flour together, and then leaving the mix to ‘collect’ some local yeasts & bacteria. The mix will then need to be ‘fed’ every day for about a week. Feeding is pretty simple, basically we dump half the current mix and replace it with fresh water/flour mix.

After about a week, give or take, the mix should be good and bubbly, with a pleasant slightly sour smell. Bingo! We have starter…

Keep your starter in the fridge and feed it once a week or so. It’s pretty hard to ‘kill’ a starter unless you let it get too hot. Even starving it to death is difficult! If oc

casionally fed, then a starter can live for centuries… think of it as a family heirloom.

The TSH “Mulloonian” was kicked off earlier this evening and I’ll keep you posted on it’s developments… I feel like a father.

1/2/11 – Update – The Mulloonian burst into life this morning with some lovely bubbles appearing throughout the mix. It is also begginning to develop a little hooch, and a distinctly sour aroma… Live, Damn You! Live!!!!

7/2/11 – Update – The Mulloonian is definitely alive and breathing. It took about a week for the cultures to really get going, and now they are bubbling and boiling with that gorgeous distinctly sour smell. In addition, if you take a little taste it is so sour it’ll make your face screw up! Next step is to try our mix to make some bread…

The Mulloonian - Day 1

The Mulloonian - Day 7

Food. There’s plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it?

Because most of what we’re consuming today is not food, and how we’re consuming it — in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone — is not really eating. Instead of food, we’re consuming “edible foodlike substances” — no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.

But if real food — the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food — stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help. Yet the professionalization of eating has failed to make Americans healthier. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals.

Read the rest of this entry »