The rumours of my blogs demise are true

I would like to thank those people who have read and hopefully enjoyed my blog. 

This has been a massive learning curve and my understanding of just what goes into sustaining a blog. I will be concentrating on my presenting and Teaching passing on my knowledge of meat food and farming.
Quite honestly more of  an orator than a writer.
www.farmersharp.co.uk
Twitter Farmersharp opinionated as ever

The importance of rare breed pigs in making bacon 

Mangalitsa, School of Artisan Food
used on Artisan Butchery Fundamentals 

The basic principles of curing is an application of salt and possibly nitrate or nitrite and some form of sugar to preserve.

Curing as a preservation method has been practised for as long as man has been hunting animals and catching fish, right up to modern times. 

The methodologies really haven't changed that much, from vast savannah grasslands to the mountains ranges and sea shores, preservation of meat and fish was done using curing and sometimes followed by drying. Occasionally in the damper areas there was excessive application and sometimes really excessive application of salt which gave rise to the tradition of things like salt pork and salt cod.

Historically pork would have been cured when there was an excess of meat and traditionally only when there was an 'R' in the month. There is a self evident truth that even in this time of plenty the product which is, wonderful bacon made from rare breed pigs shouldn't be wasted. 

The good thing about rare breed pork made into bacon is that it will keep a lot longer than if it had been made from a modern fast growing pig. Even if it is kept in a fridge and not frozen.

Dry cured Rare Breed bacon

Curing sounds very simple, and to some extent it is, but the nuances are massive between a high quality product and something that you would buy in the supermarket, which has a flavour profile of non descript  protein with salt, sugar and sodium nitrate and sometimes sodium nitrite (saltpetre).

Sodium ascorbate or erythorbate can be added to very commercial production to accelerate the curing process.

The key to any food product is obviously the raw materials you start with, in this case the pig, a slow growing rare breed, a bit older, more like twelve months than six, will deliver the goods. If you need help sourcing rare breed pork, the Rare Breed Survival Trust can help https://www.rbst.org.uk and can give you information on rare breed suppliers.

british lop @ curing course London
multi purpose good for pork and curing

No matter how much attention you pay to the curing process the end product's quality will absolutely be defined by how good the raw material is and secondly the ingredients, obviously the cure should be as simple possible.

This blog post is not meant to be a how to of curing, as there are loads of informative articles out there to read that will give you science technical methodologies on how to. Even after reading those articles there is the experience of how much fat, what breed fed in which way, and just how salty you want the flavour profile of your bacon to be? The permutations of how your bacon will turn out will be temperature, time, humidity, and much more so practice makes perfect. 

I can't emphasise enough that flavour is derived from the best raw materials, processed in the least intrusive way!

Tamworth the ultimate curing and lard producing pig 

So as with everything simplicity is the way to achieve the best results. There are things that get good results but there are products that are designed for the job, like the Tamworth pig designed for curing and producing lard!

Simple curing can be performed at home very easily. There are websites that you can buy ready-made cures from. Here are a couple but there are loads more: www.sausagemaking.org 

http://www.weschenfelder.co.uk 

There also are pink salts and whole range of different cures or you can simply use salt and sugar.

The necessity for fantastic raw materials to produce an amazing product also goes for the tools you use. A great knife is the saturating point for great butchery. These are the best Sheffield has to offer

Britains best knives made in Sheffield

Tools

Upper most in the importance of craft skills are tools. All of the world's butchery is carried out by the skill and passion of a butcher, and his knowledge of how to use a knife, saw and cleaver to disseminate an animal into its component parts.

I want to impart my passion for tools and the right tool for the job, the differences and importance of the right tools!

standard commercial cleaver

Above is a picture of a cleaver, commonly in use in most meat preparation premises from the artisan butcher to a massive processing plant.

The cleaver is functional, unfortunately with a plastic handle, which coincidentally isn't as we are lead to believe more hygienic than wooden handles! 

The nature of this yellow handled tool is that it feels very thick when you use it; and to be honest a bit of a lump hammer. 

This belies the difference in cleavers in times gone by when the art of using a cleaver has been overtaken by such modern machines as band saws.

Band saws are ok if your skill with a cleaver is not that great. Unfortunately the band saw is likely to heat up the surface of the muscle and speed up darkening of the cut surface. This darkening is not a difficulty to the eating quality but definitely is a difficulty to how it looks at the point of sale. My Mother would say people eat with their eyes first and they also obviously buy with their eyes. 

The bandsaw also throws lots of bone dust all over the produce. I know that the cleaver breaks bone, but very cleanly and much more so than a band saw in the hands of a skilled craftsman. 

A skilled craftsman with a cleaver can achieve near perfect results and minimise bone dust and bone shards to almost zero.

Practice makes perfect, well maybe not perfect but better and better. 

Cleavers or choppers are a vital part of the tools required for butchery. Below is a picture of 2 plates from Douglas's Encyclopaedia; first plate is from 1905 edition the second from the 1924 edition. Both prized possessions of mine.

As you can see from this 1905 picture above and the 1924 picture below what might be described as a plethora but in fact had been honed over centuries as the right tool for the job.

The cleaver I remember using in the late seventies (shown on Fig VII), with which I became very proficient, had a wooden handle and a steel blade which went into the handle, as they say, full tang. 

This cleaver was quite light, compared to the modern yellow handled example above.

The reason it was lighter is, as my good friend Mr Simon Grant-Jones a black smith, not a farrier (another story for another day www.simongrant-jones.com) said that a tool steel edge is forge welded to the more mild steel main body of the cleaver. Hence allowing for a very robust edge without the requirement for a big heavy blade.

Having looked at the plates from both books it became apparent to me that the figure 405 was the closest to the cleaver I used in my early career.

As you can see above figure 420 looks really large. Well this is the cleaver I remember being used in the abattoir in Gt Urswick by the one man team Mr Raymond Hurst known to all as strangely as Hursty.

Hursty could wield the double handed cleaver to split bodies of beef. 

Unfortunately if you asked him as a farmer to cut your lamb up for the freezer that was the only tool he used. Which just goes to show the right tool for the right job or not as the case may be. 

Soon to be available on www.farmersharp.co.uk a proper cleaver.