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Fancy butter

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Speciality butter made from milk used for the production of parmigiano reggiano

The subject today is specialty butter.  If you go into a gourmet or specialty food shop and check out the butter section you’ll notice smaller, colored packages of pricey fancy butters, usually European or European-style, containing more butterfat and less water than standard American butter, lending them a richer taste.  Many are pasture-based and traditionally churned.  These butters generally have no preservatives or coloring, allowing natural factors to control the color, such as where and when the cows have been grazing.  You’ll see butter made from the milk of particular cows, or cows grazing in specific regions.  Some of this specialty butter is also cultured, meaning made from cream that has been allowed to ferment.  Now and again I’ll select one of these dear butters to eat on baguettes plain, only because they are so damned good and we’re worth it.  Today I brought home a cultured Italian produced by Delitia from the milk collected during the production of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese.  It has a deep and nutty flavor with a little acidity and all the denseness associated with more butterfat and less water.  My advice is to choose a good day-to-day Euro-style that won’t totally blow your budget, like Challenge or Strauss, and then work your way through the top-shelf butters when you are looking for something really special.  Count on never being able to going back to cheap butter once you’ve had something better.

Usinger’s Wurst

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Our Usinger’s Wurst order arrived today, so we had German pork products for dinner.  This is a place we always wanted to order from for Christmas, but thought better to first do a trial run to make sure things are up to cut.  Fred Usinger, Inc.  is located in Milwaukee – a pretty good meat city – though I have to say I was a bit disappointed.  As many of you know, I always make my base order from Karl Ehmer, and then add a few things from another butcher.  Ehmer’s offers free shipping, which saves you money even though the products are pricier.  Note that I paid an amount for shipping and handling equal to what I shelled out for actual products from Usinger’s, which is standard everywhere but Ehmer’s.  The reason I keep sniffing at the door of other companies is to find the perfect Leberwurst.  Karl Ehmer’s is good, but, like many brands, is too heavy on the cure and/or smoke for me.  After awhile I find this sickening.  I want to taste the liver, I want it to be moist, and I don’t want to taste TCM.  I also like it chunky, or grob.  Next, I am looking for the Grobe Mettwurst of my childhood – an almost spreadable, tangy, coarse, cured pork sausage product that might be lightly smoked, if at all.  Something like this may be had in the form of Grobe Teewurst, which is really a spread, from places like Schaller & Weber and Ehmer’s, but it’s not really the same thing.  Some meat packers even call Teewurst Mettwurst, which is an outrage.  Speaking of outrage, Karl Ehmer sells Canadian Bacon as Nuss Schinken! Madness.  Back to the illusive Mettwurst.  You have to know your stuff to find this, and you will only be able to come close, since it cannot be legally sold in the US in its original form, according to some of my German butcher friends.  In many cases, sausage close to Mettwurst is sold in the US as summer sausage, but there are so many varieties of the latter that trial and error is not a good way to go.  Call the meat packer and ask for one of the butchers from Germany and he’ll be able to steer you.  For example, the Schaller & Weber people told me that the closest they come to my fantasy is cervelat, which is pretty damned good.  Anyway, we ordered a small quality of each of six liverwursts, a smoked Mettwurst, and a few other things from Usinger’s.  Everything arrived well packed and frozen solid.  I was a little concerned about the frozen part.  Allow me to give you a rundown and review:

Tongue and blood:  Good.  Plenty of tongue.  The downside is the heavy smoke flavor.  They made a mistake and sliced it when we ordered a chunk.  Some in our party were not amused by this, since slicing destroys the texture.
Braunschweiger liverwurst:  Unremarkable.  Springy, perhaps from being frozen or not having enough fat.  It tore.  Not bad on the cure/smoke end of things, but not much flavor.
Milwaukee-style liverwurst:  Ditto.  Could not really tell the difference from the non-Milwaukee version.
Hessische liverwurst:  The only liverwurst  that was truly distinctive.  Pretty good, and heavily smoked, but it worked here.  More creamy than dry.
Old-fashioned liverwurst:  Not really chunky, though they said it would be.  Same review as the Braunschweigers.
Ring liverwurst:  My mother’s favorite, and a bit more flavorful and creamy.
Bavarian leberkaese:  This is a loaf made of pork puree that’s baked and then sliced thickly.  Good, but dense.  If you want it lighter get it from Ehmer’s or another butcher.
Topfsuelze:  No idea, as they sent head cheese by mistake, which is much sharper (more vinegar) and comes in a tube, as opposed to a square.  I was seriously pissed off about this.  When I called they said they’d send the right one out to me or provide a credit.  Nice people, but my nose was out of joint because this is my favorite thing in the whole world, and I didn’t get any.  Not all chopped pork jowl-area scrap meat in aspic is the same, after all.  The head cheese was tasty,  though, as it had plenty of tongue and other good bits, so it wasn’t a total loss.  Steven really liked it, partly because it cut through the heaviness of some of the other items.
Mettwurst, coarse, smoked:  Almost like kielbasa, so it did not work for me.  It’s hard to find the real deal because of the FDA regulations involving the sale of cured meat.
Beef, Farmer & Thueringer summer:  All fine.  The beef has some tang to it.  Texture is firm.  These are like salamis.

Bottom line is that Usinger’s products are good, but tailored to the American palate, in my opinion.  The liverwursts come across as less rich in taste and texture — more like top supermarket versions.  They are also less unique as individuals, whereas there is no question with Ehmer’s, Schaller & Weber, Koenemann’s and Stiglemeier that you know which one you are dealing from first bite, if not sight.  I like that the smoke and cure flavors are less pronounced in all cases but the Hessische – which is by nature heavily smoked – but not enough to pay for that kind of shipping, given other issues.  Berry liked all of it – even the head cheese, which he grabbed after I dropped a piece on the floor and it bounced away from me.  Even I have to admit this is kind of scary.

Costco rotisserie chickens smaller

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Costco chicken issues.  Have you been following the story with Costco and its rotisserie chickens?  Over the past year, the cost went up from $4.99, which it had been for years, for a huge bird weighing in excess of four pounds, sometimes, to $6.99.  About a month ago I noticed that the chickens had lost quite a bit of weight.  I always select my chicken for color and size, picking many of them up and doing a full inspection.  All of the chickens were small, and the price was still $6.99, making this not such a great deal anymore.  I thought this might be fluke, like they happened to receive a batch of scrawny birds that week, but the problem persisted the next week.  I’ll bet they got complaints, because when I went to Costco today the chickens were down to $5.99.  Granted, they were still smaller – by a good pound, pound and a half – but at least they had the good sense to realize that you can’t raise the price and reduce the size so dramatically and abruptly.  I called to find out if this has something to do with stopping “plumping.”  Hope so.  Hope to hear back.

Corn muffins

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corn muffins on two plates side by side

Corn muffins made today.  That box of Albers yellow cornmeal was staring me in the face so I put together the recipe on the box, adding twice the quantity of sugar called for.  I made two batches — one for the heavy, dark, non-stick muffin pan and the other for the blue silicone pan.  The heavy pan browned better, but both versions were fine.  These silicone pans (even the smooth ones) stick when you make cornbread or pound cake-type recipes, I don’t care what anyone says.  I always rub a little oil in them first.  The last time I made cupcakes in those individual, ridged silicone cupcake pans, fuggedaboutit — they really stuck and were a mess to clean up.  Berry took it upon himself to oversee the corn muffin process and then kept an eye on them, as you can see in the photo.

Find the dog watching corn muffins being made

Find the dog watching corn muffins being made

Cheater’s BBQ

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Slow-cooked pork butt looking good on kitchen counter

If you’ll be spending time outside anyway, then you might as well multitask and get some BBQ going.  You can make some “cheater’s” BBQ, which means you’ll slow-cook a hunk of meat using a Weber grill for as many hours as you are able to baby-sit the process, and then finish it off in a low oven in the house.  For this you’ll need a drip pan (buy yourself a supply of medium-sized disposable catering pans — you can ask for “half-pans”), a goodly supply of charcoal, aluminum foil, a hinged grate for your Weber grill (makes the job easier, trust me) a dry rub, a about two quarts or so of hot water in a kettle and a 4 – 5 pound piece of meat, like beef brisket or pork shoulder.  Having an active garden hose handy would be a good thing, in case you have embers drift away and catch something on fire.  It happens.  You’ll also need a plain old meat thermometer and long tongs.  Massage the meat with some kind of dry rub, which need be no more than salt, pepper, paprika and a little sugar, and set aside.  On your Weber’s bottom grate, set in the drip pan,  Next to that, mound about 20 coals on a triple layer of foil and light them.  Place your top grate such that one hinged opening is over the coals and one is over the drip pan.  Make sure the bottom vents are about half open.  When your coals are ready, meaning when there no more flames and they smolder to the ashed-over point, spread them out a bit with tongs and then fill the drip pan to the half-full point with hot water.  Make sure you have about a quart of water in the kettle so you can add more to the drip pan later, if you need to.  Place the meat over the drip pan, fat side up.  Set the cover on the grill with vents over the meat so that you are pulling hot air through the cavity of the grill.  Create three long, crunched-up, 1/2-inch sausages out of sheets of foil.  You’ll use these to open and close two cover vents manually and to seat the meat thermometer in the third.  Open the vents on the cover completely.  Take two foil “plugs” and close off two of the cover vents.  Take the third and run the tip of the thermometer through its length so you create a hole.  Take this foil scrunchy and use it to plug up the third lid vent.  Slide the thermometer back in so the dial is now sticking out of the vent with the probe serving as an internal temperature gauge when the lid is closed.  Close the vents slightly to jam the foil in so it stays put.  Be sure the probe of the thermometer is not touching anything in the grill – like the meat.  Here’s the dance, for as long as you can endure it:  keep the unit at about 200 deg. F., as best you can, by opening and closing upper vents with the foil and the lower vent with the handle.  Close vents to lower heat, open them to raise it.  Your problem will most likely be keeping the heat down, but don’t worry about it too much as these cuts of meat are very forgiving.  Add a couple coals every half hour or so by placing them with tongs over active coals.  If you want a little smoke flavor, you can soak some wood chips in water an hour before you start and then add a couple to the coals every now and again, but I generally don’t do this as I’m not crazy about smoke flavor.  BBQ this way for at least three hours.  If you keep this going all day, meaning 8 hours or so, you most likely won’t need to move the meat to your inside oven.  When the internal temperature of the pork is about 200 deg. F. you are good to go in terms of meat that will pull apart.  For beef brisket this will be around 185 deg. F. — but people have fist fights about the correct temperature for slow-cooked meats.  If you complete the cooking process inside, simply pop the meat into a pan and a preheated 250 deg. F.  If you do the whole thing on the Weber, be sure to keep your eye on the drip pan, which will fill up with fat as it melts off the meat.  Be sure to keep the water level up so your operation is not a grease fire waiting to happen.  If, God forbid, you ever have to deal with a grease fire, use a Class B fire extinguisher or a large quantity of baking soda.  Never, ever use water, as water will make a grease fire spread.  If it is very small and in a frying pan, try to smother it with a lid.  When the meat is done, let it rest for a few minutes and slice or pull apart.  Serve with Louisiana hot sauce or a vinegar-based sauce instead of those scary ketchup-based sauces that hide the flavor of the meat.