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

Roadkill recipe

My friend the egg man sent me a message recently saying that he’d knocked over a hare and did I want it.... erm, yes!

I was pleased to receive this fully grown leveret, really quite a young animal that wasn’t very strong (in flavour) as I’m personally not overkeen on extremely strong hare....

I kept it for a couple of days in the fridge then dressed it (gutted and skinned it), but was undecided on how to cook it..... 

I chopped it into joints and thought that maybe curry might be an idea and after looking up an American recipe which had all these multitude of spices in it (half of which I didn't have), thought I would just make it up as I went along...

So, 

• pan fried the hare, browned it and put it to one side, 
• fried some onions, some garlic, some ginger and whatever spices we had in cupboard in it’s juices, 
• braised it for not very long (about 1.5 to 2 hours) and in the end, it turned out to be quite tender.....

Young Farmer Sharp (Michael), along with his non-foodie mate (who thought it was a curried chicken), and even my little girl who doesn’t eat curry or spicy food ate it all up....my little lad Radek also ate lots of it and was very pleased even though he doesn’t really like spicy food either.....

All in all, roadkill can be quite good. To some extent, it is food waste and potentially wasted food,  so as long as you are sure where it came from and of the healthiness of the meat (i.e. that it’s not been on the road side for days and contaminated), if you’ve knocked something over by accident then why not turn it into an economically viable and bloody good meal?  Me and the entire family actually enjoyed it much more the day after too!

Review of The PigIdea

The day was filled with lunch time workers quizzically asking questions such as “what the hell we were doing in the middle of Trafalgar square giving away food?”. Fair question I reckon, but there was on the whole, a massively positive response to the Big idea that is the PigIdea. The winter sun mostly shone through too, and as a good Cumbrian, have to say it’s good to see the sun now and then, especially the winter sun.

As a Hambassador for The PigIdea and with a name like Farmer Sharp, I was contacted by BPEX’s PR company Wild card, who asked if we could meet at the Trafalgar square pig feast. 

Our conversation was a frank and open exchange on all the possible ramifications for the pig industry as a whole but maybe I’m guessing, with a focus on the bigger end of that industry. The conversation covered their worries that this Idea could be a threat in view of the alleged Heddon- on- the- Wall swill derived foot and mouth disaster. As a person who saw my cousin get all their livestock culled this is the last thing I would want to risk happening again. 

We all have a duty to look at the fact that approximately 15 million tons of food waste every year (a conservative estimate) is currently being thrown away, and even if we only got a few percent of this food waste into feeding pigs it will be a massive start. Not to rush at it like a bull at a gate but careful thoughtful resolution of the problems is required to make it as risk free as it can be.

There is also the farming conversation of yield and food conversion rates etc. I personally am not an advocate for feeding pigs on swill alone, but for feeding them a balanced diet with a percentage of swill which can mean that a good and not massively fat carcass will be produced. The nutritional  knowledge is already there to sort this issue out, and maybe with swill feeding there might also come an improvement of the pig producers margins, as they are generally slim at the moment. 

The other great asset to swill feeding is that quite often swill fed pigs reared in the right way can be massively better eating and that is a win win situation - in japan, swill fed pigs achieve quite a premium because of the better eating qualities such as fat marbling and more depth of flavour.

The Pig Idea #FoodWaste

Let Them Eat Waste