Bacon Blog Day 4: A Cure for the Fever

 Community, Humor, Off Topic, Personal, Thoughts, Tips & Tricks  No Responses »
Sep 042017
 

Thank you so much for sticking with me and following along on this process.  I’m really enjoying this project and I would especially like to thank Bob for allowing me to use his blog.

So let’s cure this piggy’s belly! I’ve cut it up into smaller pieces so we can try a couple of different cures.  I’m using a recipe out of Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s Charcuterie.  I love this book and even if you aren’t even going to cure meat, it’s great reading.  I also recommend their Whiskey-Glazed Smoked Chicken and their Smoked Scallops.  I’ve also made their chorizo and someday I will try their Canadian Bacon recipe.


As I posted yesterday, the first ingredient in any cure is the pink salt or Prague powder.  But then you get to add ingredients on top of that depending on the flavors you like.  Ruhlman’s recipe calls for the following ingredients per 5 lbs of pork belly:

  • 1/4 cup Kosher salt
  • 2 teaspoons curing salt #1
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 1/4 cup maple syrup

A word about the maple syrup.  The Crown maple syrup was on sale at the grocery store and I’m a sucker for bourbon barrel-aged products.  I don’t drink bourbon, but I love the flavor.  And this stuff is nectar.  If you get a chance to snag a bottle, do it. It’s not that much more expensive than ordinary maple syrup (which already costs a fortune).

My pork belly weights about 7 1/2 pounds so I adjusted accordingly.

These pork bellies came with the skin still attached.  You can slice it off now, but  I’ve found its easier to cut it off after it is cooked.

Mix all the ingredients and then slather on the belly.  Rub it in so it comes into contact with as much the surface as possible.

Then the belly goes into a plastic bag for the next week to 10 days.  I stock up on the 2-gallon plastic bags when they go on sale and use painter’s tape for notes.  Since I’ll be doing 4 more cures, it helps distinguish the different recipes once they go into my fridge.  Tomorrow, I’ll show you a recipe for pepper bacon.

Bacon Blog Day 3: Salty Talk

 Computing, Humor, Off Topic, Thoughts, Tips & Tricks  No Responses »
Sep 022017
 

by @WidowPage

Before I show you the curing process, we need to talk about salt and how it turns pork belly into bacon.  Curing doesn’t happen without salt.  If you look back into the history of bacon, humans all over the world were packing pork belly into salt to preserve the meat.  The Chinese and Europeans started curing meat as early as 1500 BC.  According to the Pork Board of America, Hernando de Soto’s herd of 13 pigs sparked early conflicts with Native Americans who developed a fondness for the taste of pork.  His herd eventually grew to 700 hogs, not including those that were eaten or ran away to breed and become ancestors of today’s feral hogs in the Southeast.

While I don’t know the exact process de Soto’s contemporaries used to cure bacon, they had to have used salt.  Today, everyone uses pink salt or Prague Powder or Curing Salt #1.  Some might confuse it with Himalayan salt.  Don’t do that.  These are 2 different substances.

Both could be called pink salt, but only use curing salt for bacon.

Most Himalayan salt comes from Pakistan which means it should really be called Pakistan salt, but that doesn’t quite have the mystery or cache of Himalayan salt.  Thanks marketing team!  It is purer than table salt, but it is the impurities that give it its pink color.  Some people claim it has special health benefits, but I just find it tasty on baked red potatoes.

Curing salt was trademarked back in 1925 as Prague Powder by Karl Max Seiffert.  He turned around and sold his patent to Griffith Laboratories in 1934.  Here’s the super cool thing about this…I am not from Chicago but I lived here for more than 20 years and love Chicago’s history.  Griffith Laboratories was started in Chicago in the 1900s by a father and son who assumed ownership of a pharmacy.  The son backed out of attending agricultural school at U of Illinois and went Northwestern to study pharmacology.  Once he graduated, he and his father changed their company direction to “bring science to the food industry”.  They initially focused on bread and baking, but in 1934, they bought Seiffert’s patent and began distributing it across the country.  Griffith Labs still exists today as Griffith Foods and their global headquarters are in Alsip, Illinois.  You can buy Prague Power directly from them OR order it off Amazon.

Curing Salt #1

My curing salt came from Williams Sonoma.  When you buy curing salt for bacon, make sure you get Curing Salt #1.  Curing Salt #2 is meant for cuts of meat that cure for longer periods of time.  Think pastrami or ham.

Curing salt is also known as pink salt.  Manufacturers dye it this color to distinguish it from table salt.  Curing salt should NOT be consumed or used like table salt.  It contains 6.25% sodium nitrite which is what prevents the growth of botulism or the other icky things that grow in meat over time.  We will apply this salt to the pork bellies but will rinse it off once it does its job.  Do not use curing salt for any other purpose.

Tired of salt?  Fret not. Tomorrow’s post will be all about combining curing salt with other seasonings and getting on with the bacon process.  Lots of cool pictures and much fun.

Copying and Pasting File Paths – Video Edition

 Tips & Tricks  No Responses »
Dec 092014
 

Earlier this year I did a post on a new method I stumbled up on for copying and pasting file paths. I thought it was a huge timesaver, and I use it multiple times daily. Judging from the reactions I got, I’d say plenty of others have found it useful as well.

A few weeks ago, the folks at Webucator reached out to me, asking if they could make a quick video demonstrating what I show in that post as part of their free series called SQL Server Solutions from the Web. I was very happy to let them do so; here’s their finished product:

Thanks, Webucator! If you like what you see here, be sure to check out the other videos on their YouTube channel. Webucator also offers a wide variety of SQL Server training courses if you’re looking to go even more in-depth.

Copying and Pasting File Paths

 Tips & Tricks  13 Responses »
Feb 212014
 

I know most of my important file locations by heart. Whenever I need to do things that require typing out a file’s full path, such as copying a backup or taking a peek at logs, I can type those paths from memory without issue.

On the other hand, when I’m working with systems I’m less familiar with or have never seen before, my memory can’t help me. At this point I’ve always opted for copying and pasting the paths of the file into SSMS or wherever else I might need it. This works just fine, but I’ve always been annoyed that the path and file name need to be selected and copied into the editor separately.

Two rounds of copy and paste seemed a little much. There has to be a better way, and in fact there is. This has probably been present in Windows for quite a while, but I found out about it just this week. I’ve long known that holding down the shift key while right-clicking on a file brings up extra options in the context menu, but what I didn’t realize is that one of those options is “copy as path”.

This will copy the full path of the file, including the name, to the clipboard, and you can now paste it wherever you like.

The Catch

The only downside to this is that, as you can see in the image above, the file path is surrounded in double quotes. This is great for pasting into a command prompt, but you’ll need to replace them with single quotes when working in SSMS.

UPDATE: Webucator has done a video demonstrating what I show in this post. You can see all the details here.