Greenstorm's Journal

I've been processing roughly 15lbs of pork per day (this is final product, deboned and trimmed and canned, so maybe 50lbs skinned hanging weight per day, which means roughly 12lbs bones for stock or discard, 13lbs fat into strips for rendering soap, 10lbs trim) for most of the last 14 days. It's a lot of work, and that's got me through roughly 700 of the 1600lbs of hanging weight pork I need to process total. Basically because it's stored outside in the shipping container, frozen, I have to bring in a couple shoulder or legs, let them thaw in a cooler because I don't have fridge space for these huge hunks of pork, debone and trim them when they're fully thawed so the knife can get through but not warm yet because that's not food safe, then can that meat right away since I don't want to refreeze and then thaw and then can. The whole process needs a fairly precise timeline and a significant time commitment; I can't take out eight shoulders and then decide I only have energy for four of them, or contrariwise I can't suddenly decide I have energy to do another leg or two if I haven't taken them in to thaw 10-12 hours previously.

All that is to say, I've canned a lot of meat and need to can a little more, but it's taking longer than I want to get through it because of the planning/thaw process. I thaw conservatively, so meat doesn't go bad, but that means that when I have extra energy I can't get ahead -- and getting ahead in unplanned bursts is how I do my best work.

So this morning I took two overflowing totes of mostly pork legs (maybe 14 legs and I think one or two shoulders) down to the new butcher shop the next town over. They are butchers only -- they don't slaughter or skin -- and I've been eyeing them but lining up my slaughter guy and their availability seemed like a little too much. Last night they posted that they had free time to make sausage if anyone had meat in the freezer, so I called them up... and they're going to make me a 25lb batch of plain smoked ("mennonite") sausage, a 25 lb batch of pepperoni, a 25 lb batch of jalapeno-not-cheddar smokies, a 10lb batch of pizza/sandwich salami, and then grind the rest of what I brought them. All sausage will be pork-only. I'm curious about the weight of what I brought them, I think it's maybe 250-350lbs hanging weight? The legs have little extra fat and trim, and a smaller percentage of bone. We'll see. But it takes a lot of work off my plate, especially the part of the work where I need to debone and then grind everything while it's still cold.

It's especially nice because the butcher folks are a young couple who have been doing this business for less than a year, maybe. They have a great social media game and are really transparent about their work, their workspace, etc. I'd like them to stick around.

Now I just have a bunch of loins to debone and sort into chops and tenderloins, the sirloins off those loins to can the last couple batches (I don't have a bone/bandsaw, so the pelvis in the sirloin precludes chops, sadly), and then as many bellies as I want to make into bacon. I've been considering a bacon-making party; invite people over, have them make bacon, then take it home in cure to smoke themselves (or put in artificial smoke) so it gets out of my space. I mean, having bacon is nice, but especially my very fatty bacon is a lot.

Anyhow, the processing is going to cost some money and it'll return a pretty standardized product, but it's a weight off my shoulders and I'm glad to have someone else do it. If they do a good job I can offload more of it onto them in the future, like maybe the deboning for my canning meat (imagine how easy that would make things) and I'll be able to feel out how trustworthy they are at handling the very nonstandard, fatty carcasses of my little pigs.

This does mean I'm not making any prosciutto out of this batch, which aligns with my attempt to get rid of the really noisy charcuterie fridge but does mean that in a year I'll run out of prosciutto. Maybe I need to ask for a new, silent fridge for my birthday this summer.

Anyhow: self-care choices have been made. Now I can focus a little more on my spring gardening, that landracing talk, etc. It's important, because I'm definitely less functional than I used to be. Last night as the canner cooled I spent the whole evening in the bath with the NAFEX apple family tree talk.

Yesterday was butcher day. 8 pigs, by far the most I've ever handled at once, and it helps to clear out the high numbers I've had since a missed butcher last spring, which rolled into a missed one last fall, which rolled into the missed January one. So it's lots lots lots of meat, and because they're older (and largely sows) it's pretty high quality-- dark and marbled.

There's no way to handle that much meat without a professional setup (cooler, blast freezers) or perfect weather. I have perfect weather. It was maybe up to 5C yesterday, snow on the ground, and then dropped to zero overnight and will flirt with 1-2 degrees this week, then drop to -27. So basically, I could chill the meat in totes in the snow, put the totes into the animal-proof shipping container (which is made out of metal so it really chills down at night), and I have a week to process it and then it will freeze.

So I'm going through at a strong but reasonable pace. I'm alternating between the shoulders (1-2 coppa roasts per shoulder, chunking the rest for canning and grinding) and loins (debone, loin into boneless chops, tenderloin left whole). That leaves me with a good balance of very meaty bones for stock: rib and spine which are cut across to reveal the marrow, shoulderblade and forearm bones.

The first canner load is going right now: it's "heathy canning" (healthy as opposed to pathogenic, not healthy as opposed to having calories, thank goodness) beef stroganoff recipe. I have made the following alterations: 1tsp voatsiperifery instead of 2tsp thyme, 1c runny tomato sauce instead of 4tbsp tomato paste, 1 scant tbsp garlic powder instead of onion and garlic, and I used better than bouillon beef stock instead of "broth". A canner will take about 5kg of meat this way. So far it smells good. It also uses a tremendous amount of worcestershire sauce: more than a cup per full canner's worth. We'll see how it goes.

Lotta work ahead and behind but I'm happy. This is the kind of thing I like. Tucker is here, being companionable and snuggly and lending a hand but not co-planning the butchery project with me, which is the way I like it.

Now I just need to figure out how to get stuff to the folks that need it.

I altered my pork carnitas recipe to try canning a bunch of pork al pastor, to clear out the freezer some. This uses the basic raw pack + spices method. We'll see how it turns out, but I'm hopeful.

While that was going I made some rose soap, fried up some lions mane mushrooms from smithers with a little kimchi, split and brought in some wood, picked out three roosters for canning when the canner is free and searched out more jars for them, fed everyone outside some, processed some of the grocery store food fo the animals (lots of removing elastics and emptying small cartons of cream today), and now I'm trying to decide what to have for dinner.

Given how early I woke up, I should probably feed the animals a little more, give everyone a little more straw (it's cold out now! Hard on my fingers, can't be great for them) and come in and have a bath and go to bed super early or something.

I also pulled some loin & belly chunks from the freezer to try making two soft spread sausages: one nduja-style and one bacon-style. Stuffing the sausage is my least favourite part, and it's the part that often prevents me from starting on the project, but I realized: if it's spreadable sausage I can cook (sous vide) it in vacuum bags, freeze it like that, and then snip a corner and squeeze it out as I need it. If I were smoking it and fermenting it I couldn't do that, but I'm aiming for the easy-but-done end here.

"Nduja" spread will just be fat/meat + calabrian peppers + salt + a couple drops of liquid smoke
"Bacon" spread will be fat/meat + salt + pepper + a touch of maple syrup + liquid smoke
(I could do a corned pork one, a little firmer, to make hash out of?)

That stuff will take a couple days to thaw outside in the cooler though, especially in this weather, so I'll worry about running it through the meat grinder later on.

It's snowing. My chimney is fixed. There are flashes of sunlight here and there.

I had a great talk with Tucker about stuff, was able to tap out when my emotions were big but not too big, and we had a lovely weekend.

And... I just had a really great lunch.

I have some fatty loin chops in the freezer for quick meals. I'd been eating them with a bunch of chimichurri sauce to offset the fattiness but it's winter now and my parsley/oregano isn't available for chimichurri. I also don't have a big pile of sauerkraut this year and didn't really do any potatoes (though in hindsight I did buy a big bag of potatoes which are now downstairs).

I also have two kinds of wheat kernels, marquis which is a hard red bread wheat and ac andrews which is a soft white wheat. Most recently I'd ground the ac andrews and it behaved oddly, but I had some ground left over. I decided to make some bannock and fry it in with the pork chops to use up the fat and give me a carb. I also tossed a bunch of my pickled carrots (jalapeno, garlic, carrots, salt brine) on the plate too, they're ultra crisp and definitely a veggie.

This was a pretty great choice. The bannock was perfect. It's not only the fresh grind of the flour that gave me flavour; I think there's something about soft white wheat that makes me think of tortillas. The grain had that sweet/parched/toasty/aromatic flavour from frying, with a little bit of crispy not-quite-deep-fried taste around the edges from the lard it cooked in. I'm out of milk so I added a touch of powdered milk to it (proper bannock) which gave it a ghost of sweetness. The low-gluten fully-whole flour made such a soft and pillowy bread between the flaky/crispy outsides. Then the pork chops are always glorious, about 40% streaked and marbled fat, seared and meaty and silky with the fat just on the edge of melting at serving temperature so that it's textured like butter in the mouth. And then slightly soured, cool, bright, garlicky carrots with an entirely different type of sweetness and a crunch so loud it's almost too much within the confines of my own head. They were the perfect offset to that soft and fat.

This is where I want to be at with my 75% calorie project: not constrained by rules about what I can't eat but instead drawn in by a celebration of place and relationship. Mom brought me the carrots and we made the pickles together with her and my brother; the place she got them is itself a real place (Desert Hills in Ashcroft) I could get to and see and walk the soils. They have goats that climb a tower for treats and Mexican farmworkers who make tamales and sell them from a fridge in the back and have an ongoing relationship with the site. The grain was brought up from the lower mainland by Josh (soon to be my own grain I do hope) from a, no, _the_ grain CSA in the lower mainland who experiment with different varieties and know me as the person up north who probably is the most distant CSA member. And then my pigs about whom I've said more elsewhere. Plus a little dried milk, baking powder, and salt from the store that tie me in to my civilization and back me up when I need variety or just want to engage in the worldwide commerce that humans have always done and that I'm rich and fortunate enough to partake in.

Anyhow. That was a good lunch. Outside the sun is bouncing brightly off new snow and one sunbeam falls through the curtains to lie across my hands as I type.

Time to get back to work.

Edited to add: "had some ground left over" by which I mean flour. Ground wheat is flour. Sigh.

Alright, mom & brother are coming up tomorrow sometime. They are bringing an order of fun sausage casings: I currently have a very practical set of hog casings sized for what most people think of as "normal" sausage, sort of hot dog to smoky size.

I've been wanting to make some nduja and some larger diameter sausages, maybe a mortadella or a bologna (yes, I know that's not necessarily the best size to start at for an emulsified sausage) and some more standard coarse fermented dried sausages like that. So I've picked up some sizes of beef middles and caps, as well as some artificial collagen middles and a round of umai snack-stick sizes for some fully dry sausage (I've had trouble with oxidization on these before so I'll be smoking them I think).

Also got some starter culture and external mold culture since my current stuff is Very Old and I'm wanting more certainty than just adding a bit of sauerkraut water to the sausage for lactobacteria.

Now I need to look up some recipes. I have lots of pork belly to use up especially, but I'd like to do a long low pasteurization on it if that's possible without breaking the fat. Easy on an emulsified sausage, I'm not so sure about a spreadable sausage. It will be exciting to use up my hoarded jar of calabrian peppers. It would be nice to do a sausage that contains some of my tomatillo/pepper ferment too, maybe the dried snack sticks.

I wish I hadn't packed my sausage book. It's unhelpful not to be able to get at it. Anyhow, methods needed for:

Emulsified sausage for cold cuts: grind then food processor method with crushed ice, smoking, sous vide poaching (what temp, and do I poach before or after coldsmoking). How much liquid? Do I need a binder? I know everything needs to stay painfully cold. What are typical mortadella spices? Do I bloom it after poaching? Do I want to see if I can find an all-pork hotdog recipe while I'm at it?

Spreadable sausage: multigrind, do I use a food processor? Ferment during and after smoking, at what temp? Can I pasteurize in the sous vide, and what's the lowest temp I can do that at for trich, and for how long? Does playing with casing size matter? What's the difference between belly and backfat on the finished product, and what's the difference between 50 and 70% fat content?

Dry-cured sausage: These are pretty straightforward, I need to max out the antioxidant ingredients. Maybe a pepperoni, something with sichuan peppercorn, and a fennel? Smoke everything for the antioxidant properties, then put into umai bags.

Snack sticks: What grind and meat to fat ratio is optimal? What % of fermented solids? Do these need a ferment before drying? Can I dry them in a cool room, will they go fast enough, or do I need to fridge them?

It might be fun to try a composed sausage, like a capicolla, but I won't do that this round.

I also tried a round of soap with cranberry seeds (bought) rather than ground apricot pits; they're a much larger size and rounder, so we'll see how comfortable they are in the final soap. If they work I'd like to use them; while apricot is a lesser allergen than walnut shells, I believe cranberry seeds are likely to be even less so. They do take more volume for the same effect though. This soap also contains my newly acquired "muscle and joint" essential oil mix, which smells very eucalyptus/menthol-y (not birch/wintergreeny). I should make myself some lotion with that oil mix too, I am very achy this fall, especially my fingers.

Now for something actually super great.

The guy came and killed/skinned/gutted 5 pigs last Saturday. I tossed a bunch of primals in the bathtub in ice to get the heat out, put some in the freezers (meat is insulative, so you can't pack too much in a freezer), and got to work. There are still maybe a dozen primals in the freezer -- mostly hams -- and there was a bunch of extra waste of bones and fat trim because I figure I had enough of some things for now. So:

Two dozen jars of concentrated tonkotsu stock
A dozen jars of Ellen's carnitas recipe, likely to make more
A bunch of thin-sliced ramen pork, maybe an oz or two per pkg
Several boxes of chops, mostly loin chops with about an inch to an inch and a half fatcap left on them but some leg steaks and sirlion chops
Many roasts, primarily picnic and leg roasts
A couple boxes of belly, uncured as yet
About ten pounds of ground in 1lb packages, likely to be added to
A box and a half of coppa and prosciuttini and three slabs of bacon in cure with sichuan peppercorn, juniper, whisky, and seville orange in varying amounts
A kilo and a half of "crack pork jerky" waiting for the dehydrator
A bunch of odd bits, ribs, tongues, kidneys, hearts, cheeks
Two jowls in cure and the rest untrimmed in the freezer waiting (those things take a lot of trimming, there are so many salivary glands in there)
A full 5-gallon bucket of soapmaking lard <3
40 or so portions of rendered leaf lard in single packages plus more to be packaged
10 kilos or so of sausage either in process (ground and waiting for casing) or in chunks waiting for grind
5 smoked and a couple unsmoked/uncured hocks

Additionally we smoked a bunch of bacon from the last butcher which had been in cure for long enough, and three prosciuttos and one lonzino. I need to drop my salt percentage a bit for the bacon, since it's eaten hot-- it's good for bacon sandwiches but a little too intense to eat on its own.

Plus we harvested most of the wheat, and I'd previously harvested my beauregarde soup peas. Although the peas were primarily a seed multiplication exercise, I have enough to make a small pot of pea soup from my hocks and my peas and my chive or onions. How amazing.

Some of my pepper plants are inside awaiting frost. I've been picking smallest unripe winter squash and eating them which: makes up for the bad zucchini year, encourages the remaining squash to grow better, and keeps them from being wasted by frost. Plus they're very dense and tasty, unlike zucchini which can sometimes be a bit squishy.

Mikado Black tomato is my new go-to black tomato. Very smoky tasting and it ripened!

Jory is starting to ripen, it's got nice big fruits. Unexpected and I'm interested to taste it.

Yesterday we pretty much finished rendering the soap lard, and I have a 5 gallon bucket full of it. It's a good thing I love making soap; also what an amazing object to have! Overnight last night/tonight the cooking lard from leaf fat is rendering.

21 500ml and 8 750ml jars of stock are done and in the pantry.

Cheryl has been given her meat for the chicken trade; Ron has not yet.

Tomorrow the coppas actually go into cure and 3 more primals get broken down. The pace is slowing.

The chickens hopped the fence yesterday and were in the grain trial so I chased them out, then we harvested eveything that was ripe. That means amolinka, bishop, Ble de arcour einkorn, blue durum, ceres, marquis (pr seeds planted May 6 but not the cedar isle stuff planted may 11), pelisser, pembina, reward, and white sonora. Pelissier and blue durum are exceptionally beautiful: almost lavender coloured heads with dark awns. The einkorn was green long after the other wheats started to go golden, but it was as ready as the rest of them yesterday.

Still remaining in the grain trial is rivet (which I love and really want to ripen), rouge de bordeaux, braveheart triticale, and khamut from salt spring seeds. Also the two cedar isle patches, AC andrews and marquis, are still unripe.

There were a couple stray bits of ergot in a couple of the wheats, and also in one barley. The triticale has a bunch. It seems to be easy to pick out since it replaces the grain with a huge black fungal body, and I'm further told that it floats where the rest of the grain will sink.

I brought in a bunch of broccoli raab seeds from the sorrento from William Dam seeds. I made no effort to keep it from cross-pollinating with other brassicae but I think only radishes were also blooming at that time, if anything. It'll be interesting to see. The ones I let go to seed in the greenhouse have dropped their seeds and are trying to grow me some of a fall crop already, though it may be too late for that.

The crock got half-filled with cucumber pickles. I'm pretty happy with the way the cucumbers turned out. They're very sweet compared to bought ones, except for a single bitter one (we cut off the very end and tasted them all out of curiosity). I grew boston, national, and morden pickling cukes this year. National produced first, morden and national were similar in production. Boston started later but seems to be ripening more all at once; Aug 23 or so was the first serious pick from it so it might not make it in a cooler summer.

I brought in several lovely ripe mikado black tomatoes the other day from both deck and field. I think it's in the lead as the best black tomato here this year. The tomatoes are fairly sizeable, slicers, and have great form. I will be tasting them soon. Meanwhile cabot, glacier, minsk early (the most productive) and moravsky div have set and will ripen large quantities of fruit each. Matt's wild cherry is finally hitting its stride. Katja probably will, as likely will silvery fir tree and a couple others. I think the trial can be considered a success: I learned a lot a lot a lot. The chickens have discovered the garden and are helping me eat tomatoes. Boo.

I harvested several unripe North Georgia Candy roaster squash from the vines and ate them like zucchini in a pasta sauce the other day. That was really good. I also tucked some into the pickling crock and am curious how that goes down. A lot of the squash look pretty immature, we'll see how much more heat we get this year to ripen. In future I might try to grow them up a trellis on the inside of the greenhouse/woodshed. Of the squash trials, burgess buttercup started putting out female fruit and squash earliest. Several of the kuris and the lofthouse squash are catching up, and gete oksomin and north georgia candy roaster seem to be doing ok. Fingers crossed I get some seed from something to plant next year. Again no attempt to keep things from pollinating each other; it was a hard pollinator year I think too. Likely that's because it was so warm then so cold then so warm over and over.

Though maybe bees should be in my three year plan. I'm getting some honey from a friend who has bees in town. I bet she could teach me.

I need to remember to call the bird butcher in Smithers to set a time for ducks and geese.

Yesterday was the first field day I've led in awhile at work. I had one of the summer students with me.It got some stuff done but wasn't super productive; we're learning to estimate lengths and diameters from 7.5cm to 50m or so in various configurations which requires lots of guessing then measuring. It's easy enough to just to measure first, but then your eye doesn't get calibrated and you don't get to the much faster accurate estimation stage. I've also never really been a production-speed bush worker, and the summer student is new to the bush.

That is to say, this was not enormously more productive or meaningful than any other day at work. The summer student is a standard gifted young woman who'd eager to please and fast to learn, so pleasant to work with but not a particular connection.

And still at the end of it I felt so happy, and embedded in the world, and so much myself. I think I always doubt this when I'm not on the edge of it because I can't explain it well. Heavy physical work while inside doesn't have the same effect for the most part. Just being outside all day sitting in a chair probably also doesn't, though who can sit for that long outside? But the thing that I need to make me happy is to do physical work outside for several hours on most days.

It doesn't really have to do with the rest of my circumstances much at all.

Noteworthy event of the day: saw a juvenile sandhill crane by the side of the road driving out to the bush. It looked like a young ostrich that happened to be the colour of a fawn, very gangly and non-flighted as it ran along the ditch and scrambled up an embankment. So weird.

The southern interior is basically on fire right now after the heat wave and the ensuing lightning storms. There was at least a brief period where all highways that lead up here were blocked off, though one could still go through Alberta or take a ferry up the coast and drive at the cost of an additional day or two. This is the first time I remember a community being wiped off the map by fire: sounds like a train cast a spark from its wheels and about half an hour later Lytton was gone. Normally our firefighters are pretty amazing about protecting structures but there was barely time for most people to get out... and some did not.

Things are cooling down now so hopefully some of the fires get under control but they are running fast and far right now. Part of working in forestry is basic wildland firefighting training because we're all well-suited to be co-opted into firefighting efforts; there's a government requirement that we're trained and keep basic equipment in our vehicles in case we see and can put out anything while it's small in our extensive travels.

It's good to feel even-keeled again. I have a lot of field time this summer so hopefully I can keep this feeling on tap.

Today will be deboning entire pork shoulders (google the shape of a pig's shoulder blade for a feeling of sympathy), gardening, picking up feed, and doing some duckling things. I should also plan out my cures for the prosciuttos. Sichuan peppercorn? Star anise? It'll take thinking about. I'm also considering jerky-ing some in the liquid from jalapeno carrot pickles, which sounds pretty great, doesn't it?

Wow. Well, it's been a bit.

Josh and I didn't get a bear; we went out for a day and then came home and killed a pig (one of Penny's first piglets, Apricot's sister) and made a whole lot of sausage. I'd told him that I do have a lot of meat so I didn't feel the need to spend a lot of time looking for more and he pretty much agreed.

So that was a 13-month Ossabaw: 97kg liveweight, 75kg after skinning and gutting. It was a perfect kill, we put down grain and he dropped her exactly and I got in with a really excellent stick/bleed. She was just the size that we couldn't lift her very high together but we could roll her into the wheelbarrow. Ossabaws really are the perfect size homestead animal.

We scrubbed and washed her a bunch, then strung her up in the new gutting station (it's down by the chicken coop instead of up by the house, it's a good place for it). It was a good gut too: I have the liver in my freezer, and I normally accidentally puncture the liver with my fingers. We harvested the jowls, took the head off, and halved her.

The quail got the head and the chickens got the stomach.

When mom was up we skinned by putting the halves in on the table and skinning each half, washing down the table, and then dealing with the meat: not while hanging, on other words. Pigs are difficult to skin since there's no clear demarcation between their fat and skin; they don't have a hide that can pull off like other animals. This time we lay the halves scrubbed side down on the table and basically cut our primals up off the hide. It worked really, really well. Everything stayed clean, there was high recovery, and it was just very straightforward. I think I might stick with this method.

Granted, we weren't going for nice clean primals because the goal was lots of sausage. We got 22kg, more or less, of a good 75% meat 25% fat sausage mix. I also took off a ton of extra backfat for soap, a ton of leaf lard, kidneys, heart, two coppas and a prosciuttini, the tenderloins, and a LOT of proto-bacon that I need to get into cure. Lungs and spleen (finally) got sliced and dehydrated for dog treats. All the bones went into the stockpot and I've canned 7L of stock and am currently canning another 1.5L of stock. I expect I'll get 10L of lard total. I'm going to start using the leaf lard for cooking, starting to replace butter in my diet, now that I have enough lard to make as much soap as I want.

I really love my pressure canner, this was its first run.

Sausages made were all basically from the Marianski sausage bible, except my Italian hot sausage recipe, except that I went down to 1.5% salt in all cases. Sausages were: hot Italian, Russian, Mexican chorizo, Argentinian(ish) chorizo, merguez, andouille (so good), polish, and mysliwska.

We mass-packaged most of the sausage, I need to break down some of it into smaller packages still and cure the meats. I also want to do a liver sausage so I'm thinking about that.

I feel very food secure right now. It's great.