Since Prosciutto time is right around the corner, it’s now time for a late (but nonetheless timely and accurate!) second installment.

If you’ve successfully purchased and salted and the required meat according to my first post, you’re now ready to make the magic happen and actually cure the meat of most of its bacterial evils through the use of a flavourful brine.

You’ll need:

Tools:

• A clean bin with a lid that your prosciutto-to-be can fit inside of
• A large sieve or cheesecloth
• Pots and patience

Ingredients:

1. 15 liters of water
2. 15 cups of salt (Yes, it’s a lot of salt…)
3. 7.5 cups of dark brown sugar
4. 5 tbsp of saltpeter
5. 1 bunch of thyme
6. 15 sprigs of rosemary
7. 15 bay leaves
8. 10 tablespoons of crushed juniper berries

Once you’ve assembled the necessary tools and ingredients, it’s time to get cookin’. Begin by adding the salt, and saltpeter to the water and bring the pot(s) to a boil. Once the water is boiling, stir to ensure that you’ve dissolved all the salt and add in the brown sugar, stirring as needed to ensure that it is dissolved as well. At this point, the water will take on a rich, deep brown color. Now things get fragrant. If you have cheesecloth on hand, assemble a herb bouquet of thyme, rosemary, bay leaves and the juniper berries. If you don’t have cheesecloth, simply tie the fresh herbs and bay leaves together as well as you can and make sure you have a sieve for later. Bring the water to a boil once more and let it simmer for 5 minutes. Remove from heat.

Wait until the brine you’ve made has cooled to room temperature and remove the herb bouquet if you have one. If you don’t, once the brine has cooled, simply pour the brine from the pot through a sieve and into the bin you’ll be using to store the meat during the brining process. Once the liquid has been transferred, place your meat in the bin ensuring that it remains submerged. If necessary, weigh the meat down and cover the bin with the lid, storing it in a cool dry place.

For a 25-30lb piece of pork, you’ll want to ensure that the pork spends 8 days immersed in the brine. Note that if you weighed the meat down to keep it submerged, you may need to open the bin daily in order to rotate the meat and ensure that the part that is in contact with the weight is changed in order to ensure that the entire surface area of the meat has been exposed to the brine for an adequate amount of time.

If you’re curious to know more about how brine works to not only dry the meat (via osmosis) but also leads to meat that is softer and tastier, Cooking for Engineers has a great article on the subject that involves semi-permeable membranes, protein breakdown and other filthy bits of erotica.

In a few days (yes, I promise), I’ll post the final step on how to protect the meat when you remove it from the brine and start the year-long curing process. Until then, stock up on some paprika and cayenne!

All that changed when we took off up tiny, winding, perilous provencal roads to have lunch Chez Bruno in Lorgues.

Bruno, the eccentric proprietor of this fabled restaurant was sitting in the garden when we arrived. He looks like Marlon Brando did during the later part of the first Godfather movie. Although he isn’t initially very welcoming, he definitely takes pleasure in watching all the patrons who’ve driven hours out into the middle of nowhere to eat at his restaurant. What awaits inside Chez Bruno is a remarkably intense culinary experience centered around the truffle, the so called black diamond.

The restaurant has a set 6-course meal at a fixed price. For a premium, you can have your meal prepared with more aromatic “alba” truffles (white truffles), however the actual composition and size of the meal remains the same.

Since we were fairly certain that we wouldn’t have an opportunity to repeat an experience like this for quite some time, we decided to be gauche and photograph every dish almost like a Japanese tourist would. The meal begins with an “amuse-bouche”, a piece of bread covered with thin truffle slices and doused with delicious truffle oil and salt.

Amuse Bouche

Next up is was the entrée: an entire black truffle atop a slice of foie gras, covered in a light pastry in a deep, rich Bourgogne sauce

The Mysterious Truffle-Puff

Truffle-Puff Exposed!

After sampling these two rich and delicious dishes, one musn’t forget that starch is an essential component of a balanced diet and contributor to a healthy lifestyle. To that end, Chez Bruno provides a perfectly healthy baked potato, that they serve in a salty, creamy, tasty cream-butter sauce and top with loads of truffles to make what is perhaps the most awesome and least healthy potato knwon to man.

These aren't yo 'momma's taters

At this point, your heart is still perfectly happy. Although most of your vascular system is backed up, your aorta is still clean as a whistle. That’s all chef Bruno needs to serve up veal and foie gras in a light sauce, covered with, you guessed it, more truffles.

La piece de resistance

In order to get back to reality, one needs to be gently weened off the caloric excesses of the preceding courses. Hence, Bruno offers not one but two desserts. (Well actually, the first is a pre-dessert and the only dish made without truffles!)

Chocolate Cream - The "Pre-Dessert"

The Dessert - Apple Tart, Caramel Ice Cream and Truffle Coulis

There you have it, a meal at Chez Bruno in all of its gory, delicious detail. I feel kind of dirty after posting this here, it’s kissing and telling at best and perhaps even downright pornographic. However, if you do make it to that part of the world, be sure to take a moment and splurge, it’s well worth it.

What a flwowp the shwowp pitch was

I may not be an angel and I’m certainly no VC. However, I am almost an MBA and as such have spent many evenings asking tough questions to presenters from all walks of life. That said, last week I took a walk down to the SAT for StartupCamp and had the chance to rub shoulders with some interesting people in Montreal’s bubbling startup scene. Of particular note was Shwowp, an effort headed up by three social media starlets from Montreal.

The web app provides a way for shoppers to track the purchases they make online and offline. The goal here seems to be that a shopper will send Shwowp receipts from their purchases by forwarding an email or snapping a shot of it with their phone’s camera. Once Shwowp gets the receipt, it’ll be able to crunch the data and track purchase histories, budgeting, and consumer behaviour while allowing shoppers to keep up to date on what the Jones’ are buying in order to spot trends and great deals.

I can definitely see the value that Shwowp would receive from such a platform. Hard data on purchasing activity is a valuable pot of gold that some players in our financial system get to dip their feet into. This is the sort of information that would have market research firms knocking down your door with a battering ram and briefcases full of cash.

The hope is that the benefits of this service will take it viral and that soon everyone will be Shwowp’ing their purchases as happily as they post their crappy vacation photos on Facebook. Unfortunately, Hunt and the Shwowp team spent so much time talking about how awesomely amazing the company they were pitching was that they forgot to tell us why they suck. This is important because:

Everyone sucks.

The presentation had great visuals, BIG BLOCK TEXT,  and was reasonably engaging (Tara Hunt, did a decent job as a passionate presenter). However, if you’re trying to pitch your idea to men and women who are intelligent, articulate and selective, you need to be real.

Being real isn’t just having a blog or raising whuffie, if you want to be real you need to air your dirty laundry. Tell us that your business model is based on assumptions from half-baked market studies. Tell us that going viral has a x% (where x is less than 10) chance of actually happening and that you’re relying on hitting it off with a great and persuasive user base right off the bat. Tell us that Zukerberg might very well integrate your features into Facebook and leave your site to rot.

Give us the risks, tell us what keeps you up at night and you’ll come off as genuinely interested in starting a successful business and demonstrating a fiduciary responsibility to your fucking investors.

Once you’ve done that, tell us how you plan to mitigate those risks using clear and realistic tactics. Prove to us that you’ve thought this through, that it’s not just your opinion. Or better yet, appeal to your audience for help. Enlist a community that loves and respects your work to help you start off on the right foot.

ADDENDUM:

If anyone has Silverlight installed and wants to view the pitch online, you can do so at replayedu

To that end, here are some ground rules:

1. Follow the recipe. At least the first time. Curing meat is easy but you probably aren’t used to it. As a result, if you go out on a limb and follow a hunch you may run into big trouble.
2. Be patient. It takes time to prepare prosciutto. 2 days for bleeding, 10 days in a flavoured brine and at least 365 spent drying. If you cut anything short you will end up with a prosciutto that is either too wet or too dry.
3. Don’t be afraid of mould. It’s a good sign, question yourself if none grows during the drying process.
4. If something doesn’t smell right, stop, think and seek help. Recipes aren’t foolproof, not even this one. So many environmental factors come into play. You really need to keep an eye on your prosciutto throughout the process so if there is ever any rot (I haven’t seen any in years of following this recipe) you can try to salvage what is left of your prosciutto.

Now that you know the rules of the game, you’re ready to actually get out there and start curin’ some pork.

Choosing

Pork Leg and Salt : All you need to get started

The first step in making prosciutto is running out to buy a leg of pork. You’ll want to see a reputable butcher for this and ask him to round off the portion of the leg that connects to the pig’s torso (the lowest portion of the picture shown at the left of this paragraph). This will ensure that your prosciutto has a nice shape that’s easy for you to cut and deal with later. In Montreal, I usually go to Charcuterie Noel since they tend to get their meat from good suppliers and while waiting at the butcher’s counter I often see many pork legs go by, thus helping to ensure a healthy inventory turnover.

You’ll want to aim for a leg that is around 10-12 kilograms. Bigger legs give you bigger chunks that are ideal for slicing however once you get past 12 kilos the meat is generally tougher and not as desirable. Pork legs smaller than 10 kilos will often provide great testing and tender cured hams, but are less pleasant to slice.

One final note, if the butcher suggests removing the bone around the ball joint that connects to the pig’s hip, politely decline. Although many traditional recipes remove this bone before curing, this generally results in increased spoilage. Leaving it in will only make cutting the cured prosciutto more exciting. Yes… exciting….

Bleeding

Once you’ve got the meat on your kitchen counter, it’s time to start the curing process that turns this big hunk of pork into prosciutto. Before we begin, I’d like to bring up a topic from high school chemistry that is at the heart of this recipe: osmosis

Osmosis: Science at work

In order to cure meat, we’re going to need to dehydrate it. In order to dehydrate it and infuse it with the p roper flavours and rich colour we’re going to avoid using anything like those cheesy fruit dryers you see on infomercials. Instead, we’re going to use salt in high concentrations to cause liquid inside the prosciutto to come through a thin membrane of fat and muscle tissue and seep out. Thus, before we start gradually drying the meat in open air, we need to bleed and brine it to remove as much liquid as possible.

The first step in this process is to “bleed” the meat to remove part of the excess liquid in the pork. In this stage, we’ll be applying copious amounts of salt (about 600g) to a pork leg in order to start the curing process.

1. Liberally apply salt to the exposed muscle of the pork leg, ensuring that you work it into any nooks and crannies. Apply a less concentrated layer to the outer skin as well.

Thoroughly Salted Prosciutto

2. When salting all the crevices, pay special attention to this area. Ensure that you work salt in around the bone and on the meat underneath the skin.

Salted Crevice

Once you’ve applied salt to the pork leg, bring it to the cool, damp room you plan to eventually dry it in. Prepare a surface for the leg to lie flat on and some receptacle in which to collect the blood and any other oozings that will be extracted through osmosis. I do this by using a folding chair, which I cover with a plastic garbage bag for protection (I like my folding chairs).

First Day "Bleeding" Setup or "What 100lbs of Pork looks like"

With your surface prepared, place the pork leg skin down on the surface and use some object to prop it up at an angle to promote drainage of liquids onto the surface and into the receptacle you’ve positioned to catch the oozing. Leave it this way for 1 day.

On the second day, flip the prosciutto over and apply weight to it. Generally around 4-8 kilograms should suffice. Place the weights on the skin of the pork leg. Remember to keep the meat at an angle to promote drainage. Leave it this way for 1 day.

Once you’re done, continue through to my next post on the subject that shows you how to complete the curing process by preparing a flavourful brine.

2009's Prosciutto

Many of you foodies know that Prosciutto is absolutely delicious. Ham cured to perfection with the greatest balance of saltiness and flavour makes this food a favourite. This deliciousness comes at a steep enough price, a leg of Prosciutto di Parma can cost as much as 400.00$ once it’s been cured while local brands will cost upwards of 100$ and often be of very poor quality.

Over the past few years, I’ve been making Prosciutto quite literally in my parent’s Montreal basement. Over the next few days/weeks, I’ll be writing about how you too can make a great prosciutto at home given a cold damp room (I’ll take temperature/humidity readings in my parent’s cold room to give you an idea of what you need), lotsa salt, some herbs and of course a pork thigh!

At the left, you can see one of the Prosciutto I prepared in February, 2009. I cut this particular piece in late January 2010. Yup, almost 1 year to the day! There’s the most important fact about Prosciutto preparation: once the 12-day curing process is complete, the meat must slowly dry over the course of a year. If you’re anything like me, it’s not so easy to wait but the results will speak for themselves!

So call your butchers, clear out your cold rooms and start looking for table salt in your grocery flyers, we’ll get cracking soon!

You should resist the temptation (I didn’t) to use the gorgeous Medjool date variety. Although this prized variety is delicious, their size makes them impractical since they take multiple bites to get through. You’ll really want the flavours to come through in one short and intense burst. On that note, you’ll also want to try to score some low-sodium bacon. You don’t want to overpower the sweet flavour and creamy texture entirely, simply complement it.

Gozman’s Amazing, Zillion-Calorie, Stuffed Dates

Ingredients

• 12 dates
• 12 teaspoons of softened goat cheese or mascarpone
• 4 strips of bacon (preferably low-sodium)

Procedure

1. Slice the dates along the long side in order to butterfly them and remove the pit.
2. Scoop cheese filling into the dates. Fold the dates back together
3. Wrap each date with 1/3 of the bacon strip making sure to overlap the edge.
4. Secure bacon to date with toothpick.
5. Broil at 500F on center rack for 7-9 minutes or until bacon is crisp.
6. Cool for 10 minutes and serve

As part of some portfolio building I’ve recently been up to, I needed a quick and dirty admin interface to my site’s data. Enter Typus a really handy Rails plugin that automatically generates an admin interface from your database and implements simple access control in order to let an individual or a small team manage a site’s data.

The interface is snazzy and the setup is literally three lines of bash:

$ script/plugin install git://github.com/fesplugas/typus.git
$ script/generate typus
$ rake db:migrate


Take a look at the project’s github page to learn the nitty gritty. I’m not sure if I’d use this for anything production grade, but it’s definitely worth looking into if you need to prototype something with Rails.

De

Yep, you’re lookin’ at ‘em!

Ever since thoroughly enjoying Walkers’ shortbread cookies and then suffering terrible disappointment when I found out that getting them in Montreal is nearly impossible (unless you fly to and fro on Porter airlines that is), I’ve been on the lookout for an interesting shortbread recipe.

I surfed through to Lottie+ Doof from 101cookbooks the other day and came upon an interesting recipe for a walnut-ridden shortbread. I tried the recipe this weekend and I can surely vouch for their deliciousness.

I halved the original recipe :

2      sticks (1/2 pound) plus 1 tablespoon softened unsalted butter
4 1/2  ounces light brown sugar
2.5    ounces white sugar
1   egg
1/2  tablespoon pure vanilla extract
1/2   pound + 1 1/2 ounces bread flour (though all purpose will probably work just as well for this)
1/2   teaspoon salt
3/4  cups of coarsely chopped walnuts

Prepare a quarter sheet tray by buttering the pan, placing parchment paper over it, then buttering the paper. Lightly dust the buttered paper with flour.

Cream butter and sugars in a stand mixer with the paddle attachment until light and fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla until combined, then mix in dry ingredients. Combine completely.

Divide dough evenly into prepared sheet trays, spreading smooth and level. Sprinkle with granulated sugar and bake at 325° until golden brown, about 35 to 45 minutes.

Lottie + Doof suggest to cut the shortbread once its cooled. I found it easier to cut it when it’s warm to avoid too much crumbling. Your mileage may vary. They say that the cookies keep well for at least a week, unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to fact check this as they were consumed in a matter of hours.