New Soap, New Giveaway!

Help me celebrate my newest soap creation---and win some for yourself!

My new Farmstead Deluxe Cream Soap is very special, not only because it is so very creamy and luxurious, but also because it is so pure and natural.  It features:

• Icelandic sheep's milk:  hand milked (by me) from my own flock of Icelandic sheep
• Guernsey cream:  hand milked and hand skimmed (by me) from my own Guernsey cow
• Home-rendered lard:  hand cut, rendered, and filtered (by me) from my own pastured heritage breed pigs.

The only ingredients in the soap that were not raised and hand-processed right here on the farm are the lye and the pure essential oils that give the soap it's bright, crisp lemon-herb scent.

Would you like to win some of this luscious soap for yourself?  If you enter my holiday giveaway, you'll have at least seven chances to win a variety pack of my hand made soaps, including:

• 1 bar of the Farmstead Deluxe Cream Soap
• 1 bar of the Amber Scented Sheep's Milk Soap
• 1 bar of the Unscented Pure Castile Soap

To enter, you must:

1. "Like" (or already have liked) our Ingleside Farm Facebook page
2. Get a friend to also "Like" our Facebook page.
3. Leave a comment here on this blog post telling me YOUR NAME as well as YOUR FRIEND'S NAME.  (Make sure to include your email address so I can contact you if you win.)

You will get one entry for each friend who "Likes"our Facebook page thanks to your recommendation.  There is no limit to how many entries you can earn this way.  Your friend(s) will also be automatically entered in the giveaway. 

Seven winners will be chosen randomly from all the entries, one winner per day, for the entire week of December 18 through 24.  Winners will be notified by email and announced here on this blog.

Let the giveaway begin!

WINNERS:

December 18:  Barbara Beard
December 19:  Kristi Elmore
December 20:  Christian Burchett
December 21:  Judy Russi
December 22:  Sarah Hart
December 23:  Jenny Brown
December 24:  Cyndi Howard

Making Guanciale

I'm not Italian, I don't consider myself a gourmet cook, and until a few weeks ago I wouldn't have been able to pronounce "guanciale" much less known what the word meant.  So why am I suddenly making 17+ lbs. of the stuff?

We butchered a pig recently, and I'm suddenly faced with the task of learning how to turn all the different piggy parts into different kinds of food.  I've been rendering lard, curing bacon, cooking pork chops and eating sausage.  But why guanciale?

Guanciale is the Italian name for pig's jowls that have been cured and dried.  Supposedly, it's a bit similar to bacon or pancetta.  I wouldn't know.  I've never tasted the stuff.

But wait... jowls, you say?  Who does jowls better than a Guinea hog?  And who had bigger jowls than the obese hog we just butchered?  I mean really---look at the size of those things!

 

I had read that the jowls can be cured just like bacon, but frankly, when I realized that this hog produced 54 lbs. of ACTUAL bacon meat, I figured why make more?  If the jowls are considered to be a delicacy when prepared this other way, then why not take advantage of the fact that I now had 17.5 lbs. of jowl meat?

So, as usual, it was off to the internet to do research!  Here are some of the sites I looked at:

Guanciale
Guanciale:  Italian-Style Jowl Bacon
Home Cure Guanciale Is Finished
The Art of the Cure
Bucatini all' Amatriciana, Making Guanciale, and Charcutepalooza!
Making Guanciale
Homemade Guanciale

Most of the recipes I found online called for 2 lbs. of jowl meat.  I had more than 17 lbs., so obviously I had to recalculate the ingredients.


Most of the recipes I found suggested that you trim the jowls into neat rectangles and make a point to cut out the salivary glands.  Because I was doing this on the day we got the whole pig back from the butcher, I was also curing 54 lbs. of bacon, rendering 22 lbs. of leaf lard, and finding room in the freezer for the other 200 lbs. of meat and backfat.  So trimming the jowls really didn't seem like a priority.

I washed the jowls thoroughly and cut them into chunks that would fit into the containers I had.

Then I rubbed them all over with the cure, closed the containers, and put them in the refrigerator.

Here's the recipe I used:

17.5 lbs. fresh Guinea hog jowl meat.
4.5 cups coarse kosher salt
4.5 cups sugar
1/4 cup whole black peppercorns
20 bay leaves, crushed.
1 heaping TB thyme (ground)

They stayed in the refrigerator for 9 days.  On day 3, I turned them over and rubbed a little more salt on them, but other than that I left them alone.

On day 9, I took the chunks of cured meat out of their containers, rinsed them thoroughly, and dried them with paper towels.

I cut a length of butcher's twine (which I happened to already have on hand because it's what I used to make a new drive band for my spinning wheel a few weeks ago).  Then I poked a hole through the thick part of the meat with a skewer, and used the skewer to push the string through the hole.

After curing, the meat is supposed to hang in a cool, dark place for a month.  Our old house is drafty and hard to heat, so in the winter we close off a few of the rooms and don't bother heating them.  We decided that hanging the meat in our unheated dining room sounded like a more appetizing idea than hanging them down in our tiny, dank, dirt-floored basement.

We happened to have a portable rack for hanging clothes on, so I hung the chunks of meat from that.  I put a lid from a large plastic storage bin underneath to catch any drippings.  And I closed the drapes to keep the room as dark as possible.

Now the task is to wait for a month and see what happens!

Curing Bacon

Mmm... bacon!  What could be better?  How about home-cured, nitrite-free bacon from a pastured, heritage breed of hog?

 The extra-large Guinea hog we just butchered provided us with a whopping 54 lbs. of bacon.  Our butcher doesn't include curing the bacon or hams as part of his service, so I turned to the internet to teach me how to cure it myself.

After studying lots of pages like these:
Home Cured Bacon
How to Make, Cure, and Smoke Homemade Bacon
Home Cured Bacon Recipe
Curing Your Own Bacon
Making Your Own Bacon:  It's Easy and Satisfying

I finally felt ready to try it on my own.  I didn't use any of the recipes I found online exactly, but adapted them to suit my preferences and my available ingredients.  In particular, I decided to skip the nitrates and nitrites by avoiding the pink curing salts called for in most recipes.  Because of that, my bacon won't be pink like store bought bacon, but since those additives have questionable food safety, I think it's worth it to avoid adding them if I don't have to.

I started with 2 BIG slabs of fresh bacon meat, each weighing about 27 lbs.

I had purchased a supply of large, flat Rubbermaid containers to contain the bacon while it was curing, so the first thing I had to do was cut the big slabs of meat into smaller slabs that would fit in my containers.  You can also use large Ziploc bags, but since I had so much bacon to cure at once I figured I'd use containers that stack easily without sliding off.

Here are my smaller slabs, cut up and ready to be cured.

Next, I prepared the curing mixes.  I used two different recipes---one more complex and one more simple---just in case I ended up not liking one of them.  I didn't want to end up with 54 lbs. of badly flavored bacon!

Bacon Recipe #1

27 lbs. fresh Guinea hog bacon meat
2.5 cups coarse kosher salt
1 cup smoked sea salt flakes
1.25 cups brown sugar
1.25 cups maple syrup
1.25 cups apple cider
1 cup juniper berries
1/2 cup coarse black pepper
40 bay leaves, crumbled
0.25 cups minced garlic
3 TB thyme
3 TB nutmeg

Bacon Recipe #2


27 lbs. fresh Guinea hog bacon meat
4 cups coarse kosher salt
2 cups brown sugar
1.5 cups maple syrup
0.25 cup whole black peppercorns
1 TB thyme

Here's a photo of Recipe #1, all ready to use:

I rubbed this mixture liberally all over the slabs of meat and placed them in their containers.

I put the covers on the containers and stacked them in the refrigerator, where they stayed for 8 days.  About halfway through the curing process, I took the meat out of each container, turned it over, and rubbed a little extra salt on, just to be on the safe side.  At that point, the meat was already releasing its liquids and starting to get firm and fragrant with the spices.

On day 8, I took the meat out of the refrigerator, rinsed each piece thoroughly with water, and patted it dry with paper towels.  It had quite a firm texture by then.

Here's how the meat looked when it came out of the fridge:

Here's what the top (fatty) side of the meat looked like after it was rinsed:

And here's what the bottom side looked like after it was rinsed:

I preheated the oven to 200 degrees F, put a cookie sheet on the lowest oven rack to catch any drippings, and arranged the slabs of cured bacon on the upper two racks.  I roasted them like that for about 2.5 hours, or until the internal temperature of the meat reached 150 degrees.

Because I had such a large quantity of bacon, I could only fit a portion of it in the oven at a time, so the roasting stage had to be repeated several times to give each slab of meat a turn.

After the roasting, the slabs of bacon rested in a pan on the counter top until they returned to room temperature.

 

Then with a sharp knife, I cut them into slices as thin as I could.  This would be easier with a meat slicer, but a knife will do, if you don't mind having your bacon thick cut.

The hog this bacon is from was extremely obese.  The fat ratio in this bacon is very, very high, but it's still tasty.

Here's what the sliced bacon looked like before frying:

And here is the end result:

The taste test results?

Recipe #1 tastes amazing, but VERY strongly flavored and very salty.  I had originally planned for that amount of cure to be spread over twice as much meat, but it just wouldn't spread that far (plus I was nervous about having too little salt and the meat rotting instead of curing.  Next time I'll trust the process better, and use less cure for the amount of meat).  I tried soaking one slab of this bacon in several changes of water for an hour to see if that would decrease the saltiness, but it didn't help all that much.  This batch of bacon will be best served in small doses where its big flavor can have the greatest impact without being overwhelming.  I'm looking forward to it in pasta, on salads, in soups.

Recipe #2 is milder and has a flavor more like breakfast type bacon.  You can taste the maple syrup, but not too strongly.

Both batches of bacon taste fantastic, and the Guinea hog meat has a richness of flavor and texture that bursts in your mouth like no store bought bacon ever has.  Because of that exceptional richness and the exceptionally high percentage of fat in the meat from this particular pig, I find that I am fully satiated by smaller portion sizes than usual.

After the taste tests, I sliced all the bacon into slices, arranged the slices in Ziploc bags, and stored them in the freezer.  That's a lot of bacon!

Guinea Hog Pork Chops

Tonight we tried some Guinea hog pork chops for the first time.  I dredged them with seasoned flour, pan-fried them in home-rendered lard, and served them with potatoes, pan gravy, and asparagus.

The meat, as expected, was excellent.  The real surprise, though, was what an enormous difference it made to fry the chops in lard instead of our usual olive oil.  The chops were tender inside with a delicious crispy surface, and even after I fried 3 pan-fulls of chops in succession, there was absolutely no scorching or sticking to the pan, which made it easy to make delicious pan gravy in a matter of moments.

Now that I've tried it, I would definitely recommend frying in lard!

Here's what the chops looked like before they were cooked:

These chops were from a hog that was very obese.  I'm showing this photo as a reminder to people:  Don't overfeed your Guinea hogs!  They are easy keepers and gain weight very easily.  If you feed more than is necessary, you're not making more meat, you're just making more fat.  I like a bit of marbling in my meat, but that marbling doesn't need to be in big 2.5" wide swaths like in that bottom right chop.

Rendering Lard

As I noted in my previous post, the overweight hog we sent to the butcher recently produced---in addition to a freezer full of pork---more than 75 lbs. of fat, which I have been rendering into lard.

The first question people ask when I tell them I've been rendering lard all week, is:  "Why?  No health-conscious person cooks with lard anymore, do they?"  In fact, that's not the case at all.  As described in these various articles, lard is a lot healthier than most people think:

Lard:  The New Health Food
Lard Has Clearly Won the Health Debate
Praise the Lard
Lard:  After Decades of Trying, Its Moment Is Finally Here
Trans Fatty Acids:  Why Lard May Be Better for You Than Vegetable Oil

Of course, even with the unexpected benefits, I'm not planning to eat 75 lbs. of lard this year!  Some of it I'll save for cooking, but the majority I'll make into soap.

Lard soap is mild and gentle to the skin, and it will be great to have some "zero mile" fat for soap making (as opposed to the olive oil I use to make my sheep's milk soap, which is imported from thousands of miles away).  I'll still keep making the olive oil based soap, since it's been very popular, but the natural farmstead lard soap will give buyers an additional option.  Choice is good!

Anyway, since a lot of people have never rendered lard before, I figured I'd show the process, step by step, here on the blog.  Rendering isn't difficult, but it does take a while, so you have to be patient.

Since I had such a huge amount of lard to render, I had to do it one portion at a time over several days, according to how much would fit into my largest stock pot.

Our hog was very large and very obese, so he produced 22.5 lbs. of leaf lard and 53 lbs. of back fat lard.  The leaf lard is the internal fat from around the pig's kidneys.  It is considered the highest quality lard, since it's said to have a finer texture and a more neutral flavor than the back fat lard.

Here is one of the slabs of leaf lard from our pig.  We got two slabs this size.

 

The slabs of back fat were even larger.  Folded over themselves and stacked together, they filled an entire banana box!

The first step was to cut off chunks of fat that were a more convenient size to handle.  Here's a chunk of back fat, ready for me to start processing.

 

To get a neutral (not so porky) flavor to my lard, I trimmed off all the little scraps of meat.  Then I cut the fat into little chunks, maybe about 1" square.

The discarded scraps of fatty meat made a VERY popular snack for my chickens!

 

To begin the rendering process, I put a couple of inches of water in the bottom of my largest stock pot, then filled the rest of the pot with cut-up chunks of fat.  I heated the pot on the stove top until it started to boil, then reduced the heat to a low simmer.  

The water in the bottom of the pot helps prevent the fat from sticking before it has a chance to melt.  By the time the rendering is finished, all the water will have evaporated away.  

You do need to stir the pot (less in the beginning and more frequently toward the end), to prevent the solids from sticking to the bottom and burning on.  

 

Almost immediately after the boiling started, the fat changed color and began to get translucent.

 

Little by little, the chunks of fat started to release quantities of melted liquid lard.

 

 

For a while, the liquid in the pot was a milky whitish color.  It was at this point that the pot began to need more frequent stirring, because the solids started sinking to the bottom.

 

Eventually, the liquid turned clear.

 

The smaller solids sank to the bottom.  It was hard to keep them from sticking to the bottom of the pot!  Meanwhile, the larger solids puffed up and floated on the top of the liquid.

 

When the floating bits turn golden brown and slightly crispy, the rendering process is done.  For a pot this size, it took about 6 hours.

 

Next, I strained the rendered lard through a strainer lined with several layers of cheesecloth.  The solids that are left in the strainer are "cracklings."  You can salt them and eat them as a snack, cook them in cornbread, sprinkle them on salads, or use them anywhere else you might use bacon bits (they don't taste like bacon, though.  They taste---not surprisingly---like pork rinds).

The cracklings from the backfat came out chunky, as shown in the picture above.  The cracklings from the leaf lard came out in smaller crumbs.

 

I'm storing my cracklings in ziploc bags in the freezer until I'm ready to use them.  

The rendered, filtered lard itself I poured into mason jars.  I had originally thought I would pour the lard into molds and store it in blocks like pounds of butter.  But unlike the partially hydrogenated lard you can buy in blocks from the grocery store, this lard is still liquid at room temperature, so jars turned out to be essential!

When the lard was first poured into the jars, it was a clear, pale, golden color.

By morning, it had cooled down and turned pure white, but it was still liquid.  It does turn into a solid if you put it in the refrigerator or freezer.

I'm going to store my lard in the freezer until I need it.  Frozen, it should keep almost indefinitely.

From the 75 lbs. of fat I got from my pig, I rendered about 37 quarts of lard.  That will make an awful lot of pie crusts and and awful lot of bars of soap!

From Pig to Pork: The Story of Hagrid

Last month, I was contacted by a woman who was selling all her Guinea hogs.  She wanted to know if I would like to buy two adult breeding sows and an adult boar.  Since I'd already purchased two new sows and a new boar (Rosemary, Thyme, and Basil) in January, I didn't really NEED any new pigs at all.  But the woman was willing to sell hers for a bargain price, so I said okay.

When I saw the pigs for the first time I was stunned by their appearance.  All three were very obese (not an uncommon problem in Guinea hogs, since they are such easy keepers).  But beyond that, the boar and one of the sows were easily 50% larger than any of my other pigs.  I hadn't expected that!

For comparison, the photo below shows the new boar on the left, and the smaller (NORMAL sized) sow on the right:

The Guinea hog breed description states that adult Guinea hogs weigh between 150-300 lbs.  The main appeals of the breed are its small, manageable size and docile nature.  I estimated that the larger of the new sows weighed about 400 lbs. and the boar was closer to 500 lbs.

You can see by these photos how obese the boar was:

Then there was the question of temperament.  The two sows, Aponi and Asashi, were mild-mannered enough, but the boar, Hagrid, was a whole different story.  We've hauled pigs in the back of our Subaru Outback before.  They all pretty much just lay down and went to sleep until the journey was over.  By contrast, Hagrid spent the entire trip hyperventilating and trying to rip and chew his way out of the car.  He did a lot of damage and got himself so worked up, when we finally got him home and unloaded him, all he could do was stagger to the middle of the paddock and collapse, panting.  I was seriously concerned that he might have a heart attack and die right there!

After his ordeal, he just wanted to sleep for a few days.  Mindful that he had experienced severe stress, I mostly let him alone to rest, but went out periodically to check on him and speak to him kindly.  Because of his unusually erratic behavior, I was cautious around him, but I managed to pet him a little bit, hoping to let him know he was in a good place.  He didn't seem to enjoy it much, but I figured he just needed time to settle in, and then he'd be happy and friendly like all my other Guinea hogs have always been.  (Although, for the record, every other Guinea hog we'd ever bought settled in immediately with surprisingly NO sign of anxiety at the new surroundings).

Unfortunately, as Hagrid got more comfortable with his surroundings, his attitude didn't improve.  Instead, it worsened.  A few times, he came at me with a little more force and attitude than I felt comfortable with.  I scolded him and gave him a swat, and he immediately backed off.  "Oh," I thought.  "He just hasn't been socialized to be polite around people.  He'll do better once he learns what's expected of him."

But that was just the beginning.  A few days later, there came a day when he charged at me with a full-on threat.  When I scolded him, instead of backing off and saying, "Oops! Sorry, boss," he puffed himself up and said, "Yeah?  Bring it on, bitch!  I'm bigger than you, and I can rip your legs off!"  I had to throw rocks at his head to give myself a safe retreat from his paddock.

That was the last straw.  Guinea hogs are a docile breed, with "calm," "friendly," and "good with children" written right into the breed description.  Not one of my other Guinea hogs had ever shown even the slightest inclination towards aggression.  I've brought visitors and their children into my boar paddock so they could pet the mature boars.  Most of them flop right over on their sides hoping for a belly rub!

In the days that followed, Hagrid's aggression continued.  I couldn't even walk within 10 feet of his paddock without him charging at the fence, trying to get through it to attack me.  His posture showed the same arched body, angrily swiveled ears, and tensely curled snout that are typical when a boar is about to do battle with a rival.  His tusks were at least 3 inches long and he was fully prepared to use them. 

I was not unsympathetic.  For whatever reason---stress, too much testosterone, imbalance of brain chemicals, lack of socialization to humans, whatever---Hagrid was unable to react to me the way a normal Guinea hog reacts to people, and was instead thinking of me as another hog that he must challenge for dominance.  Unfortunately, in the pig world, that means doing bloody physical battle.

A week passed, and Hagrid's attitude didn't change.  There was no question, I couldn't keep a pig like that here on the farm.  He would be a constant threat to any person or animal who encountered him.  So we made an appointment for him with our local butcher.

After the rather nerve-wracking (but ultimately uneventful) process of loading Hagrid back into the car, we hauled him the 10 minutes across town to the slaughterhouse.  As sad as it was that it had to end this way, when we got back to the farm I was amazed at how relieved I felt that it was done.  Now I could cross the barnyard, doing my chores normally, without the anxiety of an angry 500 lb. hog charging at the fence every time I walked by.  The whole atmosphere of the farm changed back to its normal, serene state.  Until he was gone, I hadn't fully realized how much anxiety Hagrid had been causing me.

Some of the people who heard this story thought that I would be upset with the woman who sold me the hogs.  But that's not the case at all.  Hagrid's bad attitude wasn't her fault.  And ultimately, I still got a very good bargain, even if it wasn't quite the one I thought I was getting.  I got two nice new sows, who after some intensive dieting ought to do very well here.  Plus, because Hagrid went to the butcher, the sweet, friendly young boar that we had been raising to put in our freezer gets to go back on the sales list and perhaps go father some piglets on someone else's farm someday.  So it all worked out just fine for the overall good of the farm.

We've been raising Guinea hogs for a year now, and it's exciting to finally have a freezer full of meat to try.  I'll now be able to talk more knowledgeably about the unique qualities of the meat and give better advice to buyers who want to raise Guinea hogs of their own.

I now have more than 50 lbs. of bacon curing in the refrigerator (a subject for a future blog post) and I've been rendering lard all week.  I should finish the last batch of lard today, and will post photos of the process very soon.

For the record, the following list shows the meat yield that Hagrid provided (Bear in mind that he was an abnormally large and abnormally obese, fully adult Guinea hog.  Most Guinea hogs will provide much smaller amounts):

20 lbs. pork chops
19 lbs. ham steaks
18.5. lbs. hams
9 lbs. Boston butt
12.5 lbs. Picnic ham
8 lbs. spare ribs
12 lbs. tenderloin
17.5 lbs. shoulder steaks
6.5 lbs. soup bones
54 lbs. bacon
17.5 lbs. jowls
30 lbs. sausage
6 lbs. liver
2.5 lbs. kidneys
5 lbs. mystery packages (labels got smeared so we can't read them).

22.5 lbs. leaf lard
53 lbs. back fat lard

Total:  238 lbs. meat and 75.5 lbs. lard.

Thanks to Hagrid's ultimate contribution, a few days ago, we had our first taste of  Guinea hog:  A true farm breakfast with delicious sausage patties and eggs from our own hens.  Our freezer is full and we look forward to many more delicious meals over the coming year.

Thank you, Hagrid!  We honor you for your life and your sacrifice.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Piglets in the Sun (At Last!)

We've had three litters of American Guinea hog piglets born in the last two weeks, but I've been waiting (and waiting, and waiting!) to post about them until I could get some photos.

My camera does a terrible job at dimly lit indoor photos, so as long as the piglets stayed in their snug nests in the barn, all I could capture were photos of little black blurry things.  And with the weather featuring a lot of cold temperatures, chilling winds, and freezing rain in the past couple of weeks, the piglets and their moms seemed determined to stay inside until spring.

Now, with nicer weather and a little encouragement to the sows (namely, moving their food and water dishes outside, so they could no longer depend on me providing indoor room service), our pig families are finally starting to venture out into the sunshine.

Which means... PHOTO TIME!  :-)

They are mostly hanging out right next to the barn door because in addition to plentiful sunshine, there's a lovely soft, warm pile of waste wool leftover from sheep shearing.  I should have raked it up long before this, but the pigs enjoy napping on it so much, I decided to leave it until spring.  It's only going to be used to mulch the garden anyway, so there's no harm in waiting.