Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: January 2013
Do I look Sicilian?
Three times now, a patient has said to me, “You know who you remind me of? That guy from The Princess Bride!”
I’m always hopeful they mean Mandy Patinkin,
but each time, they meant Wally Shawn.
Could be worse. They could have meant Billy Crystal.
D.
Porkstrami: finished product, untasted, so if there are no more posts you’ll know I died of food poisoning.
About ten days ago, I described how I went about brining my pork shoulder. Here it is, getting ready for its salty bath:
pork shoulder, rinsed and ready for the brine
It’s in a plastic garbage bag. I added the brine, tied it off, and kept it at approximately 36 degrees F for ten days. Every day, I turned it or shook it up a bit.
Yesterday was day 10, to be precise, so I removed the boneless shoulder from the brine, rinsed it off, dried it. Then I dusted it liberally with paprika and ground black pepper, and left it in the fridge for another day to let the outer surface dry. Here it is, ready for the grill.
pork shoulder plus simple dry rub
I banked the coals to one side, and used two to three cups of soaked hickory chips to create the smoke. The pork sat suspended on a grate at the opposite end of the barbecue.
ready to smoke!
Eight hours later, it smelled like the real thing and looked like the real thing, but the internal temperature was only 120 degrees F. I sliced a bit off one end, and it tasted great, but still looked raw. I popped it in the oven at 250 degrees F, and left it in (about two hours) until the internal temperature was 160 degrees F. And here it is:
the finished porkstrami, cooling
There are a number of questions yet to be answered. Will it kill me? Make me wish I were dead? Will the middle be as tasty as the end bit I sampled earlier today? Is it smoky enough? Too salty, not salty enough?
And if this works, why not make lambstrami?
D.
Current status of the cover, in 200 x 300 pixels
There’s a reason why a lot of books have short, one-word titles, with simple covers. They need to look great as teensy thumbnails. (Check out the thumbnails at the bottom of this semi-randomly chosen page.) With this in mind, my designer has kindly been tweaking his cover to provide something that looks good when scaled down. Here’s 200 x 305 pixels:
Gator & Shark Save the World
And at half that size,
Gator & Shark Save the World
Even in this tiny format, the author by-line and titles are all clear. Can’t make out much of the detail of the figures, unfortunately. Live and learn: I asked for a group tableau, and that’s what I got. I like my cover, though, and I really do think something like this would have been much more dull.
Yes, the graphic is relevant. You’ll have to read the book if you want to know why.
D.
Porkstrami Extravaganza, Part the First!
No, I haven’t been blogging much lately. Yes, I’ve been writing — editing, to be precise. I finished the second/third pass-through on Gator & Shark, and I’ve sent it to an editor. Now I’m trying to breathe new life into The Brakan Correspondent. It’s rough; I finished it eight years ago, and have been fiddling with it ever since. I have some great set-pieces in this novel. Just a question of cutting away the crap to find the novel within.
But on to the food. I’m going to give you a play-by-play of my latest grand experiment: porkstrami! I’m allergic to beef, I miss pastrami, and I’ve heard that pork pastrami is at least as good as the real thing. Unfortunately, porkstrami isn’t the sort of thing you can get mail order. You have to make it yourself, and that means corning, smoking, and cooking the pork.
I chose a seven-pound pork shoulder. For the brine, I’ve modified from Alpoe the Mad’s recipe (mostly because I don’t like juniper berries). Here’s mine:
One gallon of water
1/2 cup of brown sugar
3/4 cup of kosher salt
1 tablespoon of “pink salt” (see below)
2 cloves
Four bay leaves, broken up
8 garlic cloves, crushed
5 whole allspice berries
1 tablespoon whole black peppercorns
2 tsp freshly ground coriander
1 cinnamon stick
1 slice of ginger
Boil the ingredients, then cool the brine to room temperature. Add the brine and the pork to a garbage bag and put it in the refrigerator. I’m going to let it brine for at least ten days. Every day, I will shake it up a bit to redistribute the ingredients.
Pink salt: I bought this from our local butcher, who had no idea what it was or how it was used (I think he was a junior butcher — took him ten seconds to bone the pork shoulder, but he was lost on the pink salt). According to Alpoe the Mad’s blog, this is 6.25% sodium nitrite. Kinda necessary, I suspect.
I’ll keep you posted, with pictures too once it gets interesting.
D.