The sous vide family is growing. During the NRA Show in Chicago, Polyscience unveiled their new Immersion Circulator dedicated to sous vide cooking for the professional kitchen as well as the home cook; The “SousVide Professional” You can read all about it there. It is small. It is beautiful and seems powerful with a heating capacity of 30L.
Check out this video, it is very exciting.
Lots of people are scared of the most delicious parts of any animal. I for one, love cheeks, tongue, tail, liver, brains, etc… I’ve seen online a recipe for a rolled pig’s face and really wanted to try it out. On one of my trip to Borough Market, I ordered a pig’s head at the Ginger pig butchers. I couldn’t get it for the next weekend as the pig would be slaughtered the next Monday and the head doesn’t keep well. I had to get there either on the same day or the next. I chose the latter.
I went back to the market the next Wednesday before work. The head was massive, actually bigger than I expected and no way I was able to keep it whole in my fridge, I ask the butcher to cut it in half and left back to my place with two bags with pigs hear sticking out. I stopped by my flat, left it in my fridge and went to work.
That day I came back late enough to not want to get into butchery, but remembering what the butcher told me about how the head goes off quite quickly I decided that I had to start right away.
The first step was to debone the head. Using a boning knife I set out to detach the meat from the skull. I have to say I like to butcher meat or fish, but I never done something that felt that gruesome. The part that was a bit unconfortable was to go around the eyes and around the jaw. Due to my inexperience it took me something like an hour and a half to debone the first half, but then the second side took me only 25 to 30 minutes. I guess I knew where to strike by that time.
Once the face detached from the skull, I had to clean it up. My pig was quite hairy and eating hair is not something I fancy. There’s several ways to go about removing hair, you can use a blowtorch or you can use a disposable razor or both. I did just that, first I used the razor to remove most of the long hair, then the blow torch to finish it off. It’s a weird feeling, shaving a pig. Then I rinced and scrubbed the two sides to finish cleaning it up and it was ready for the next step.
Curing and marinating. You need to get some flavour in there. On top of some cling film I covered the meat with a mixture of one part salt, half part white sugar and half part brown sugar, lemon zest, ginger, thyme, ground bayleaves, cayenne pepper and fresh garlic I rolled the both sides together in the cling film and vacuum packed it to keep the cure tight against the meat.
Now you wait. Indeed the rolled face have to cure for at least 5 days in the fridge. It a long time but you wait. It’s worth it.
Seven days later, it was time to get back to my pig, I couldn’t get to it earlier, so I left it 7 days. The next thing you have to do is to rince the cure, to do so ,I first scrubbed it under cold water, then left the meat in a large container filled with water for 24 hours, replacing the water with fresh one every so often.
The next day was cooking day. I took out the meat from the fridge, laid it skin face down on cling film, removed the skin off the tongue and cut it into cubes and spread it on the inside of the face. Then I seasoned the meat with black pepper, cayenne pepper, lemon zest, ginger and thyme and some jellified chicken stock, no salt, got that covered by the cure – When I started this whole thing I intended to do two preparations, one half rolled and cooked the other one, cured and smoked then cooked. But each half were two small to be rolled properly, so I decided the overlap the two sides and rolled them together. In hindsight, next time I will not ask for the head to be split, I will keep it whole and debone it whole. It makes easier to roll it out – Anyway, I rolled it and kept it together with butcher’s string and then rolled it in several layers of cling film with the seasoning inside and vacuum packed it.
OK. We have 7 days of curing and 24 hours of rinsing. You could cook the rolled head in simmering water for 4 to 6 hours, but because of the gentler cooking I chose to use my immersion circulator to do so. I set my Swid to 66°C for 72 hours and lived my life for the next three days.
At last after nearly 10 days, I could at last taste the fruit of my labour. Yeah right. Think again. After the cooking, I had again to wait a bit more. I removed the rolled head from the vacuum bag. It was perfectly cooked. I rolled it in a kitchen towel and tied it up with yet more butcher strings and left it to hang for 24 hours more.
The next day, that was it. I removed the kitchen towel and sliced into the meat. It was beautiful and tighly compacted, you could see the layers of pig skin, pig fat, cheek meat and tongue. I tasted it. At that moment all the work and wait seemed completelly justified and worthwhile, it was so good. Salty but not too much and deliciously piggy. As piggy as it can get. My friends are coming to my place to have dinner quite often and ate most of the things I’m cooking, but I never had such reactions as the one I had when they tasted this. And I can tell you, like most people, they weren’t very keen in eating a pig’s head in the first place.
I used the pork in different ways, as cold cut with some mustard, flash fried in a sandwish or cubed and added to pasta or bean stew. I know it takes an awful lot of time to make and I can understand that it’s not for everybody, but I can assure you that it was, for me, at least completely worth it and I’m thinking about doing it again soon.
A few weeks ago, I was in contact with DryBagSteak. It’s an American company who developed a way for the civilian cook to dry age beef at home, thus saving loads of money as store bought dry aged meat is quite expensive. I asked them if I could try their technology and they kindly accepted. I received those bag some time ago now, but didn’t find the time to get to the testing, but now is the time.
Dry aging meat is the process of aging beef in a temperature controlled environment some say up to 4 months. This develop tremendously the flavour and help tenderize the meat. The best steakhouses or restaurants in the world use this technique to serve amazingly tasty beef. You can also find this kind of meat in most high end supermarket or good butchers but there is a price to this kind of quality.
One solution is to use a crude aging technique, consisting in wrapping a piece of meat in kitchen towel and leave it in the lower part of the fridge, changing the towel everyday, replacing it by a clean, dry one. It can work, but it can go very wrong also, and given the price of a good piece of meat, you don’t want that to happen.
That’s when DryBagSteak comes in. The key behind the technology is a specially designed vacuum bag. This bag is extremely fine, so fine that it allows moisture out of the bag, but prevent bacteria and other nasty thing to get in the bag, reducing greatly the chance of wasting good meat. For more information about the specific of how it works, go to their website: DryBagSteak. I wouldn’t want to say stupid things, you can also contact Thea through the website, she is the most helpful person.
Let’s get back to my testing. I bought a piece of organic sirloin approx 1.4 Kilos worth. I have to say it’s a pretty sight. The next step was to vacuum seal the meat in one of the special bag that they kindly supplied me with. Although DryBagSteak recommend the use of a snorkel vacuum sealer that they usually provide in a pack, I wasn’t ready to shell out money for yet another vacuum machine, so I decided to try and use my La.Va 300. The problem with that is that usual channel bags are designed to let the air out using their embossed texture. The dry age bag is a smooth bag and can only be used with a snorkel or chamber vacuum sealer. I scouted the Internet looking for an answer to my problem and found a guy who used a sleeve of an embossed bag inserted at the mouth of the DryBag allowing the air to be sucked out and the bag to be sealed, this was my solution.
First thing to do is to place the piece of meat in the bag, DryBagSteak recommend to snug it out in a corner for optimum contact, it’s what I did. Depending of the size of the piece of meat you’ll need to trim the bag to allow only 4 inches of space between the meat and the mouth of the bag.
Then, for the vacuum cheat. I cut a 4 inches sleeve out of one of my La.Va. embossed Bag, which by the way was a perfect fit for the DryBag, and placed it at the opening of the DryBag leaving an inch or so sticking out. I stuck the whole thing in my vacuum machine and sealed the whole thing. I have to say I had to do it three times before I got a proper vacuum and seal, so I would recommend the snorkel vacuum sealer to anyone serious about aging beef at home with this technique.
At that point it is wise to leave the bag for a couple of minute and check on the seal to make sure that no air is still present in the bag and that the steak is in snug contact with the bag. I did so and it was perfect.
Last step, place the bag in the bottom of your fridge ensuring air circulation above and bellow. I realised at that point that my fridge has glass shelves not wire. It was a bummer, but I couldn’t let that being a problem. The solution was an oven rack that luckily fit perfectly in the fridge. I placed the meat on that makeshift shelf.
Now it’s the waiting game. I’m going to leave the meat in the fridge for the next 21 days, I will take pictures every other day to show the evolution of the aging process. I will post some from time to time and I will write again at the end of the 21 days, when I’ll open the bag, cook and taste the meat. I will compare it to a non dry aged piece of sirloin and let you know my finding.
English
French
Fifty four degrees