Happy Birthday Pop
[Recipe] Lonzino – dry cured pork loin
Lonzino is a section of pork loin that has been cured then air dried. A very simple whole muscle cure that has a wonderful tenderness to it, with clean pronounced flavors, possibly thanks to the low amount of fat in each slice. It is pretty much the pork version of bresaola.
Ingredients
NOTE: Cure ingredients are given here as percentage of the total meat weight, after trimming.
Pork loin – 1082g
Kosher Salt – 36g (3.3%)
Black Pepper 10.8g (1%)
Cane sugar 10.8g (1%)
Cure #2 2.7g (0.25%)
Juniper Berry 1.6g (0.15%)
Fennel Seed 3g (0.27%)
Dried Bay Leaf – 0.4g – about 2 leaves
Trim away any nasty looking stuff from the meat – blood spots and so on. Wash gently, dry well. When trimming this thing up I thought it would be rather lovely to leave a little fat on it, just to help give a silkier mouth-feel. That turned out to be a good plan. The actual muscle is pretty lean, and the fat certainly helps to give a good texture and flavor balance.
Grind up all the cure ingredients in a spice grinder until finely ground. Put the meat in a large zip lock bag, and rub the cure all over. Seal the bag, and put in the fridge for 10 days. Every couple of days rub the meat through the back, helping to distribute the cure well.
Wrap in muslin and tie the meat up, using butchers loops and knots, much the same way you would tie a roast.
Hang to air dry at 55F, 75% humidity with gentle airflow for about a month – until the meat has lost 35% of its weight.
Slice thinly to serve.
Noooo, not the stinky cheese!
“A very heavy loss”: Cheese worth 250 million euros destroyed by Italian earthquake
The earthquake that rocked northern Italy on Sunday destroyed more than 300,000 wheels of cheese worth 250 million euros, an industry official has revealed. The region’s cheese industry has been devastated by the magnitude-6.0 earthquake, with tonnes of Parmesan and Grana Padano lost. A single wheel of cheese can weigh up to 90 pounds. “The earthquake was very strong and heavily damaged the structures of many warehouses as well as thousands of tonnes” of the two cheeses, said Stefano Berni, head of a consortium that protects the Grana Padano designation.
“It’s a very heavy loss, but there have been no casualties, which is a great relief at this worrying time,” he told the ANSA news agency. The initial estimate of 250 million euros is “very conservative,” Berni said, adding that he hoped no further tremors would “further aggravate the state of the already highly damaged and fragile structures.”
Source: The Mirror, via Gizmodo.
How auto-correct can make your life interesting…
To slim is my goal!
From Gizmodo:
From trying fad diets to developing eating disorders to becoming a gym rat, people have basically gone crazy trying to lose weight. And it’s true, America is fat. But what if the secret to losing weight wasn’t in ditching carbs or hurling or doing interval exercises but rather if it was in math? What? Yes. Math.
It’s simple. Just punch in your vitals into this model, plug in the weight you want to end up at x-amount of days and the equation will tell you how many calories you need to eat moving forward. The magic of math!
The model was created by Carson C. Chow, an investigator at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, to figure out America’s weight problem (1 in 3 Americans are overweight). He created a formula that can accurately predict how much weight a person will gain or lose depending on their caloric intake and activity level. It’s a specific numeric value to eating less. According to Chow, he considered multiple factors for his formula:
The conventional wisdom of 3,500 calories less is what it takes to lose a pound of weight is wrong. The body changes as you lose. Interestingly, we also found that the fatter you get, the easier it is to gain weight. An extra 10 calories a day puts more weight onto an obese person than on a thinner one. Also, there’s a time constant that’s an important factor in weight loss. That’s because if you reduce your caloric intake, after a while, your body reaches equilibrium. It actually takes about three years for a dieter to reach their new “steady state.” Our model predicts that if you eat 100 calories fewer a day, in three years you will, on average, lose 10 pounds – if you don’t cheat.
Also, according to Chow, huge variations in your daily food intake won’t dramatically change your weight as long as the average caloric intake over a year is the same. A person’s body takes time to respond, you know.
According to the model, for me to lose 60 pounds in one year, I need to lower my caloric intake by 800 calories a day and add in 3 periods of light cycling 3 times a week, based on an original 3000 calories/day diet.
http://bwsimulator.niddk.nih.gov/
My quest to find “something nice”
When I travel for work, sans Katy, I always try and bring her something nice back. The conversation I had by text with her today went something like this:
Katy: Got me anything nice?
Me: Does a kilo of iberico ham count?
Katy: Nope
Me: ok, I’ll keep an eye out, but the only thing I’m seeing so far is shoe shops and fashion for stick insects :(
— later —
Me: Hahaa! Success. Not only have I found somethink I think you’ll like, according to the female contingent here I have done very well. They seem rather surprised!
— EDIT —
I’m back home, and she’s seen it (and loved it), so I can say that I bought her a designer hand bag from Desigual:
I need a salad, STAT!
I now understand why, when a member of the Spanish Mafia comes back from a sojourn to the motherland, they eat salad for a week on their return to the UK.
Tonight’s dinner was a 7 course affair with enough booze to kill a horse. I had jamon and white asparagus, grilled prawns, octopus, croquetas, hake fillet with red peppers and a steak that was as big ad my face, then pudding. At one point the people around me were begging for a digestif to help them with the steak so the guys
out a liter of homemade Spanish grappa (which our group of alcoholics managed to polish off). That doesn’t even take into account the 1.5 liter bottles of red wine, nor the half dozen bottles of champagne.
Dinner started at 9pm and ended sometime after 1am. Excuse me while I go digest now…
Dear Bilbao
You’re a lovely city, the weather is wonderful but please, enough already! All it seems I’ve been doing for the last 36 hours is eat and drink!!!!! You’ve been very good to not kill me with my allergies but that doesn’t mean you need to try with volume!
We are now officially an old married couple.
It’s Saturday night and we’re sitting outside on the patio watching a fire listening to Radio 2. We is oooooold.