Adventures in Charcuterie. Part Two

Curing your pancetta, a village that fell into the sea, and stubborn old ladies.

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It has become apparent to me that I still haven’t settled into halving my output here on Substack since the beginning of the year. This week I shall write an extra piece for you.

First things first.

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South Devon

Bank Holiday Monday

I am sat in front of the glow of a log fire that has been crackling and popping in the hearth since I lit the thin little sticks of kindling early this morning, logs placed carefully on top so that the flames lick and take hold of the underside of the dry oak, quickly, filling the house with warmth and the smell of woodsmoke, feeding more and more pieces to the greedy fire as the day passes. Looking out over the sea with little to see in the distance except for the occasional little yacht with a bright sail far away. I’m troubled only by the gull that has placed itself on sentry duty on a stone pillar opposite the front door, which I’m convinced is watching me for reasons known only to itself. Despite it being spring, England has a habit of remaining stubbornly cold by the coast, so a delivery of seasoned, dry hardwood for the week has been essential, not only for the soothing practice of stacking it into a neat log pile but also to keep the house warm in the strong winds that blow in from the ocean here.

I’m currently on vacation and am spending a week, no more than a stone’s throw away from the sea in a tiny village in Devon. In fact, if I were to toss a pebble out of the front door, over the edge of the stacks of giant rocks that protect the front of the little fisherman’s cottage from the waves, it would land with a plop in the sea. At night in the blackness, far out where the Atlantic meets the Channel where the little navigational lights betray the presence of the boats at work, chugging along in the dark, red for port, green for starboard, while closer to shore the sea churns wildly against the sea defences. A boiling, sucking, white noise in the still, dark of the night as the waves crash as they meet the land. Broken only by the never-ending, ten-second bursts from the distant foghorn and sweeping beam of the lighthouse a few miles further along the exposed, jagged rocks of the peninsula.

A soothing calm to easily drift away to.

A background of empty sounds that echo around you.

The huge stones of the sea defences here, each weighing more than a car are stacked in rows, one on top of the other as they rise upwards from the beach to the front gardens of the cottages, placed to keep the waves from crashing into the higgledy piggledy row of old fishermen’s houses.

When the storms come smashing in, as they have done for centuries, they tear away the coastline little by little, slowly taking the rocks back to the sea bed, as they did over a few days and nights in January 1917, where not even one mile away from where I am sitting in my armchair, an entire village was lost to the sea in what was a combination of strong easterly gales and freakishly high tides (also the Admiralty decided in its wisdom, it would contract a civil engineer to dredge tens of thousands of tonnes of sand and shingle from the bay to build a new dock in Plymouth, unbeknown to the villagers, who had now lost practically all of their seashore defences, as the sea bed was all of a sudden, dramatically deeper).

The seventy-nine villagers of Hallsands abandoned their houses that week in a series of violent gales, except for one stubborn resident of course, one Elizabeth Prettyjohn who refused to leave and stayed put through the complete destruction of over twenty cottages, that were torn apart and lost to the sea over two nights.

She continued to live there quite stubbornly, visited mainly by the curious, in the only remaining building that stood intact amongst the ruins of what was left from before, alone with her chickens until her death some fifty years later in the nineteen sixties.

I must say that I would loved to have met her.

Feisty.

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How to make Pancetta

Part Two

I explained in the first part of these ‘Adventures in Charcuterie’, how you might begin the curing of a chunk of pork belly to make pancetta, and here we move on to the next step in the process.

If indeed you were brave enough to take the jump into what is the ancient craft of letting bits of pig go mouldy for months, before eating them, and you took my advice and put a piece of belly in to cure, then it is now time to rinse it and begin the drying process.

It should be around two weeks of initial curing in the ziplock bag. Take the chunk of belly out of the bag, place it on a board or hold it over the sink and give it a thorough scrape and then rinse under cold running water. The spices will wash away, which is perfectly correct as they will have done their job in the last two weeks. The bag along with the brine can be discarded. It really is of no use.

What you will have now is a piece of bacon that is ready for dry ageing. There may be a few bits of herb or a stray peppercorn stubbornly stuck to the meat, but this shouldn’t be any trouble, so just leave them be.

Using paper towels, thoroughly dry the piece, paying attention to any cuts and seams where moisture might hide, as this is where trouble might occur further down the line. Then using a pepper mill, grind a thin dusting all over the surface of the pork on both sides, to give a light fine crust of pepper, then using your hands, press the spice well into the surface of the meat.

Now weigh the piece and make a note of it.

This is important.

Try not to misplace this information as you will need to refer to it again during the drying process. We will need to record what is basically a loss in weight of above thirty per cent. This will tell us when it is ready. Bill at North Charcuterie who mentored me through my early forays into the world of drying bits of pig aims for up to forty per cent, but that is his preference. I took the last one I made to around thirty-five per cent loss and was very happy with the texture.

The piece of pork that we started with in Part One, weighed around one and a half kilos, so at the end of this process, we will nurture the slab of bacon into something that is dry, crusty and slightly mouldy on the exterior and will weigh only around one kilo. The drying process in combination with the curing salts we used will ensure that the bacon is safe to eat sliced thinly straight from the slab, or cooked as you like it.

It will smell incredible either way.

Now that the piece is covered in pepper, place it on a rack and put it into the fridge for a day and a night to let the surface area dry.

The next step is to have a cabinet ready for dry ageing. In the first part of this recipe, I suggested an old wine fridge would be suitable for the job, and they are available quite cheaply if you search them out second-hand online. You can do this on a rack in the fridge, but it is not something I have done for more than a week, and a drying cabinet is better for the job as your household fridge has little in the way of controlling the humidity when it’s also filled with all sorts of groceries.

If you have access to a wine fridge or have a friend with a proper charcuterie cabinet then this is where the pancetta needs to go next to hang for a few months. Take a metal hook, steel is best, or a loop of string and pierce it through a corner of the meat. The cabinet should be set to run at a temperature of around 10 degrees Celsius, and using a hygrometer the humidity should be around 70Rh to begin.

Hang the piece of pancetta from the loop or the hook, step back and admire your work, shut the door and ensure that firstly there is no light in the cabinet as this will encourage the fat to turn rancid which will impact the end flavour, and secondly turn the fan setting on to low to ensure air movement.

Over the first day or so, using a digital hygrometer/thermometer, check the readings are not wildly out. If the Rh is too low, it can be corrected by increasing humidity by placing a small shallow tray of salted water on the base of the cabinet. If the humidity is too high, then using the fan is an option to increase airflow. In professional kitchens we use silica gel for things like this, you must be familiar with the little packets that you find tucked into new shoes. This can be bought in kilo bags online and is perfect for jobs like this. It will start an orange colour and when it is damp will turn blue. It can be dried in a low oven to regenerate and be used again.

Now it is time to wait.

You will need patience in bucket loads.

What will essentially happen is that the pork will dry evenly as you monitor the humidity and temperature over the next few weeks and months. The curing salts will go to work, and nature will join in. Once a day, check the readings. If they are wildly out, take action to correct them. You can certainly ask me by message or email if you have a question.

Every day, open the cabinet to encourage the air to circulate for a few minutes, keeping the door shut at all other times, and the light turned off. Once a week, using a misting spray filled with bottled water (tap water has chlorine so will kill any potential mould transfer) lightly spray inside the cabinet to keep things on the damp side. If the humidity is too dry, then you run the risk of causing ‘case hardening’ where the meat will dry too fast on the outside, which therefore prevents the interior from drying correctly, causing the end result to be bad.

It must be said that with any type of curing, especially involving meat left to dry over more than a month, there is potential for disaster to strike, and for things to be fit only for the bin. This is more so with salamis, as these are mixtures of ground meats, fats and spices, so the potential for trouble is heightened. Single muscle cuts, if prepared correctly should dry without a problem so you should have little trouble beginning with the pancetta.

Over the coming weeks, you will begin to notice mould spots appear here and there. This I agree is unnerving, but is natural. Penicillin, the mould that will hopefully be prevalent here will start as white points, often blooming to a powdery white, sometimes green. This is very normal.

Unsettling but normal.

The good moulds that form are essential in controlling the ageing process and will keep the bad moulds at bay. Anything orange, red or black might signify trouble, though control is easily achieved by taking the piece out of the drying cabinet and rubbing away troublesome spots with a 50/50 solution of strong white vinegar and water. I have done this here and there to allay some concerns and have been happy with the result. The key is controlling the temperature and humidity, that way the meat will lose the correct amount of water over time and will dry slowly from the inside out. A piece of pancetta like this is relatively thin so will dry quite easily. Some cooks like to roll pancetta, and this is something I have done with lamb belly pancetta in the past, it looks very beautiful, but for your first attempt I would not recommend this at all. It will give you something much thicker to dry which can be problematic for beginners, with the rolling needing to be very tight and exact. I would say that you should save that for a future project.

Let us say that in two weeks, I shall come back to this project, and by that time if indeed you have started the process, your pancetta should be well underway.

Until later this week,

William