Hello,
Right after the butchery it seemed as if we had meat hanging just about everywhere in the house. I was astonished how much there was and got busy building the small room there beside the pantry to keep it all in over the long term. It has turned out to be handy and also provide space to keep the associated bins, boxes buckets ,pots that were used. So there it hangs and I also think it contributes to a certain atmosphere I like because as mentioned it does look good. And it smells as well which was also an interesting progression to follow and maybe somewhat foretelling because it was like this. I realize that that meat was not just hanging there inertly waiting to be eaten. That there were certain biological processes set in motion and continuing that had to do with temperature and humidity along with the preparation steps I had taken initially. The whole idea of this kind of meat preparation is that the structure of the flesh undergoes a change, that a kind of bacterial activity begins a process of rotting we hope to manipulate to our advantage, just like brewing cider. As time went on and I could observe in a way the process, because the meat is hanging right there where we enter and leave the house constantly, I began to see it as a battle developing -" began to see"... began to smell is how I should put it and not an unpleasant smell, don't draw any unwarranted conclusions. It was a salty, smokey classical ham and bacon smell, most appetizing even mouth-watering. But there was another underlying smell more sour and pungent. At times it would seem the one smell was dominant over the other and this would go back and forth, and was, unsurprisingly, most obvious during the warmer periods. I found nothing really unexpected about this all because it passed in my understanding that ideally the process should last two full seasons of warm and cool cycles having to do with the development of the right taste and texture of the meat.
Well, this is all fine, but entirely abstract and academic because I jumped the schedule and as I mentioned cut into the one ham after only one cycle of warm and cool this recently passed Christmas. At first I was skeptical but the taste was not unfamiliar. Never really having eaten meat prepared like this before I was prepared to accept new tastes that may even take some getting used to and after a day or so with no apparent ill effects, my thinking continued being that I was just getting accommodated to eating flesh again now after a long period of not eating flesh. That changed after baking a piece of the ham yesterday which had the effect of intensifying the taste to the point where I found it too strong to be pleasant and realizing, no, conceding, that something, at some point had taken a wrong turn. Was it the red wine, the storage where everything looked so good, the impatience? I don't know maybe it could even go back as far as the age of the pig when slaughtered. Where this pig was intended and bread to be fatted and killed within 6 months of birth, we had her two years. Well, I'll hold on to that remaining meat and see what happens while at the same time hoping to uncover what might have gone wrong.
Greetings,
Don Wagstaff
Topic: Had to stay determined...... (Read 4955 times)
