Finally, the bacon left the bathroom
Dear Friends – Following my last news telling you about our new charcuterie shower workshop here at World’s End, I have an update for you.
The air-cured Lonzino is still hanging in the cool and airy shower room as are the two large – and probably by now very, very salty – pieces of Guanciale. BUT Klady’s bacon has been an absolute and total disaster.
I was warned when I heard her cursing in the garden as she brought the ‘bacon’ into the house after resting it in the second fridge.
As an APPROXIMATE cook (she never really follows recipes), her big mistakes were to leave it for just those few extra hours in the salt bed and then ‘settling’ it down in the fridge for a further two days without a plastic cover (which critically, it turns out, would have preserved the moisture).
As an eternal optimist, Klady bought a large bottle of bourbon and soaked the smoking chips in it in the hope the bourbon would envelop the bacon in an interesting taste while moisturising it at the same time.
I learned that during this process, the normal cook’s recipe is one dash of bourbon and spices for the wood chips; one good and hearty slurp of bourbon for the cook! Continue on until the bottle is empty.
And so it went. The massaged bacon concoction entered the oven for the slowmo smokin’ and juicy bacon bake. The salty seaside scent was totally captivating and even SirD was excited, looking forward to a dinner of hot bourbon smoked bacon and eggs.
When all the cooking was done unfortunately it really didn’t meet the most fundamental culinary expectation, edibility.
One absolutely and totally inedible huge hunk of bacon – squishy soft, tender and so very salty that any self-respecting anchovy or pickled herring would choose to die before being included in this recipe!
What did Klady do? She chucked the bacon into the garbage bin in the hope it would kill any passing vermin and then invested in a new set of kitchen scales and updated her spreadsheet to keep track of her culinary experiments.
Whether these measures will work I really don’t know, but for my sake, keep your paws crossed.