Smokin Turkey
is Blowin Smoke!
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- Jul 28, 2008
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Great thread!
These little guys look delicious!
These little guys look delicious!
Chicharrones or pork rinds is basically the pig skin with a layer of fat still on it that is cut into squares and then fried in it's own lard till golden brown and very crispy. Carnitas are made from the meat and are also deep fried in the lard leftover from the Chicharrones. As for the wine bottles, my folks bought those at a local swap meet. I also wondered how the bottoms were cut off. I'm wondering if maybe they are just made that way, without the bottoms, for that specific type of use.Jeez that all looks good! And nice to see pigs raised the way they should be.
Two questions:
1) Please educate an ignorant Englishman, what are chicharrones please?
2) I love the wine bottle-lamps hanging around the edge of the roof in the first picture, can you tell me how the bottoms are cut off please? I'd like to make some and have tried in the past using a hacksaw with a ceramic tile-cutting blade and the bottles always crack:frown:
Never in the snow. We just don't get any here. A blustery winter day in the middle of winter is still in the 40's, but most of the time in the 50's-low 60's.Very cool Bob! Thanks for sharing!
You guy's ever do that in the snow? :roll:
Where's the beer? Isn't that a violation of fire code?
Not to steal Bob's thunder, but I thought this piece written by my dad, who was born in 1911 in rural Texas, might add a little to this great thread.
"There was no R.E.A. then, therefore no electricity, hence no refrigeration. This had a tremendous effect on how people ate. What was cooked for the noon meal couldn't be served for the evening meal in hot weather, because it would sour and also food poisoning was a great danger. What food that was left at noon was thrown in the slop bucket for the hogs. In this manner, the food that would have spoiled was, in effect, recycled by the pigs who furnished pork to be eaten in the fall.
There being no refrigeration, the hog butchering took place in the fall on a day cold enough to chill the meat all the way thru, but not cold enough to freeze the outside, thus trapping the body heat inside. The hog that had lived on swill all his life had been switched to corn a month or so before butchering. Nobody had ever head about cholesterol, so the fatter the hog, the better.
A fire was built under a pot, which measured around 4' x 6' x 2' and the water brought to about 180 degrees F. The hog was walked to near the vat where he was hit between the eyes with a heavy hammer and his throat was cut with a large keen butcher knife to drain the carcass of its blood. He was then rolled into the vat and submerged in the hot water to loosen the hair, after which everyone pitched in to scraping all the hair off with a relatively dull knife.
When the pig was cleaned of hair, a slip was cut on the back legs just above the feet so that a sharp piece of wood could be stuck behind the Achilles tendon. A block and tackle was hooked in the middle of the wood and the pig was housted high enough for his head to clear the ground. Using a sharp knife, a slip was made from between the hind legs to the jowl and the pig was de-boweled. The liver and heart were pulled out and sent to the house to be cooked for lunch. This was the first meat of any kind to be eaten since the winter before, except for chicken and very salty "fillet of sows bosom". The next treat was back bone and loin. There will never be food as good as this was. There is an old saying "Hunger is the best tonic for an appetizer".
All the fat was stripped from the intestines to be made into lard, and the intestines turned inside out and stripped and cleaned to be used as sausage casing. From the pig there were sausage, salted bacon or "middling meat", ham and shoulders, also spare rips, lard and lye soap. The scraps of fat were thrown into a large black kettle in the back yard with a small fire under it. The fat was slowly boiled from the tissue and strained in a pure liquid form into buckets where it set as solid white lard. The pieces of tissue that were left were called cracklings. One of the dietary treats of the year was created by mixing cracklings with cornbread to make "crackling bread". Of course the taste buds were not jaded by cookies, ice cream cones, Babe Ruth bars, banana splits, etc., so any variation from every day diet was a treat. This all furnished the last of the meat, meal and molasses diet."
2) I love the wine bottle-lamps hanging around the edge of the roof in the first picture, can you tell me how the bottoms are cut off please? I'd like to make some and have tried in the past using a hacksaw with a ceramic tile-cutting blade and the bottles always crack:frown: