Curing meat is apparently a lot easier than one would expect. Of course, until the invention of the fridge it was the main way to preserve meat.

Why bother when bacon and ham is so easily available on the high street, many people would say. The answer is simple. Modern curing techniques quickly inject preserves into the meat, making the end product salty and heavier. Old methods take time to extract water from the meat using salt, marinades and/or air, making it lighter. As meat is sold by the kilo and time is money, it is obvious which method has become the most popular.

But what about flavour? Meat with water extracted is bound to taste better than meat with added water and preservative. Some of the best bacon and ham I have tasted went through a process of curing in a vat of stout and molasses for 4 weeks before being cold smoked for 2 days.

There are hundreds of recipes for curing meat the traditional way, all using different processes but all have in common the ingredients of salt, sugar or air. The secret is to remove the water from the meat.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is a great curing enthusiast and has a number of recipes and ideas in his Meat book, from dry curing with salt, to different brine mixes and smoking. The basics are as follows;

When curing in a brine mix always follow a concentration of 1kg of salt to 3 litres of water. Adding herbs and spices to taste.
When dry curing use handfuls of salt and/or sugar to extract the water from the meat. A pork bellie for bacon takes about a week of rubbing salt in every day, whereas a whole leg of pork may take 4 6 weeks left in a box with weight on top.
Air drying is not strictly a way of curing meat but of maturing and intensifying the flavour of previously cured meat.
Like air drying cold smoking is not a very effective curing process unless the meat is salted first. It does however add flavour and contribute to the preserving process.
Curing does not make the meat last indefinitely but as a rule the more water extracted the longer the meat will last.

For more information and recipes on curing we suggest a visit to Hugh Fearnley Whittingstalls www.rivercottage.net and visit his forum to talk to people on-line who already cure their own meat.

When I went to America to play rugby two years ago, the host club arranged for me and the other visiting rugby players (four chaps from New Zealand) to work for a local builder. Over the three months I was there I worked my way up from clearing the building site, to hauling lumber, to actually being able to strap on a tool belt (slung low, bum-crack showing, as is the vogue), cut bits of wood and nail them to other bits of wood.

One day we were building the main supporting wall for a three-storey house. We’d measured, cut and nailed the wall – all that remained was for us to erect it. We nailed the base of the wall in place, and the four of us took up our positions to push the wall upright.

About half-way up, the supporting nails began to pop out from the foundations and the wall crashed down upon us. Brandon and Derek, who were at the edges of the wall managed to sidestep impending doom, but Mark (the boss, a South African man-mountain, apparently impervious to pain) and I (not impervious to pain in any way, shape or form) were caught in the middle of the wall, trapped beneath the studs. Mark managed to support the wall enough for me to scramble free, allowing Derek, Brandon and myself to then free him.

We were all pretty shaken. After I’d stopped crying, we packed up our kit, drove back into Park City and got very, very drunk.

Without being overly dramatic, the incident could have killed us.

This story illustrates the relationship I have with DIY. Not only am I crap at it, it wants me dead.

I’m much more confident with a whisk than a nail gun however, so when a bag of pig cheeks came my way, I decided to turn to my comfort zone that is the kitchen and turn them into bacon. As you do. DIY on my terms.

The process of dry-curing is actually quite simple. In a tupperware box, mix ten parts salt with one part demarera sugar. I added some freshly ground black pepper and lots of thyme to my cure. You can add whatever aromatics you like.

Take your pork – you can pretty much cure any cut. I used pig cheeks as this is what I had, but pork belly is more common – and rub the cure into the meat, taking care to cover all of the surface. Place the salted meat in a container – a wooden wine crate for larger cuts, or a tupperware box for smaller pieces. Cover with a clean tea towel and leave somewhere cool. Smaller pieces can be stored in the fridge and this is ideal. Seal your box of cure.

After 24 hours revisit your bacon. There will be liquid in the bottom of the box. Drain the liquid and rinse out the box. Brush off any excess cure from the meat, then apply a fresh dose. Return the meat to the box, cover and put back in it’s cool place.

Repeat this process for 5 days. At this point you can either dry the bacon with kitchen towel and hang it in a cool, draughty place, cutting off pieces as you need it, or wrap in greaseproof paper and store in the fridge.

What you use your bacon for is basically down to trial and error. My cured cheeks are a little too salty to be sliced and fried for breakfast – I’ve found that slicing the rashers and soaking them for 30 minutes or so in cold water sorts them out. When chopped finely and used as a base for a pasta sauce, or in a cheesy quiche, as you would use pancetta, they are perfect.

Looking at the economics of it, a pack of streaky bacon (6 slices) from my local shop costs £2.49. I got my pig cheeks for free, the cure cost me £1.38 in all, and I have a couple of kilos of bacon/pancetta to use that will last me the next few months. Good, no?

Now I’m not saying that you shouldn’t buy bacon and that you should always make your own. If your local butcher cures their own, they probably do a better job than you could, if only through experience. But you could also safely argue that the supermarket’s offerings are likely to be packed with added water and whatever else. It’s down to choice. If you fancy having a go at making your own, then great. But if you don’t, buy from someone who Does It Themselves and can tell you the process and exactly what’s been added to the pork.

So you see, DIY does not necessarily involve nails or death. It can simply mean a decent meal at a decent price.

P.S.: On the same day as the Falling Wall, my Kiwi friend Troy shot a nail through his foot with a nail gun. The nail missed every bone in his foot and was extracted easily. Another Kiwi friend Doug fell twenty feet from a ladder while painting the outside of a house. He landed on his arse and apart from feeling incredibly embarrassed, was otherwise unscathed. It was an extraordinary day.

Troy, Doug and myself now always make our own bacon. Our shelves, however, are quite wonky.

After near constant jibing from my colleagues I’ve finally gotten around to writing a new article! A lot has happened since I last wrote. BigBarn’s relationship with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and River Cottage has led to a bout of ‘cottaging’, with home-cured bacon, beer and marmalade being forced upon my girlfriend/taster/guinea pig.

The New Year has conjured a few new recipes though, and here’s the first!

Cheese and Onion Tart with a Stilton Sauce

This is a very versatile dish – there’s an almost limitless list of ingredients that could be added to the filling, but a nice smoked bacon or pancetta would come close to the top.

For the pastry:

1 part fat – lard or butter to be precise
2 parts plain flour
A drop or two of cold water.

For the filling:

3 large onions, sliced into rings
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
100g Stilton, roughly chopped
100g Cheddar, roughly chopped
3 tsp Balsamic Vinegar
2 tsp sugar
A glug of Olive Oil
A bay leaf
Salt, pepper

For the sauce:

A couple of glugs of single cream
A bay leaf
A handful of Stilton crumbs
Salt, pepper

Whenever I make pastry I judge the amount by pouring flour into a bowl set on scales and guessing at how much I need. Being overly cautious, I generally make too much, but judge it as you will. I then add half as much fat, normally butter, but sometimes half-butter, half-lard if I have it.

Use your fingertips to mix the fat into the flour until your have a breadcrumb-like mixture. Add a couple of drops of water, and use a knife to mix to a dough. You may need to add more water, but please – a drop at a time! When the mixture has bound into a ball, pop it into the fridge and get on with the filling.

Heat the olive oil and add the sliced onions and garlic. Cook over a medium heat until the onions are well cooked and translucent. Add the bay leaf, season very well with salt and pepper, and add the sugar. The sugar will start to caramelise the onions. As they begin to brown, add the vinegar and stir well. Reduce by a third and remove from the heat.

Take the pastry from the fridge and roll into a 0.5cm thick round. Flour a baking tray and place the pastry on the tray. Spoon the onion filling into the middle of the pastry, then sprinkle the cheeses on top of the onions. Fold up the edges of the pastry over the filling, trapping the filling, but leaving a gap in the middle, through which the cheese can poke. Bake in a hot oven (200°C) until the pastry is golden and the cheesy filling hot and bubbling.

While the tart is in the oven, make the sauce. Pour the cream into a suacepan and add the bayleaf. Season the cream. Add the stilton and over the lowest heat possible, heat the cream until the cheese has melted, stirring all the while.

Serve the tart with boiled new potatoes, some savoy cabbage or mange toute, with the sauce poured over.

There is a great deal of cheap meat around at the moment. There is the cheap and nasty meat, like mechanically recovered meat in burgers, or, the meat I like, the cheap, bargain meat, cuts left over from the festive season.

Understandably everyone wants to spoil their family over the festive season and show off to friends by serving the expensive cuts of meat. As a result there is a lot of mince around at the moment. At my local farm/butchers shop well hung, lean beef is selling for £1 per LB delicious for chilli con carne, spag bol, cottage pie or home made burgers.

Burgers there’s a story. Everyone tells me that people on low incomes cannot afford good food. My 1lb of quality mince made 6 burgers almost quarter pounders by the time I had added finely chopped onion, Worcester sauce, egg, pepper, salt and a few bread crumbs. I am sure the ready made versions full of preservatives and mechanically recovered meat cost more than this.

And sausages, did you know that a sausage cannot be sold as a sausage unless it has more than 65% meat. Anything with less meat can be called a banger or chippolata. Our local Barford Banger Sausages are 84% meat due to local customer demand.

Or for the real foodies. Pig’s head brawn, yum. Many butchers have to throw the head away and a charged for doing so. The going price therefor is £1 per head. The one head I cooked last week for 4 hours made enough brawn for lunch for 8 people and a further 4 portions for the freezer.

So there you have it good food at low prices. But a little work, or if you are like me pleasure, in making something that tastes good.

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