Hot homemade pickled onion recipe.

31Mar10

My father has always made pickled onions and whenever he gave jars out or gave jars to me for people to try they always seem to be a resounding success, so I started making them a while back based on his nice and easy recipe and they seem to be just as popular when I give them to friends. Although they may be humoring me but I don’t think so because they always come back for more.

Ingredients

• Pickling onions
• Salt
• White vinegar
• Whole chilli’s
• Peppercorns
• Garlic cloves
• Whole ginger
• Jars

Top and tail the pickling onions, pour over some boiling water and leave them for a few seconds, this will make them easier to peel.

Skin them all and then leave them in a bowl of salt and water over night, if you leave them too long the centers will start to pop out but that isn’t a problem if you care about taste and not aesthetics. This will keep the crunch as they mature.

Drain the onions well and fill a clean jar, put a couple of chilis in there, a teaspoon of peppercorns, a couple of slices of ginger and a couple of whole garlic cloves. Cover with the vinegar and don’t open until the garlic cloves go a nice green/blue colour which is usually a week or two..

The actual amount of ingredients depends completely on you own taste, when I make them for some of my friends I specifically try to blow their heads off with loads of chili’s and peppercorns and leave them in there until the onions start to turn a greenish colour as well. They usually end up eating the garlic and ginger as well.

A lot of recipes call for sterilisation, boiling, spice mixes, hot sealing but this is dead simple and works a treat.

Unfortunately pickling onions are only really available around by me in the autumn time and I can never do enough to last, shallots are too expensive and so I cheat.

You can get supermarket pickled onions for about 30p a jar so I throw away their sweet vinegar and treat them as if they had been brined overnight, they are never quite as good but are always far better than any I have bought.

homemade pickled onions

Notice how nice and blue the garlic is? Those are pickled eggs in the background which are done in almost exactly the same way.

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Tags: chili, onions, pickled

Sausage frenzy – recipes

18Mar10

I have had a frenzy of sausage making after having a manual sausage gun given to me and buying a load of chiplota and standard sausage skins from eBay.

Chili and garlic sausages

• 1 lb Belly pork
• 5 tsp chili powder
• 5 tsp minced garlic
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup breadcrumbs
• couple of ladles of stock

I zapped this lot up in a food processor and put it into the chipolata skins, they were delicious but I think that the meat to fat ratio wasn’t right, they were so meaty.

Olive, caper and pork sausages.

• 1lb pork shoulder
• 1 handful of green olives
• 2 tbsp of pickled capers
• dash of anchovy sauce or paste
• half a cup of breadcrumbs
• couple of ladles of stock

These were the same texture as the above but were delicious, a friend told me they were the best sausages he has ever eaten but I get the feeling he buys his sausages in supermarkets.

Leek, apple and pork sausages.

• 1.5lb belly pork
• 0.2lb back fat
• 2 cups breadcrumbs
• 1tsp salt
• 1tsp black pepper
• 2 tsp chilli powder
• 2 medium leeks
• water

I decided that I would try to improve the texture this time and added far more breadcrumbs and some added fat.

Seemed a little bit too much breadcrumbs, it piped easy enough but took two mixes as the mixer couldn’t take it in one go. It didn’t take a lot of water (didn’t have any stock).

The test burger was lovely, lots of leek, bit of a burn, didn’t seem to much bread.

I fried long and slow in oil, for about 45 minutes.

I think there was a little bit too much bread or possibly too much of the whole bread/leek/apple mixture, surprisingly hot.

Don’t think apple worked and wouldn’t make them again using the same combination, I would drop the apple, reduce the leek and probably use a little less breadcrumbs.

Pity I made 20 perfect sausages and had to casserole them because they aren’t good enough for me to give to anyone else.

Cracked pepper and pork shoulder.

• 1lb shoulder pork
• handful of peppercorns
• half a cup of breadcrumbs
• couple of ladles of stock

Cracked the pepper in the mixer and then added the rest, piped them up and cooked then the next day, I almost blew my head off and I like hot food and love pepper, so strong they were practically inedible. The peppercorns were in such big chunks it really didn’t work. I decide they needed to be cooked longer and with liquid so I casseroled some and pickled the others, pickled sausages are surprisingly good if a bit of a weird idea but I will be making them another time and posting it up here.

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Tags: sausages

homemade chorizo

03Mar10

Thought I would try to knock up so chorizo just because I love it and it costs a bomb.

• 1lb belly pork
• 1tsp cumin
• 1tsp ground coriander
• 1/4 tsp instacure/curing salt/cure 2
• 1tsp ground black pepper
• 2tsp cayenne
• 2tsp paprika
• 3tsp salt
• 5tsp whit wine vinegar
• 5 pickled chillis
• 5 cloves of garlic

either mince or chop with a food processor to nice chunky mix, drop the rest of the ingredients in and give it a spin.

I only had one size of casing so they ended up being smaller than I wanted  but they looked pretty once I hung them up.

my larder - with chorizo

Left them there for 8 or 9 days and fried one up, was pretty good even if i do say so myself, was so good in fact I gave all the rest away for people to try before taking a picture.

Not so clever.

While I was taking that picture I snapped a couple of my new guanciale and my pork neck fillet experiment. Both of which I will end up writing about when I get recipes right.

guanciale

lamb neck fillet

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Tags: charcuterie, pork, sausages

Homemade sausage recipe

22Feb10

After having a chat with my friendly butcher he gave me about 20 yards of collagen sausage skins, he also gave me some curing salt but that is for my salami and chorizo hopefully. All free again, I love my butcher.

So, I bought a 2 pounds of belly pork for £4.50 and decide to make some sausages.
I chopped the pork into 2 inch cubes after taking off the skin and dropped it into the food processor along with a couple tablespoons of whole grain mustard and a couple of teaspoons of black pepper, I didn’t bother adding any salt to see if it worked without it. I pulsed it until it was quite smooth but still with some chunks as that is how I like my sausages, dropped in a cup of breadcrumbs from some stale homemade bread and a couple of ladles of stock and the meat was ready to go.

I have never made sausages before and haven’t got any machine to fill them so I grabbed a funnel from the garage and sterilize it, the end looked to small so I cut it further up to widen the part the meat came out.
I then tried to put the casing onto the funnel, idiotically I had cut it too wide for the casings, possible I should have checked.
Time for some ingenuity, I found an unused silicon tube and managed to manufacture the end of a silicon tube, a cut funnel and some insulation tape into a working sausage filler.
It took a while but I ended up with about eight or nine foot of sausages in four strings .

I let them settle overnight and then fried them up slow and long, very good but  to be honest I think I should have split the sausage meat before flavouring and tried a few different mixtures.

Still,  I think that a foot of sausages with no artificial ingredients, good quality meat made by myself for fifty pence is a damn good deal, I doubt I will be buying sausages again and the money I save can go on a bloody sausage stuffer because it took over an hour to force it through that bloody funnel.

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Tags: pork, recipe, sausages

What to do with a pigs head.

17Feb10

After starting a conversation with my butcher after seeing a couple of trotters in the waste box and asking whether I could have them he told me about how many cuts and favorites have gone out of fashion. Tripe, no one was interested, he couldn’t sell whole ox tongues or hearts anymore, trotters, and then we come to it, pigs heads, only one person had ever asked him for one in the last 20 years or so.

So I asked out of curiosity how much he charged for one and he told me I could have them for nothing, he would even brine them for me free of charge. Bargain.

A couple of days later I picked up my pigs head, cut in two length-ways. Brain, ears, cheeks, all still there.

So, I cut out its eye, awkward that was, dumped it in a pot with a pile of veg and a bouquet garni from the garden and left it to simmer for 8 hours. Skimming off any scum. The flesh fell off the bone and I selected the best bits of fat and flesh, put it into a bowl, reduced some of the stock and topped it up to give a nice gelatin finish and chucked it in the fridge.

It was a lot of effort for very little brawn, my mistake was that I should have either added a cheap chunk of beef, pork belly or both. I found the flavour really strong and it would have been better if it was tempered with some other meat. The stock however is marvelous.

But, with the other half I cut off the cheek, covered it with salt, sugar, thyme and black pepper for a week. Washed it and hung it for another week and it is an absolutely beautiful bit of home-cured bacon.

After a bit of research I found out this is known as guanciale in Italy and jowl bacon in the states and is quite highly prized, understandable, it really is great to cook with.

Just picked up two more cheeks today, my butchers has no need for them, he can’t sell them so for every pig he gets in I get two pig cheeks free.  I am going to try a few different methods and when I find the best one will publish it here.

Filed under: pork   |  1 Comment
Tags: brawn, Guancia, pigs head