Review: 'Case for Sustainable Meat' debunks many sacred cows. When food guru Michael Pollan recently tweeted in support of Nicolette Hahn Niman's new book, "Defending Beef: The Case for Sustainable Meat Production," the protest that followed made it perfectly obvious why such a book is necessary.
"A Cattle Rancher wrote a book about how free range, grass fed beef is better than factory farmed. Slow clap," commented @FoodNetworkVeg. But Hahn Niman's mission is much bigger than that. If you are looking for a book to inspire fisticuffs at the Thanksgiving table, you've found it. Her "manifesto" calls for a revolutionized food system — one that requires cows. Safeway Announces Progress Toward Gestation Stall-Free Pork Supply Chain. How to Make Ventreche, A Recipe for French Bacon. Corned Beef Tongue. Homemade Corned Beef Recipe. 1 You can either used store-bought pickling spices or you can make your own.
To make your own, toast the allspice berries, mustard seeds, coriander seeds, red pepper flakes, cloves, peppercorns, and cardamom pods in a small frying pan on high heat until fragrant and you hear the mustard seeds start to pop. Remove from heat and place in a small bowl. Use a mortar and pestle to crush the spices a little (or the back of a spoon or the side of a knife on a flat surface). Add to a small bowl and stir in the crumbled bay leaves and ground ginger. 2 Add about 3 Tbsp of the spice mix (reserve the rest for cooking the corned beef after it has cured), plus the half stick of cinnamon, to a gallon of water in a large pot, along with the Kosher salt, pink salt (if using), and brown sugar. 3 Place the brisket in a large, flat container or pan, and cover with the brine. 4 At the end of the cure, remove the brisket from the brine and rinse off the brine with cold water.
Cured Lake Trout Roe « Food Perestroika. The icing on the cake when you catch your own fish is that you’ll get plenty of fish roe during spawning season – my last trip alone brought almost a pound!
Cured trout roe (personally, I don’t like calling it caviar unless it comes from a sturgeon) has become an increasingly expensive delicacy, with stores charging as much as $100 for 4 oz. And yet curing roe is incredibly fast and easy! The whole recipe requires only 3 ingredients, a scale and about 10 minutes of your time. Red alder ranch » canned salmon. People are often surprised when I tell them I can my own fish. The first time I canned fish, it was albacore, in California, and the instructions we had to follow made it needlessly messy and complicated. So here is a little photo essay of how I can salmon at home. WARNING! Please be aware that there are hazards to this activity, and some of the risks are worth noting and making a strong warning about.
Red alder ranch » gravlax. So, this is one of my other favorite things to do with salmon.
Gravlax is basically cold cured salmon, and the recipe originated in Scandinavia, where so many of the interesting ways of preparing fish come from. Start with a couple of small fillets. I usually use coho, but this year I saved a couple of fillets off of my spring chinook instead, since I couldn’t wait for coho season to have some of this delicious treat. I freeze the fillets for a few days to kill any parasites, since gravlax does not involve any cooking of the fish. Cavegirl Chicken Pate. Conjure an image of a caveman on the hunt, ok?
Now picture him and his tribe nabbing it, the mammoth or whatever. What next? Do they carefully butcher the thing, discard the fat and squabble over who gets the USDA prime cuts? No! They consume the most nutrient-rich bits: the organ meat. Fast forward. When it comes to our health, lets consider what people have been eating for thousand upon thousands of years. A recipe.
I already know that this won't be one of my more popular posts, but hey, I'm in charge here and I love jerky.
At least, I love homemade jerky. Do not call Slim Jims or that other crap that they sell at gas stations or the packy "jerky" -- bleeeeccckkk. Jerky is nothing more than dried meat and spices, so if you like meat and have never tried it because you thought jerky = Slim Jim, I urge you to reconsider. Jerky is a great snack to have on hand when you want something a little salty, and the portability makes it ideal for hikes, lunch boxes, road trips, etc.
Not to mention that jerky is an incredibly high-value dog treat -- the Ninjette will pretty much do any kind of trick you ask and never take her eyes from mine when I'm holding even the tiniest bit of this jerky. How To Render Beef Tallow From Marrow Bones. I recently made beef stock with marrow bones (sometimes called pipe bones) and in the process rendered out a heck of a lot of beef fat (tallow) from inside the bones.
Two birds with one stone, and all that. See all the white stuff inside the bones? That’s marrow. It’s either a great culinary delicacy and the reason mankind started using tools in the first place, or totally super gross, depending on who you talk to. It’s composed of about 90% fat.