the accidental smallholder :: diary archives

Smokin'

Yesterday I got the last pieces of the jigsaw that is our home-built smoker - a length of tubing for the propane gas bottle and a couple of retaining clips to keep it firmly connected to the boiling ring and the bottle. So last night we assembled it, set about discovering its nuances and put one of our Wiltshire cured hams in as a first try.

During the night I made adjustments to the gas ring every 3 hours and added sawdust as required. The temperature ranged from 20-40 degrees centigrade, at first, but settled at a perfect 30 degrees once I'd got the hang of it.

This morning, fairly confident that I could maintain a steady supply of smoke at a fairly constant temperature I hung the 2 sides of belly pork in to be smoked for 24 hours. I've just removed the ham from last night, boiled it briefly in water and it's in the oven baking. Photos to follow.

I'll produce a page with details of how the smoker was made later, but here are some photos from last night:

1. The boiling ring, from the Outdoor Megastore:

2. A bottle of propane gas, hooked up to the ring:

3. The smoker base. The hinged flap on the front allows access to the baffle plate where the sawdust sits:

4. The smoker cabinet. At the bottom you can see the diffuser which should distribute the smoke more evenly, and at the top the three bars for hanging food from:

5. The baffle plate with sawdust in place:

6. The smoker fully assembled with the cabinet on top of the base:

It's huge, standing over 7 feet tall, but will accommodate a lot of food to be smoked at the same time, and should work as a hot smoker too. The plan is to use this for a year or so, then build a brick smoker with integrated barbecue next summer. I should point out that it was built by my dad to a design we both refined - I wouldn't have a clue where to start, but being a former metal-worker he can clearly work wonders with the stuff.

Thirty pieces of silver

Well, the pigs have gone. It's very quiet without them and I haven't yet got out of the habit of looking at tired bread or cooked pasta and thinking "oh, the pigs will eat it".

People ask "do you get upset when the pigs are killed?" The roughty toughty answer is "not at all". But the truth is "yes, I do".

The process of loading the pigs was very smooth - they would happily follow a feed bucket. At the abbatoir, they happily followed the bucket into the holding area. They weren't going to be there long. When I got back into the Landrover, I bawled my eyes out, muttering incoherently about "just pay me in 30 pieces of silver".

However, not much later, I was thinking about roast pork, and sausages, and crisp smoked streaky bacon. And I wasn't crying.

Yes, I do get upset, for a while. But I reckon that's OK. Unless I want to be a vegetarian, I'll have to put up with it because I can't go back to buying supermarket pork and all the welfare concerns that go with it.

So if you're thinking of raising some pigs, don't be put off by the last step. Raising them well, giving them a good life and being upset when they die is part of being humane.

And that's what this is about.

Taking a breather

We had a 'To Do' weekend this weekend, something I missed off of the long list of things needing done was work on this site - I've got a load of gallery images and recipes to add and there's been plenty happening which should have been logged here (if only for our own reference). It just seems to be a time of year when there's so much to do outside.

Anyway, I'm taking the time now over lunch for a quick update.

First up the belly pork which has been in brine for the past 72 hours was rinsed this morning and left in fresh, clean cold water where it will stay for 24 hours. Then it'll be hung to dry for 24 hours, then hopefully smoked for the same period. Then it'll hopefully be bacon :O)

The 2 joints in the Wiltshire cure look fantastic (we see them every time I change the cooler blocks which are keeping the temperature down). A deep, dark brown, almost black in fact. These will be removed from the cure tomorrow morning, then I'm undecided what to do with them. One for smoking maybe, the other left to dry then glazed and baked.

Yesterday we made sausages, and it was an unqualified success. The butcher had conveniently cubed all of the meat suitable for sausages, and the addition of some back fat, salt, pepper and breadcrumbs was all that was needed. We had a couple of sausage sandwiched at lunchtime just to test them, and they were fab. If I were a perfectionist I'd say they are still a tad lean, so we added a bit more fat for the second batch, which used oatmeal for rusk instead of breadcrumbs, and included a load of sage and thyme from the garden.

Things that are cropping heavily just now:

• Peas. The Pilot are nearly finished, but the Greenshaft are proving to be incredibly productive. We spent an hour on Saturday shelling peas, and I spent another hour this morning before work. I don't think we've picked even 10% of the total crop yet. The mangetout are also cropping faster than we can pick them.


• Raspberries continue to crop heavily too, but there aren't that many left now. My mother made some very good jam with a load, and the rest are in the freezer.


• The last of the blackcurrants were picked on Saturday, and Rosemary made about 10 jars of jam. There are some left and we're going to try mixing them with raspberries for an experiemental jam, tonight or tomorrow.


• The courgettes (Defender) are coming into full crop, and welcome they are too. We used to make a wonderful Brie and Courgette soup, but the year before last seriously overdid it and neither of us has fancied it since! Give it a couple of years and we might get a taste for it again.


• My potatoes are exceeding all expectations. Massive crops of Red Duke of York and Pink Fir Apple, and what looks like a good crop of Desiree to come. All the spuds are growing on land which was inhabited by pigs last year, so I think all that manure has been good for them.

Other crops on the horizon include tomatoes (the first super sweet 100 are just ripening), maincrop onions, which look to have done well, sprouting brocolli (the first sprouts are just about ready to taste) and beetroot.

It is a lot of work at this time of year, but with a lot of produce being frozen, pickled or preserved in some other way it's a good investment for the leaner months to come in autumn and winter.

Pig processing

Yesterday we had an unexpectedly early telephone call from our butcher to tell us that the largest pig had been prepared and was ready to go, some 36 hours before we had expected. Last night saw some feverish activity preparing the basic brine to make bacon with the belly pork, and finding a suitable vessel in which to do the curing. After a moment's panic a rummage through the cupboard revealed a cool box which should be just the thing.

This morning at 7.30am I popped up the street to collect the pork, and delivered half (60lb) of it to friends near Saline, who kindly supplied us with saltpetre (since Rosemary had 'tidied' ours away...). A gift of some raspberries in return kept us all square!

Immodest as it may be I have to say the pork this year is fantastic. Just the right amount of fat and very, very tasty (we had a couple of chops for tea tonight). We seem to have learned from last year's experience not to overfeed the pigs even if they do look hungry!

A lot of the pork has gone straight into the freezer, but some choice cuts are getting special treatment. Apart from the belly, which will hopefully make fine bacon, we're going to cure a couple of pieces of leg and a shoulder. We're using a wiltshire wet cure, consisting of beer, salt, black treacle, black peppercorns, juniper berries and saltpetre (according to HFW's recipe). The odour while it was boiling was wonderful, so hopefully the end product will be equally good. IT'll soak for 3 days in the cure, then be hung to dry for a day.

I'm hopeful that we'll have our smoker ready for the middle of next week, in time to smoke the belly and the cured hams. It's based on a single boiling ring and is being built by my dad to his own design. I'll post pictures and plans here once it's completed. Our friends in Saline have once again come to our rescue, this time with the promise of oak sawdust for the smoking.

The other bit of processing we're preparing for is sausage-making, probably tomorrow but maybe Sunday. We've got the pork looked out, casings soaking in water (they come packed in salt and need a good soak and rinse before they can be used) and the Kenwood chef all primed and ready to mince. We'll try to learn from our first sausage-making exploit, when we used far too much lean meat and not enough fat. They were a tad dry, but tasty nonetheless!

We'll get the other 4 halves back from the butcher next week, this time frozen and boxed for our other customers. If anyone wants to pre-order for next year let us know!

Deed done

This morning as planned we took the pigs to the abattoir in Dunblane. Everything went extremely smoothly, thanks to some help with loading up from our friend Brian, and the benefit of experience having done this once already last year.

Rosemary shed a few tears, but to me they've been dead since the day they arrived - we looked after them and kept them safe but their fate was sealed back in March. It is kind of quiet around the place now without them, but there'll be more next year no doubt.

We should get the biggest pig back from the butcher on Saturday, so I'll be looking out some curing recipes over the next few days.

PS: Sorry for the lack of updates, we've both been laid low with the cold and Rosemary's done her back in!

Raspberries, garlic and knobbly spuds

Things keep growing, whether we're ready for them or not.

Tonight I harvested another 1 1/2 pounds of raspberries, straight into the freezer for winter crumbles and pies. I also lifted all the garlic, 30-odd heads, which has reached a good size and will keep us going for a year. Just in time too I think, since 4 were damaged by some kind of mould or rot. They were disposed of, the rest are now in the garage to dry thoroughly.

I might have a go at pickling some this year - we only tried pickled garlic for the first time a few years ago at a fine establishment called the Jolly Sportsman in Sussex where we were on holiday, loved it and have always meant to try doing our own. Since there's plenty of vinegar left from last week's pickled eggs I've no excuses.

At the weekend we had 3 types of spuds with our Sunday dinner - the Red Duke of York earlies which we've been enjoying for a couple of weeks now; a couple of Desiree which were lifted out of pure curiousity to see how well they were doing; and last but definitely not least half a haulm's worth of Pink Fir Apple. These were a total experiment. On our way up the M6 from Oasis last year we stopped at a fantastic farm shop where apart from some wonderful cheeses like Stinking Bishop we bought a bag of Pink Fir Apple spuds. They look extremely strange, but have the most beautiful flavour and texture. Anyway, we kept a few tubers back and planted them in the spring and lo and behold it looks like we're going to have a bumper crop. Yum yum.

Cat Flap Tennis

In honour of Wimbledon Fortnight, Homer and Copper have developed a new game. It's called "Cat Flap Tennis". I'm not really sure what the objective of the game is or how a player wins or loses, but it involves two cats, one on either side of the cat flap. Cat 1 slaps the flap with his / her paw. Cat 2 slaps it back. Really skilled cats like Homer catch the flap with their paw as it opens towards them. Maybe the object is not to get biffed on the nose(?).

It's quite a noisy game especially when played in the quiet of the wee, small hours of the night. Cass, of course, doesn't get involved. Or maybe he's not invited...

Anyway, seems to amuse Copper and Homer.

Recipe articles

I've added a new section to the articles section of the site for recipes. We do make a lot of stuff, using recipes we've found on the web or in books, or made up ourselves over time, so will add the best to the site as and when we use them. Today it was pickled eggs, this afternoon it's going to be mange-tout soup.

We'll only post recipes we've used ourselves, but if anyone wants to send us recipes we'll be happy to try them, add them to the site and credit the source.

Like pigs to slaughter

Our pigs are booked into the abattoir for Tuesday 13th July. As before we're borrowing a trailer from a friend - we couldn't justify the expense of a livestock trailer of our own at the moment. The butcher is also sorted, with instructions for what is to happen to which pig.

The largest pig we will keep half of and sell half of, and the belly will remain intact for bacon-making. I'm planning on building a smoker in the next couple of weeks so we can produce smoked bacon and ham, and experiment with cheese, eggs and fish. The smoker will probably be based on HFW's description in his first book - basically 2 inverted metal dustbins, the top one slighter smaller than the bottom one, on top of a heat source (I'm hoping to find a gas burner or an electric hot plate which will do the job rather than a bbq or similar), on top of which sits a tray with the wood chips. Progress (success or disaster!) will be reported here.

We've sold 4 half pigs and will be keeping a whole pig ourselves this year. It is economic - we'll make a small profit and will have a whole pig in the freezer which should do us a year.