Cooking Cheap

It’s been a while since I posted here. Mostly because I haven’t done anything new food wise that’s interesting or dangerous or out of my comfort zone. Now it’s spring and hormones are running and “why not” my companion. I dissected a 8.75 lb pork butt into 4, 2, and 2. Six of that for the freezer and 2lb for a cured bacon or ham like product.

Two pounds is not a lot by many standards. There’s not many of me. I’m going to cure that 2lb’s of butt in a spice rub that might be close to Tasso Ham. A week or so from now I’ll put in on the smoker and we shall see. As always this isn’t going to be exact, just my guess on the amounts I added. I’m using some old spices the TV cooks want you to through away after a year. Some of mine are much. much older. I mean like a lot older. I started from another recipe of course but my substitutions are rampant.
2 lb Boneless pork butt, one piece. Or Shoulder or whatever. The cure/rub:

• 1/8 C Mortons Tender Quick — that’s the cure part. 1.5T for me. Seemed like the right amount to me.
• 1/8 C Celery Salt. (Interesting, that’s a lot)
• 1/8 C Packed Brown Sugar (I might have used a bit more)
• 1/8 C freshly ground black pepper (see note below)
• 1 Tbl of Garlic powder.
• 2 Tsp Paprika cause I didn’t have 1 tsp of Cayenne and 1 tsp of Cayenne looked a little heavy for me.
• 2 tsp of old Poultry seasoning. (or 1/2 tsp each of sage and thyme)

Rub it all around the pork, place in a plastic bag and add the rub that didn’t get absorbed. It will. The curing agent will suck in the spice, then weep “liguid” and you turn the bag over every a few days for 6 to 10 days. That’s my plan.

What happens may be something else. The relatively high amount of celery salt is interesting as is the levels of sage and thyme. Much more a sausage recipe than ham or faux bacon.

Black Pepper Notes:
I’m not going to hand grind an 1/8 cup of pepper corns but I do like peppercorn bacon. I smashed up a Tablespoon of pepper corns with a mallet. That’s cracked pepper. Then I ground some pepper in the hand mill and got bored with that so I added some mega mart “cracked” pepper (aka “course grind”.

[5/15/08]
Call it what you like but it’s pretty tasty. I chose to smoke it to 160F. That only took 2 hours on the smoker running at 235 to 250. That’s the nature of a cured meat (the Tender Quick). Since it’s pork butt, it’s a little fattier than ham so it can be used everywhere ham would be. That’s OK. I’m pleased.

[6/11/08]
This is good stuff. I’ve used several slices out of the freezer on recipes where you’d use bacon or a spiced ham. If you fry it up and taste a chunk, you may not stop sampling and then what will you do?