The Art of Waiting / A Arte de Esperar

Millipede Love

pigwhisperer — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 21:53:17 +0000

For adult eyes only.

Article in Real Simple Magazine’s August 2010 Issue / Matéria Sobre a Fazenda na Revista Americana “Real Simple”

pigwhisperer — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 20:51:56 +0000

I recently wrote a feature essay for Real Simple magazine. The essay, and some lovely farm photos by Frederic Lagrange are in the August 2010 issue.

Eu escrevi recentemente uma matéria para a revista americana Real Simple. A matéria, com belas fotos do fotógrafo Frederic Lagrange já está nas bancas dos EUA!

Our Farm’s New Logos! / As Novas Logomarcas da Nossa Fazenda!

pigwhisperer — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:34:56 +0000

Actually, it is three logos; one for each of our product lines. We will use one for our coffee products, one for pork products, and one for our honey. Yaguara means “jaguar” in Tupi-Guarani, the language of the indigenous people who lived on our farm centuries ago. Since our farm is called “Valley of the Jaguar,” in honor of the big cats that roamed here only a hundred years ago, we liked the name Yaguara.

Português

Yaguara significa “Onça” em Tupi-Guarani. Por isso, é o nome que nos selecionamos para nossa linha de produtos ecológicos. Séculos atrás, onças percorriam este vale. Tribos indígenas instalaram-se nesta várzea por causa das suas terras férteis e seus nascentes de água doce. Hoje, o objetivo da Fazenda Várzea da Onça é de produzir café de qualidade e proteger o ecossistema que nos sustenta. Por praticar agricultura sustantável, a fazenda Várzea da Onça proteje não só a qualidade do nosso café como também a qualidade da vida que o envolve. Várzea da Onça é um refúgio para as mais diversas espécies de árvores e plantas nativas, orquídeas, pássaros, e anfíbios. Por preservar a natureza, a terra, e os nossos recursos, estamos promovendo sustentabilidade ambiental e ecológica.

Embrace the Sausage

pigwhisperer — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 21:42:58 +0000

Embrace the sausage. This is what Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn say in their curing, salting, smoking, and sausage-making bible, Charcuterie.

A few months ago we hosted a sausage-making workshop organized by SENNAR, an education program sponsored by the Brazilian government. Everyone participated—me, James, my sister Tatiana, all of our employees, and Oscar. (He’s a chef in a dog’s body.) Before moving to the farm, James and I also took a great sausage-making class at Chicago’s Kendall College.

Unruly class member

Class disciplinarian

All you need to make sausage at home is an electric mixer with a meat grinder attachment (most Kitchen-Aid’s have this), some hog casings, and tool to stuff or encase the sausage. Actually, you don’t even have to encase the sausage; you can simply mold the ground sausage meat into patties or fry it in a pan to add to pizza and pastas.

Hog casings are pig’s intestines that have been washed and treated. The membrane encasing sausage meat is intestine, or a synthetic collagen made to resemble intestine. You can buy real or synthetic casings at The Sausage Maker, an amazing online store for all of your sausage needs. (My former catalog of choice used to be Anthropologie. Now I spend my free time drooling over curing salts and sausage prickers.)

Back to casings—we get ours from our pigs, which we kill and butcher on our property. First, we wash the intestines thoroughly with water, then turn them inside out with a bamboo rod and wash them again. After about seven to ten washes, we soak the intestines in water and limejuice. Why all of this fastidious washing? Because the intestines run from the stomach to the anus and are filled with digested materials on their way out of our bodies. (In other words, intestines are filled with poop.)

Then we take a small plastic spatula with rounded edges and scrape the cleaned intestines. We learned this scraping technique at our SENNAR workshop. It’s miraculous! Basically, the plastic spatula scrapes away the intestines’ lining, making them translucent and as thin as rubber bands. After scraping, we wash them again, inside and out. Now they are ready to use for sausage. I am amazed by how fine and light yet incredibly strong casings are. Their strength allows casings to hold in all of a sausage’s delicious fattiness, and gives the eater that amazing snap when biting into a sausage.

In homage to our workshop, here’s a great recipe for fresh Italian sausage. What is a “fresh” sausage? It’s one that is cooked and eaten hot. It is not cured or smoked, and has no curing salts in its ingredients.

Fresh Italian sausage
4 lbs lean pork butt, cubed. (The butt is not the pig’s rear end but its shoulder. The shoulder has lots of nice marbling, which is great for sausage.)
1 lb pork fat, cubed
5 tsp coarse Kosher salt
5 tsp fresh black pepper coarsely ground
2 cloves garlic, finely minced
2.5 tsp fennel seed (Yum. This adds such dimension to the sausage)
1 tsp anise seed
Crushed red pepper flakes to taste
Medium hog casings, if making links.

First, it is imperative to KEEP YOUR MEAT COLD during the entire sausage-making process. Sausage that gets too warm will “break,” meaning the fat and protein will separate from each other when cooked, and you’ll get a mealy or crumbly texture to your cooked sausage. You want a smooth but firm texture. You want your sausage to glide not crumble! So I recommend cutting up the cubes of meat and fat, freezing it, then defrosting it just a little bit. You can put it through your grinder nearly frozen, and it comes out much better than at room temperature.

First, mix the spices together in a bowl. In your meat grinder, grind the chunks of nearly frozen meat and fat together using a coarse grinding disk.

Use your mixer (with either the palette or bread kneading attachment—not the whisk) to mix the ground meat and the spices. Ideally, this mixture should become a sticky ball, where the fats, meat, and seasonings make a “primary bind” as the charcuterie boys call it. The more you knead your meat mixture, the more the meat’s protein (called myosin) develops, and the stickier it becomes.

OK, so you have your perfect sticky ball of meat. Take a little, golf ball sized round, make a patty, and fry it on the stove. Eat it. Enjoy it. Have some wine. This is your taste test, to make sure your seasoning is on point. Before you stuff a sausage, it’s best to test it. This way, you can add more seasoning (or more meat if it’s too salty) before you go through the trouble of stuffing.

Stuffing:
The same mixer you used to grind the meat also comes with a plastic stuffer attachment. Wet your casings, slide them on to the nozzle, then turn on your machine and stuff. When your casings are filled, twist them or tie them into links. Then prick these links with a needle, knife tip, or sausage pricker to get out air pockets.

Listen, I’m not going to lie: stuffing is hard. The casings are slippery. The meat squirts out in uneven clumps. It takes practice. My first links alternated between fat little maki rolls and weirdly pencil-like things. Oh, well. They all tasted good.

Refrigerate your fresh sausage and use it within 3 days. Or, as our Kendall College teacher said, immediately if you are using store-ground meat. (It is not as sanitary as grinding your own.) Or you can wrap sausages individually and freeze.

Here’s an inspirational little quote, to get you excited about your sticky balls:
“Sausage involves craftsmanship in the kitchen, care from the cook, and devotion from the eater. There may be no finer package of protein, fat, and seasonings than that which resides within the transparent but resilient hog casing—and none more humble.”
–Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn.

Saramago Passes/ Perdemos Saramago.

pigwhisperer — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 14:00:18 +0000

“Just as definitive death is the ultimate fruit of the will to forget, so the will to remember will perpetuate our lives.”

José Saramago passed away yesterday, according to a post on his foundation’s website.

Here’s the first portion of an autobiography written when Saramago received the Nobel Prize in 1998:
“I was born in a family of landless peasants, in Azinhaga, a small village in the province of Ribatejo, on the right bank of the Almonda River, around a hundred kilometres north-east of Lisbon. My parents were José de Sousa and Maria da Piedade. José de Sousa would have been my own name had not the Registrar, on his own inititiave added the nickname by which my father’s family was known in the village: Saramago. I should add that saramago is a wild herbaceous plant, whose leaves in those times served at need as nourishment for the poor. Not until the age of seven, when I had to present an identification document at primary school, was it realised that my full name was José de Sousa Saramago…”

O escritor José Saramago morreu na sexta-feira, aos 87 anos. A escritora Nélida Piñon definiu como “imortal” e “eterno” o escritor português. Saramago sempre viverá nos seus livros.

The Coffee is turning./ O Café está amadurecendo.

pigwhisperer — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 13:05:57 +0000

It is June and the coffee cherries are beginning to ripen. This is early for us–usually the cherries ripen in early August–so the coffee harvest will begin this week. We have six people coming to pick the ripe coffee cherries tomorrow. Hopefully we will have more people helping us with the harvest next week.

É Junho, e os grãos de café estão começando a amadurecer. Geralmente as cerejas amadurecem no início de agosto. Mas em 2010, a colheita do café vai começar esta semana. Temos seis pessoas que vêm para catar o café maduro amanhã. Esperamos ter mais pessoas nos ajudando com a colheita na próxima semana.

And the World Cup winner is…

pigwhisperer — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 22:15:04 +0000

Wired UK printed this spiffy diagram of an algorithm predicting who will win the World Cup. I hope it’s true!

Sometimes a dog’s love…

pigwhisperer — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 20:35:29 +0000

Is the only thing that helps me through a tough day.
This is Oscar receiving his daily massage from Olga, his Russian masseuse.

Update: Sow Watch 2010 turns into Piglet Watch

pigwhisperer — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 21:18:49 +0000

Mona gave birth to 16 little ones, which was more than any of us expected. But many have died. (Three were stillborn, four died soon after birth from weakness, and Mona sat on one.) Now we are left with 8 and are trying hard to keep them healthy. We’ve learned that large births are sometimes more a curse than a blessing. Mona has only 14 teats, so there isn’t enough milk for more piglets than that. But hopefully these 8 will stay strong.

Rastafari not a culture, it’s a reality.

pigwhisperer — Sat, 29 May 2010 21:49:14 +0000

“When you smoke the herb, it reveals you to yourself.”
Bob Marley