Bacon vs Bacon IMHO

Posted on by March 8, 2015

The other day we were in the mood for BLT’s and still had a package of Bacon in the fridge from Ilowski Sausage Company on St. Clair Highway in East China, Michigan.

My Conclusion: Not all Bacon is Bacon.

IMHO Joey Ilowski’s Bacon is by far the best bacon in South East Michigan that I know off. I found comparable bacon sold at the Sparr Mall close to Gaylord, Michigan but can’t remember the manufacturer and also at Geier’s Sausage Kitchen in Sarasota, Florida.

Cooking and eating bacon, that does not curl up too much when frying, has just the right amount of salt and does not burn in the pan from all the sweeteners in it makes me wonder why we need all that added sugar/corn syrup/ dextrose and all that added water in it.

In my opinion bacon should be trimmed pork bellies, either dry cured or cured in a brine, not pumped with all the added stuff in it. It should be kind of firm to the touch before you fry it and the only thing coming out of it during frying should be the rendered fat.

Make it a point and try some of what I consider the real stuff and see if you agree with me.

But again I might be wrong, after I had about 20 people sample Kielbasa from two different suppliers, one gentleman told me that he really liked the one with all the fillers and sweeteners in it, so go figure!
May be it is the sweet stuff in the bacon that makes it the favorite to put on anything.

Bacon should not be made from Beef or Turkey.

With Bacon – PORK RULES!

I love Bacon, but I am still a purist, there are occasions which call for bacon and others which are over the edge.
Bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches are great on a hot summer evening, bacon with eggs for breakfast, it belongs there, but already when you buy the more expensive Black Angus Ground Beef to get that added taste profile, why would you want to change the taste and add bacon?
It belongs in a Bavarian Style Sauerkraut, German Potato Salad and many other dishes were it was used already for centuries.
It does not belong on Hamburgers or even worse covered with chocolate, as a syrup for milkshakes, bacon flavored ice cream and all the other bacon based products they are trying to convince us to buy.

But hey this is only the opinion of this guy!

The Basics of making Fresh Sausage

Posted on by March 5, 2015
Geier's Nuremberger Bratwurst, Picture courtesy of Geier's Sausage Kitchen

Geier’s Nuremberger Bratwurst, Picture courtesy of Geier’s Sausage Kitchen

During the Wurst Party we ran yesterday a few questions came up which I would like to answer.

The definition of Fresh Sausage is that it is raw meat and the most common ingredient in it is Pork, to be even more specific the Pork Shoulder Butt or Boston Butt is the cut that is very often used.

The easiest to make are Sausage Patties, which is Ground Pork, which should have at least 10% fat, mixed with the seasoning of your choice, formed into patties and fried before consumption.
No equipment needed and it is excellent with a Pork sausage seasoning, Italian, Polish or any other seasoning mix you prefer.

If you want to make Sausage links you will need a contraption to transfer your seasoned meat mixture into a casing. This is called a sausage stuffer.
Using natural casing, hog casings will give you an Italian Sausage size diameter, while sheep casings are used for breakfast sausage. If you use edible collagen casings instead, 30 mm diameter replace the hog casing and 21 mm the sheep.

As Sausage is a matter of personal taste, any recipe should be tried in a small amount and adjusted to your liking. As we cooked some samples right away at the above mentioned party, some of the guys thought that the amount of crushed red pepper in the Hot Italian was not enough, while others thought it was just right.

Seasoning: I premix the herbs and spices if there are more than 2 in the recipe, see the Bratwurst recipe on Inge’s Kitchen. That way the sausage always tastes the same and it is a lot easier to weight at the time of making the Wurst.
I always weigh up my spices in grams, it is a lot more exact and there are gram scales out there that are easily affordable.

When you make sausage at home you are not bound by the rules and regulations that commercial sausage kitchen have to adhere to. This brings me to Water.

I learned a long time ago that “dissolving” the salt and seasoning in water and pouring it over the meat makes the mixing process a lot easier. The amount of water is up to you. A little bit of advise, if you make a breakfast sausage size Wurst I would add a little more water, as it is a lot easier to force the meat through the thin tube on the stuffer to get it into the casing.
One of my friends asked me why I list the water in pounds and not in ounces. During the time we made sausage in our store, the scale was always right there, but a measuring cup was usually hard to find and if you want to make a specific amount of sausage for a custom order, adding the weight of the meat, water and seasoning together was a lot easier to calculate the final weight.

Grinding your own meat: Meat will warm up a little during the grinding process, so push it through the grinder as fast as possible. If you want to grind the meat multiple times to make a finer sausage, like a fine Bratwurst, add chipped ice or ice water to keep it cold. For the Sechsaemter Bratwurst listed on Inge’s Kitchen, I weigh some water in a bowl and set it in the freezer until it is frozen around the outside perimeter and mix it in while grinding.

So once you get started, make a smaller batch, adjust your seasoning, salt and other ingredients, be it cheese, onions, green peppers, to your liking and make sure to record the changes for future times.

 

Making Wurst!

Posted on by February 11, 2015

Last week I found Ground Pork for under $2.00 lbs at our Kroger store, it was very lean and even organic. So I bought 2 -1 lb packages to make the Wurst – Base Recipe posted on our ingeskitchen.com in the Lunch Meats and Sausage section.

Threw the meat in a bowl, weight up the 6 different ingredients, to keep the story true, I added 2 tsp whole mustard seeds, mixed it all together.

Transferred it on to aluminum foil and wrapped it tight. In less than 10 minutes I had the Wurst ready to go in the oven.

The Wurst was almost too lean and was a little try, after adding some mayo or butter to the rye bread and a crunchy pickle with it, it tasted great.

Could have used 1 lb of the Pork and a pound of 80% lean Ground Beef.
I usually grind my own meat (Pork Shoulder Butts) which gives me the right fat content.

Total Price under $4.50.
End product about 2 pounds with the spices and water added so cost is $2.25 per pound compare with $6 to $7 per pound in the Lunch Meat counter of your Deli.

So a saving of at least $ 8.00 for a high quality product.

 

Why waste my Time to make Wurst?

Posted on by January 19, 2016

Let me first refer you to my post Wurst – Sausage and Luncheon Meats to explain why I use the German word.

I will cover the “why” here and also a simple way to start this hobby without buying all the expensive equipment and finally I will cover for you the basic machines you will need if you want to go further into the art of Wurst making and some of those Tim, the Toolman, Taylor gadgets which really make it fun.

The Why:

  • Price – A pound of Ground Meat is a lot cheaper, than finished Lunch meat.
  • Fat Content – Especially if you grind your own meat at home you can easily keep this under control.
  • Salt – Most commercial Wurst is made with a large amount of salt, which can be cut down to where you still like the taste and off setting it with other herbs and spices.
  • Unnecessary Ingredients – Go and read the labels and tell me if you need all that extra sugar in the forms of sugar, dextrose, sorbitol, corn syrup and whatever else they find to make more money during production.
  • Taste – If you make your own you can (probably after a few tries) get the taste to exactly what you like.
  • Health in General – Besides the above mentioned points you can select to use the meats that you consider like buffalo, ostrich, turkey or other poultry. Here I mean the good stuff, not the mechanical de-boned ingredients you find in many Lunch meats.

I could come up with more reasons but I do believe I made my point, so let us look into what you have to buy to get started with your first attempt.

Two ingredients are needed:

Pink Cure and Smoke flavored Salt

The Pink Cure can be ordered online from places like Butcher and Packer in Michigan and the Smoke Salt can be replaced by Liquid Smoke.

And if you don’t own one already you need an inexpensive gram scale.

There is no other special equipment needed that is not found in any normal kitchen.

It really is easy to make!

If you want to try it go to our Wurst – Base Recipe – on our Inge’s Kitchen website.

So you made the sausage and liked the taste.

It is time to buy some equipment.
First I would invest in a meat grinder. Followed by a 5 pound Sausage Stuffer and if you want to turn into “purist” you will have to get yourself a smoke house.

I will add a list of helpful equipment soon.

A Restaurant remembered

Posted on by April 23, 2014

I know this post only fits into this blog because I want to reminisce about a remarkable restaurant which only lives on in our memories.

The idea for this post came to me when a friend send me a truly well made picture comparison of today’s Detroit to times gone by. You can find it at detroitturbex.com with the, in my opinion, fabulous slide show which you can enter by clicking here.

Since I came off the boat from Germany in the late, late 60’s I called the Detroit area my home and as my wife was born in the city, these roots go even deeper.

One picture in the slide show mentioned above made me think of the time when I worked at the largest German Sausage Manufacturer in the city. In particular of one wholesale customer, a chef and his wife, who stopped by at least once a week to pick up salamis, heavy smoked hams and more for their restaurant. So I looked if I could find some information about that restaurant on the net and came across only one article.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

The original can be found in an archive article from the Ann Arbor Sun in October 1976.

In the paragraph directly under the Red Wing picture Arminio’s Villa Venice is mentioned.

As described in the article it was a restaurant on Woodward, north of East Grand Boulevard, which is now an empty lot.

The set up was unique, as you entered there was a Grand Piano sitting on a podium to the left, where the chef sat down a few times a night to skillfully play some classical music. Straight ahead was a large show window giving you a glimpse of the nicely stocked walk-in wine cooler. The seating areas were on different level overlooking the Piano. On the walls were pictures from the chef’s life, some of them were when he was active in movies and if I remember right one was with him and Vincent Price.

Once seated they brought you a nice size antipasto platter, before they even took your order. I thought that taking care of the owner at my place of work gave us special treatment, but then I looked around and noticed that all customers were treated that “special”.

I remember the different Italian dishes our group ordered were all delicious and plentiful. After Arminio’s wife recognized me, he prepared a special desert for us and came out and joined us with a bottle of his excellent house wine. This evening was truly remarkable and at repeat visits the food was always terrific and the treatment was the best.

This was really a unique restaurant well worth remembering and an excellent example of a good thing that was and is close to extinct nowadays.

Natural

Posted on by January 20, 2014

The other day my wife was asked to pick up some chicken breasts for a dinner at our church from a membership warehouse, as the local supermarkets did not run any specials that week.

The conversation I overheard came to the added water contend of the chicken. I wrote an article about this in a previous post and would just like to add that the word “NATURAL” on a package nowadays can include also any “natural” ingredient like water and other “natural” flavorings. This will again give you a good chance to pay a relatively high price for water. Check your packages it has to be stated on it somewhere if it is more than minimal processed.

The lady my wife talked to was actually surprised that “natural” on the packages she checked does not mean that there is no water added.

Here is the link to my previous article.

Buying Meat

Posted on by February 5, 2014

The way we buy meat for our house.

I am not and never was a believer in buying whole Sides of Beef, Beef Quarters, Freezer Bundles and whole Hogs for my home use. I always tried to analyze a customers needs for larger quantities meat buys to actually give them the most for their money with the least amount of waste.

So after we sold our store we had to start implementing our meat shopping to fit our lifestyle.

We are meat eaters and a dinner without meat very seldom happens at our house. (I really mean very, very, very seldom)

The first thing we did was to analyzed how we eat and what we need for three month. How many roasts, steaks, pork chops, ground beef etc. we should have on hand. For this we actually made a list of dishes we cook and how often we want to eat it in that period. (Very helpful is our monthly menu calendar, which gives us variety and menu ideas, which we loosely follow as left-overs or social events often screw up the best intentions to stick with this list. Our way of setting up our menu will be in the next post.)

So let us say we have Steaks twice a month, Hamburger dishes once a week, Schnitzel type dishes once a week, Chicken dishes once a week, Fish once week and some kind of roast once a week, one day is for left overs and I have to take my wife out about once a week to keep the peace at home.

So let us start with the Chicken first.

Chicken breast, we usually buy in 5 pound packages boneless if possible on sale and always check that they are not pumped. (see my post from 12/13/2011). If we can, we buy boneless chicken thighs (which are usually cheaper) for our dishes cooked with sauce(s), such as Hungarian or Italian style. Occasionally we buy a fresh whole chicken for use the next day, our Cajun Chicken recipe is one of our favorites for this.

Fish we buy fresh or frozen as needed.

Now where is the Beef!

For Roasts we buy, in the colder season, chuck pot roasts and English cuts (now called a boneless shoulder pot roast) on sale, usually when they offer buy one get one free and the price per pound is not out of line. As this type of roast is usually braised, a firm to the touch piece of meat with not too many big chunks of fat in it is sufficient, it could actually be a piece of USDA Select graded meat.

For Roast Beef, we buy either a whole Sirloin Tip and cut it up to what we need (roast, thin cut steaks, stew and pieces for shish-kebob. I also use this for homemade Beef Jerky. For all this a “Jaccarder” is the most handy gadget to own!!) or we buy bottom rounds. We either buy whole pieces from the membership club or again when they are on sale. In my opinion a top quality USDA Choice graded piece is a must here!!! These roasts if they are done right are excellent for the rotisserie.

Steaks:
We usually buy a whole Beef tenderloin and process it to our needs or as I am fond of Rib Steak, be it bone in or as Ribeye/Delmonico steak we splurge once in awhile on them. As these are a treat, they have to be of the best quality (again at least USDA Choice and if Black Angus they have to be Certified Black Angus, as most other advertised Angus meats just do not come up to my quality standards.)

Hamburger or Ground Beef:
Bought from a reliable source or if I can I buy chuck roasts and grind my own. As I believe that parts of the chuck have a fuller taste than pieces from the hind I prefer Chuck, but when it is ground, do you really know which part it comes from? Fat contents, we go for about 15%, as you need some fat to add to the taste.

As I grew up with more pork in our diet than beef or any of the other meats, I have to say I am very fond of it. Forget the high priced Veal most of the time as it can be very easily substituted with Pork. Osso Bucco (Italian style Veal shanks) – try making the dish with boneless pork chops (follow our recipe), all our friends love it and it does not break the bank. Schnitzel, why buy Veal Scallopini ($15.00 per pound) if Pork Sirloin Pieces ($ 2.50 per pound) do the same and most of the people will not even notice the difference. I usually buy whole bags (5 lbs) of pork sirloin for about $ 2.00 per pound ( Talk to the meat manager for a special price on whole packages, should be cheaper as he has less work, less spoilage and you will loose some weight from the meat juice in the package.)

Whole boneless pork loins, again watch that they are not pumped, will give you chops and roasts, see the pork roast recipes on our Inge’s Kitchen website.

I mentioned pumped a few times here and refer you again to my post from 12/30/2011.

Even if it is called all natural, if they add any type of broth or solution you are paying for water, which you have to consider in your product cost.

 I have a few links here to recipes at Inge’s Kitchen. This is one of the other websites we publish and maintain.

 

Freezer orders

Posted on by January 18, 2014

During my lectures and some conversations it seems that buying larger amounts of meat(s) is coming back in fashion.

So let us break down the purchasing of a Side of Beef or Hindquarter:
If you have a large family and use all of it up in under 6 month you might want to look into it.
But let me point out the positives and negatives of this concept.

.

The pluses are:

  • You will have a freezer full of meat and, if you plan a day ahead, you can have meat dishes without running to the store, ergo savings in gas.
  • The price per pound “is” cheaper.
  • It is wrapped for you in airtight packages to go right into the freezer.
  • It is already frozen, using less of your home energy for the initial freeze.
  • All packages are marked.
  • You will usually receive an inventory list.

Makes life easy, right!

Now let’s look at the negative:

  • The savings in comparison over regular counter prices are only there if you have your order straight cut through. If your change the cuts, as an example if you do not like Top Sirloin Steaks and have them ground up into Hamburger, you change a higher price cut into a cheaper one, you might just have lost all your savings from the whole Side of Beef.
  • The Steaks and Primal Roasts will be long gone and you will have all the secondary (cheaper) cuts left over in your freezer, you had better get used to soups and stews.
  • When you buy a whole Side or Hind you also buy all the fat and the bones, which you cannot use and can amount, depending on the yield, to half of your purchase price!
  • You will have to run an extra freezer, this matters only if you don’t use one already.

The next argument I often heard was: “Oh, I buy direct from the farmer.”

Let’s break this one down.

Not many farmers I know of still kill their own beef. Yes, one of my butcher friends, with his business out in the Boonies, used to be hired by the farmer(s) in his area for that reason, but the last time he did it was quite a few years ago and he then was more often hired to butcher hogs.

The small local slaughter houses (if they didn’t close the doors yet, like many, that I know of) are government inspected, so there should not be any safety concerns about your meat. But not many have a Government Grader on hand to give your cow (it is actually a steer or heifer) the, in my opinion, desired USDA Choice rating. So you are in the end, buying “ungraded” beef. (See my post on Inspection and Grading)

To sum this up, if you have a larger family, use all the cuts as they are straight cut and run a freezer no matter what, this might be a way for you to save.

My suggestion is, if you had a freezer order like this before, take your inventory sheet (we always supplied one for our customers), which should include the weights of the different cuts, go to your supermarket or meat department and mark down the prices in the counter. Multiply these with the weight, add it all together and actually see how much money you saved. (If you don’t have any of these lists and want to check into it write me a comment and I will post one of my old cutting tests for you.)

freezerbundles1Another way to buy are those Freezer Bundles. Before you buy any of these do the same as I suggested in the previous paragraph.

Now to the next step: Check your newspaper, flyers in the mail or online meat department advertisements and do the same as above. You might see that buying specials saves you more money than freezer orders or bundles. (Always figure in the time and price of wrapping your meat for the freezer.)

 

In the next post I will go into sensible ways to buy and save, (IMHO)

 

 

Are we making ourselves sick?

This post is a little off the normal Eat’s and Meat’s subjects, but I think it might confirm what I believe for many years.

We are making ourselves sick?

  • A segment on Fox news the other day had two doctors talking about the increase of nut allergies in our young people over the years.
  • We have problems with drinking the local water when we go abroad and Montezuma’s revenge is the best known example/proof of this statement.
  • From what I can see the severity of the food based illnesses is also on the rise. It seems like a case of Salmonella poisoning, which has been around forever, went from a couple of days of diarrhea to a necessary visit to the emergency room.

Are these the results of our strive towards extreme sanitation?

Many “experts” already stated, that using these antibacterial hand soaps are of no beneficial value, even no good for you as they also destroy all the good bacteria we need for our overall health. But after many of these studies you now see antibacterial wipes at many public places and mothers running after their kids with these wipes at the playgrounds.

Now the question is do those wipes actually destroy the bad guys: “The Viruses”?

According to my research the answer is “NO”. See article at ConsumerReports.org if you don’t want to take my word for it.

My opinion is that we have to keep our immune system in tact and fighting.

To give you an example from my experience. Two little neighbor girls, one played in dirt and ate grass, the other one did not like to get dirty and ran home quite often to clean up. Guess what, the girl playing in the dirt and eating grass never got sick and the cleanliness obsessed girl caught every cold coming around.

That brings me to my meat market story.

How things changed over the years.

When I first started working in a meat store we had saw dust on the floors, which made evening clean up very easy. We gave skinless hot dogs to all our customers kid(s) and it quite often happened that these doggies dropped right into the sawdust. Mom took the dog wiped it on their coat and it went right into the kids mouth. By the time we opened our own store, the government (inspectors) outlawed the use of saw dust. The hot dog fell and mom’s request was if we could rinse it. A short water rinse and the hot dog made it back to the kids.

By the time we sold our business the common response to the hot dog drop was: “Don’t you touch it, it is contaminated!!!”. I still wonder how our generation and all the generations before us ever survived long enough to keep the human line alive.
I believe, becoming wimpy all the way we cut down on our chances.

So live your life and hope to survive!

 

The Best Smoked Trout ever

Looking at old photos, made today a day which brought back memories from the time I was just married to my beautiful wife forty years ago and welcomed into her family.

There was a family friend who started and ran the Milford Bay Trout Farm in Ontario, Canada.

Ralf Uhde passed on a few years ago but the family trout farm still exists and is run by his son and daughter in law.

I remember on visits there the exquisite smoked Trout Pate he made from scratch, even growing the garlic for it in his garden and the in-house smoked trout, which always was good to the last bite. This time has gone by and with the hustle and bustle of life, we only saw them on a few special occasions like weddings, where he always happened to have a few samples along to enjoy.

Links

Remembering the smoked trout and the pate even after all this time makes my mouth water and as I am retired now, I believe I will make it a point to revisit there sometimes this summer and enjoy besides the trout, the beauty and serenity of the place.