by Holly Hughes
One of the women has moved in close, elbowing the men aside to get her bowl under the animal’s neck. Enormous amounts of blood are gushing out now, hitting the bowl hard and splashing up to soak her arms and chest. Blas has withdrawn the knife and is holding the head to direct the blood flow. There is still immense muscular strength in the pig as it fights and wrestles, but it has nowhere to move. The men lean their weight into it like a scrum; dynamic, full of power, but locked still.
Everyone wants to know that it’s fast and painless. Of course I check my watch. The creature gives up fighting about two minutes after the knife goes in. I have no way of knowing how painful it is to have the vessels around one’s heart severed, but the main drive for the animal in its final minutes seems to have been a kind of odd, almost determined rage, rather than panic.
The men push two scaffold poles under the table and carry it like a stretcher into the barn. The body rolls a little as they gently lower the litter to the floor. It is still steaming in the cold air and a bunch of grass has been used to plug the gash in its neck, but it has lost all its intense muscular tone. It’s difficult to express the absoluteness of the change; from a condensed ball of raw, angry power to a soft mound of flesh that seems it will almost pour off the bench if the litter bearers don’t carry it with extreme care.
A bottle of brandy appears and everyone takes a steadying slug.
An Ibérico pig has a full coat of bristly black hair which has to be removed before butchering. Ben Tish and I are handed a propane flamethrower and a scraping knife. As the farmhands turn the body to expose it to the flame we sear and scrape. The smell of burning hair is strong, but somehow not unpleasant. After about a quarter of an hour of work the pig is pink (apart from its characteristic black hooves), and has ceased to look like something that should be running around a yard, instead resembling something that might occupy a butcher’s hook.
Blas steels a shorter, more effective-looking blade and begins to cut. He removes the head, cutting carefully between the vertebrae. He splits the pig along the belly, from the anus to below the throat. Using just the knife he cuts through the cartilaginous link at the front of the pelvis and, with the help of two of the farmhands, opens the pig like a book. The viscera are dragged down, out and into a plastic bowl. Blas puts the heart and kidneys aside and the women separate the intestines—still blue-green in colour from half-digested acorns—which they will spend the next few hours washing and scraping clean at the tap. These will be the skins for our sausages.
With the pig empty and open, Blas begins removing pieces. The legs are removed, tied with string and hung on a couple of ancient-looking hooks. Using the short knife he works from the inside out, teasing out each muscle or group—a process we refer to as “seam butchery.” English butchery traditionally uses saws and cleavers to cut the carcass into joints, which are a logical division of the meat in a geometric sense but make little accommodation for the physiology of the beast. A British “shoulder” is a square joint containing muscle, connective tissue and bone in a kind of arbitrary sandwich. Blas instead separates more physiologically distinct pieces of meat, handing each to an assistant to place in the scrubbed wooden troughs, called artesas, ranged along the walls.
Ben is looking for particular cuts today. The secreto is a flat sheet of muscle from under the shoulder blade, light pink and marbled with fat like toro tuna belly; the pluma is the tip of the loin. Both are uniquely Spanish cuts. Both are routinely diverted to the lucrative Japanese market.
The speed and efficiency of Blas’s knifework is almost too fast to follow, but in short order the artesas are full of sorted meat and he’s lifting the last remaining piece, the cleaned spine, from the spread hide. He snaps it in half with his hands like a stick of celery and throws it into a trim bucket. As he turns away, one of the men rolls the skin and places it in a separate plastic bag.
Somebody has set up a cheap garage barbecue in the corner of the barn, and lunch is picked from the piles of meat and grilled over the coals.
There’s something reassuring about the way each stage of the process seems to happen without any appreciable leadership. You’re aware in every move that you’re watching something that’s gone on in much the same way for centuries. Two of the hands carry in an ancient mincer bolted to a table and we begin to crank the trimmings through, creating, over an hour or two, several buckets of sausage meat. The bowl of blood is brought back in and we mix it with meat and spices before packing it into the cleaned intestines to make morcilla. Ben and I have been so drawn into the processes that we hardly notice that we’re now entirely soaked up to our elbows in blood.
And suddenly it’s over. The farmhands are warming themselves by the dying barbecue with shots of brandy, the artesas, now filled with sausages, have been carried away, the floor has been scrubbed, the mincer dismantled and oiled and we carry the salchichones and morcillas across the darkening courtyard to the hogar, an outdoor kitchen built around an open hearth where they will hang to dry.
On two large hooks hang the hind legs of the pig, neatly trimmed, a rope around each black hoof ready for our trip to the curing factory tomorrow.
Ibérico ham is some of the most highly prized and expensive charcuterie in the world. It’s made only from the hind legs of the black pigs of the region—which is why they are sometimes referred to as pata negra or black foot hams—which have been fattened on bellota, the acorns of the Extremadura’s scrub oaks.
In the morning, as the sun rises, we are barrelling over the Extremadura in another Jeep. This time, as we pass the vast orchards and catch sight of the small herds of pigs rooting freely for acorns, we can’t help but see them a different way.
The factory at Sierra de Barbellido is a brutal concrete cube set on top of the tallest hill in the area. It looks exposed—a feature that’s vital to ham production, as we’ll see inside. We’re met by Rafael Navarro, the plant manager, who will walk us through the production process.
The skin is removed from the haunch, leaving only enough at the slender bottom of the leg to show off the all-important hoof and to take the stamps which mark our ham’s place and date of production. During trimming the joint is massaged to remove any remaining blood from the main femoral vessels. The legs are layered in sea salt in large numbered plastic baskets designed to be moved by fork lift. The baskets are filed in a huge climate-controlled room, where a computer keeps track of every batch. Salting takes roughly a day per kilo of ham, although other atmospheric factors and the quality of the fat layer can cause this to vary.
By the time salting has finished it has penetrated 2cm into the surface of the meat, but the core near the bone is still essentially raw. Each ham will have lost 30 percent of its moisture by weight, making it an inhospitable environment for the bacteria which cause decomposition and allow lactobacilli to thrive. For the next 90 days the hams will proceed through three fridges with high levels of humidity. During this time the salt distributes throughout the meat and lactic fermentation begins. As the hams leave the last fridge they are coated with a pelt of white and green moulds. (The white mould is a variety of penicillium and will eventually colonise the entire surface of the ham.)
Now the hams move to the top of the building, where they will hang for approximately three years. Today, in midwinter, the temperature is about 5C, but during the summer it will rise to 30C. The factory is higher than the surrounding country and windows can be opened or closed in any direction to take advantage of moist Atlantic winds or to block the drying Northerlies. This, however, is the only control exerted as the meat passes through the annual cycles. By the end of the third year the fat has oxidised to a rich yellow colour and the moulds are brown and white. Finally the hams are moved to the bodega, or cellar, where they hang for several more years. The temperature here shifts only between 10C and 14C and the hams settle, mature and become entirely brown.
Throughout our stay Ben has been putting aside pieces of meat for dinner. First comes the ham. This on
e came from a pig just like ours, but has aged for four years from the 2008 matanza. Ben shows me how to drape each slice over the back of my hand so it warms to blood heat and the fats begin to soften and liquefy.
Next comes a spectacular mixed grill of “double cooked” ribs (slow-roasted then finished on a grill), heart, liver, kidneys, loin and cured belly. Then, finally, the dish that’s perhaps the test of our commitment. We Brits can be squeamish about pork, terrified by a history of unclean rearing practices, disease and poorly understood cooking methods. We particularly have a problem, almost at a cultural level, with undercooked pork.
Ben brings to the table a beautifully seasoned, immaculately constructed Ibérico pork tartare, topped, in the traditional manner, with a raw egg. It has been a long couple of days—physically hard, emotionally punishing and bewildering on every level. Yet we’ve followed a process which we, as lovers of food, can appreciate has been “clean,” in both a physical and moral sense, throughout. The healthy, free-ranging animal has been reduced with inspiring skill and by traditional means to some of the most desirable meat in the world, and we’ve seen the whole process through.
There is not a moment’s pause as we dig in.
BEER AND SMOKING IN DANVILLE, ILLINOIS
By Alan Brouilette
From Blood-and-Thunder.com
Barbecue cook-offs are a magnet for weekend food obsessives—a title that comedy writer and e-zine food editor Alan Brouilette might have claimed before he went to Danville. That was before he met his match. . . .
We were just outside Danville on the edge of the cornfield when the nerves began to take hold. Weeks before, in a mood of fine strong confidence, I determined that months of covering barbecue competitions had provided enough wisdom that I was ready to get my own two hands dirty. It was time to take action. Stop watching the parade of pits and pork and engage. It was important that I dig in and do it myself. It was necessary: Rub the meat. Smoke the meat. Cover the story. I cast about for a suitable venue for this escapade, and settled on a KCBS competition in the town of Danville, Illinois, an hour and a half away at lawful highway speeds. I recruited a team of assistants and fronted $250 in cash for the entry fee. We reserved the weekend and thought no more of it.
The morning before the contest I began to prepare. Proper equipment is important. We had five bags of charcoal, thirty pounds of meat, two high-tech probe thermometers, three coolers, four folding tables, five lawn chairs, a collection of knives, an assortment of sweatshirts, a box of cigars, a bottle of whiskey, a case of beer, a sack of pecan wood, and a whole galaxy of rubs, sauces, marinades, mustards, vinegars, salts, peppers, stocks, pans, infusions, foils, and plastic tubs. We needed all that for the competition, mind you, though once you get locked into a serious barbecue collection the tendency is to push it as far as you can.
We opened the whiskey and began loading the rented flatbed trailer. Considering our inexperience with this sort of undertaking, I would say we did well. I had the foresight to rent an open trailer with two wheels and high sides that we could tow with an SUV, freeing us from the need to cram three vehicles with grease and smoke and kitchenware. We lashed the backyard smokers to the trailer railings and used the coolers and charcoal to wedge them in place. We pulled away from the house with total confidence, and made it nearly two hundred yards before our careful knots unraveled. This was no time to panic. Our expedition was resilient. We stopped the car in the middle of a white suburban street and reorganized using construction straps while jabbering at one another about inertia and vibration. The police did not arrive while we repacked, which was wise. We were in a state of high excitement, which can be interpreted by the cop mind as indicative of drug use and miscreant behavior. We were ill-prepared to convincingly explain that only one of those was at hand, so it was a relief to begin rolling again.
We made it to Danville in the nick of time and rolled down Vermilion Street, Danville’s main drag, with “No Vaseline” playing loudly. Ice Cube is a musician that announces your presence with authority. We were here to brook no guff from the locals. We had come to compete. To win. To take the prize away from some bumpkin and his Weber kettles and swagger out of town with a couple of local girls staring sadly as our trailer grew smaller in the distance. We quoted Bill Murray often . . . “Cinderella story . . . outta nowhere . . .”
This was my stated goal. In truth, of the seventeen teams, my best-case goal was to finish anything other than dead last.
The team next to us had an RV complete with sponsorship banners and a smoker larger than our trailer. The team across from us had a display of trophies, several of which were taller than the shortest of us. This was unnerving. The chimney-box they used merely to start their charcoal fires was nicer than all of our equipment combined and their smokers may have cost as much as the Honda Pilot in which we had arrived to the competition. We began to consider the possibility that we were overmatched. We parked with some difficulty—parallel parking a fifteen-foot two-wheel flatbed trailer is a difficult proposition even with a hand not unsteady with nerve—and rushed quickly to the cooks’ meeting, a gathering of the grim-faced men and women who comprised our competition. I had attended these meetings before, but always in the service of journalism. Today I was no journalist. Today I was a participant. We were addressed by Danville’s mayor, who smiled a great deal and reminded me of the actor Troy McClure. He welcomed us to Danville and was very nice. The contest’s organizer spoke. We were humming with adrenaline at this point, and impatient while she went on about quiet times and KCBS rules and souvenir t-shirts. We had not come for t-shirts. We had come for trophies. I signed a piece of paper agreeing to abide by all the rules and took away the four white-foam clamshell boxes that marked us as serious competitors. “Beer & Smoking in Las Vegas” was emblazoned on our entry form. I swelled with pride. A name is important. A name announces to the other teams that you are not someone to be trifled with. You are no backyard nebbish who brags to the nearest lawnmowers and gutter-cleaners that you make the finest ribs on the block. You are a serious competitor. You deserve respect.
We took our clamshells back to our cooksite and began to plot. It was crucial to the success of our plan that the brisket go on around 9 p.m. The pork butts could wait until midnight. We opened the first round of drinks and lit cigars; an important step in the preparation of quality competition barbecue. We scurried around our cooksite, unpacking and assessing our circumstances. It had grown dark, and we realized we were hungry. We rooted through the coolers for dinner, but found only a bag of pretzels and some Combos left from the trip down. In our haste to pack all the things we needed to dominate the competition, it had slipped our minds that we would require a meal or two before our meat was ready to feast upon. Thus it was that, at nine p.m. and surrounded by fine barbecue cooks from all around the Midwest, I found myself on the telephone in an argument with a sour employee of Papa John’s about delivering pizza to a parking space on Vermilion Street. He insisted that a physical address was necessary, and that I was not making a reasonable request in urging him to deliver to “the green Honda Pilot parked two hundred feet north of Main Street.” I saw the strategic need to concede to this rigid corporate policy and pretended I was a late-working drone at the law firm across the street. The driver arrived forty-three minutes later, and I intercepted his dogged effort to deliver pizza to a closed law firm by vigorously explaining the complexities of the situation until he fled.
We began preparing the brisket. I had visited a meat-cutter in Chicago, and we were well-supplied with animal flesh. One whole untrimmed brisket, two monstrous pork butts, four slabs of fine St. Louis cut spare ribs, and sixteen pale chicken thighs on the bone. We stripped the brisket from its Cryovac packaging and rubbed it with yellow mustard. The mustard is flavorless, but ensures the spices adhere. We expertly covered the brisket in a spice mixture of my own devising. I had packed enough brown sugar and kosher salt to rub a dozen briskets, and to the salt and sugar were added seasonings
of a dozen types. When rubbing something that will be smoked for more than twelve hours, there is no room for subtlety. You need bold flavor. There were chiles of several types, a large hit of garlic and black pepper, and several exotic paprikas. We viciously punctured the meatslab with the Jaccard tenderizer. The Jaccard is a savage thing; brass knuckles with steel teeth. It chewed the brisket a hundred times before we wrapped the thing in plastic and left it to absorb the flavors of the rub.
The temperature was dropping, chilling everything. I fired the first of the two smokers, to warm the inside in advance of the brisket. The fire was a welcome presence, adding the light smell of pecan smoke to the air and warming those with the fortitude to stand close enough. We felt the need for more beer before repeating the rubbing process with the butts. The butts received much the same physical treatment, but we adjusted the ingredients. You cannot just shake a few spices over competition barbecue meat. You have to season it. You have to build a flavor profile. Salt is a critical aid to the osmosis of flavor, but pigmeat has an affinity for sweetness. We accounted for this by adding pomegranate molasses to the mustard and increasing the sugar in the rub as we invented. Pomegranate molasses! I felt clever for having thought of this exotic component. We crusted the pigmeat heavily with seasoning before rolling it in plastic and setting it aside to wallow in its flavor-mud.
We had some downtime now while the smoker heated and the meat absorbed. I seized this opportunity to visit with our neighbor. The banner on the RV next to us read “82’s BBQ” and I stepped next door to watch the captain prepare his own meat, bearing an extra beer as a gift to our neighbor. Jasen and his wife Leslie talked barbecue with my team for hours that weekend, speaking of other competitions they had seen, helping us acclimate to the rigors of competition, and even sharing a secret or two. Leslie led us to the nearest grocery around eleven when we ran out of whiskey and paper towels. They were so kind to us that we grew suspicious. If they hoped to become close to us and steal our barbecue secrets, they were in for a nasty surprise. If they had malevolent intention it would be much effort for nothing, because, like a great knuckleballer, our secret weapon was that we didn’t know what we were going to do either.