Bacon Jam?: A Day with Ed Hick

Article Disclaimer:  This article is in no way perfect!  Adding photos to Google Blogger has frequently been the bane of my existence in this whole blogging process!  I'm sure the article could use some editing for typos, etc. but I just can't re-do all the pictures AGAIN if this doesn't save properly!  Aaaccckkk!

As I have mentioned in previous posts, our hosts in Durrow, Ireland, Sarah and Patrick bake and sell quiches, savory pies, sweet tarts, savory and sweet roulades, brownies, soup, and much more through their business called The Gallic Kitchen.  They cater events, supply cafés with their wares, have a stand at two farmers’ markets in Dublin, as well as owning their own café location in Abbeyleix.  Oh, and they have two young children, Flo, 10 and Artie, 8.  Busy, busy folk!

Upon our arrival in Durrow, one of our stops on the way to the house was to drop off some supplies at the café.  As soon as Patrick led us into the Gallic Kitchen Café, the first thing I noticed was a display refrigerator with an array of products: local Alex’s Chicken Liver Pate, membrillo from Spain, Irish cheeses, Sarah’s own delicious chutney, etc.  And, the most eye-catching item, I must say, was Ed Hick’s Bacon Jam.  Bacon Jam?  Intriguing.

Hick Family Portrait

We soon found out that Ed Hick and his brother Brendan come from a line of industry standard breaking, successful pork butchers and sausage makers and are quite famous across Ireland.  And, it just so happened that along with being almost neighbors at the Farmleigh Farmers’ Market in Dublin, Ed was a good friend of Patrick and Sarah’s.  Needless to say, we were delighted when Ed kindly agreed to allow us to visit his processing plant on sausage making day!

As sausage making operations at the plant started at 7:30 a.m. sharp, and the plant was located in Dun Laoghaire, about a 2 hour drive from Durrow, we decided to stay the night at a hostel in Dublin, about 20 minutes north of Dun Laoghaire.  After finding a suitable overnight parking spot for the rather conspicuously blue and large Gallic Kitchen van (graciously loaned to us by Patrick and Sarah), we grabbed a drink at Market Bar, dined on lamb kebabs, and hit the sack in preparation for an early morning.

Each Bin is a Separate Recipe

Using the navigation tool on Jonathan’s iPhone, we found our way to J. Hick & Sons Traditional Pork Butchers without much trouble.  We knocked on the metal grate door and were first greeted by the purr, ok, roar of a large capacity bowl chopper (channel: giant multi-blade whirling Cuisinart) and then by Ed himself, outfitted in blue plastic overalls and industrial ear muffs.  In preparation for a full day of sausage production, the day before, Ed and Brendan had premeasured the spices and weighed the meat for each recipe so that today they could simply mix and stuff.

The first sausage of the day was always their one and only organic sausage, a breakfast link special ordered by a local hotel.  Clearly this is a relatively large account given the specific and extensive protocol that the facility is required to follow in order to be able to call their products “certified organic”.  Mixing and stuffing the organic sausage first ensures that no non-organic ingredient has so much as touched the machinery after it was sterilized by the specific cleaning products authorized by the certified organic powers that be.  Specific percentages of “lean” (pork meat), fat, oats (unusual choice of cereals for a sausage) and spices are mixed in the bowl chopper until the contents are a smooth, almost creamy consistency.  While the product is mixing, Ed intermittently adds scoops of ice partially to maintain a cool temperature while the meat is whirling around in the machine (if the fat reached too high a temperature it will melt and turn to grease) and once the ice melts, the water will aid in the emulsification process. 

Sausage Making Terminology Note: hot dogs and mortadella are familiar examples of emulsified sausages.  The inside is smooth with no definition between meat and fat.  Contrast with PigWizard’s Artichoke Heart and Manchego Chicken Sausage: ground meat and fat mixed with distinguishable chunks of diced artichoke heart and manchego.  Both styles are important to have in your sausage making repertoire.

Anyway, back to Ed’s special order organic breakfast sausage.  After sausage is mixed, it is scooped into a large capacity piston stuffer where the meat is squeezed into the casing, and then hand linked and counted in preparation for packaging.  And no, these coddled little organic sausages cannot be packaged using the same materials as the non-organic product!  Keep your traditional foam meat trays and plastic wrap; we demand that organic weenies be vacuum sealed in expensive specialized bags, free from the wicked plasticizers that make plastic wrap stretchy and organic food non-certified.  I’m being a little cheeky here but the extent of the qualifications for certified organic products in this country are admittedly a leeetle bit over the top.   Having said that, after scarfing down a few of Ed’s organic weenies I understand why the hotel special orders their exclusive supply.  Cause they’re freakin’ good.

Following the organic sausages were trays and trays of different sausage recipes, some emulsified sausages, some ground.  Some with orange rind and parsley, some with bread crumbs and spices (the white pepper whooshing around in the giant mixer made me sneeze a few times!).  Jonathan always made his large batches of sausage at Kurt Schmitz USDA plant in San Leandro, so our field trip to Hick’s Traditional Pork Butchers was really my first experience with mass production equipment whipping through four or five hundred pounds of sausage.  As informative and interesting as the day was as a whole, I have to say that the highlight of the trip was learning to make the oldest and most traditional of Irish and UK sausages: black and white pudding.

I know what you’re thinking, “Ewww!  Blood!”  You have no idea.  Read on to experience second hand what the vegetarian Baby Bird of yesteryear never would have done for a million bucks.

Firstly, let’s start here: what are black and white puddings and why are they so integrated into Irish cuisine?  The “puddings” are traditionally breakfast sausages made with a base of flour, barley, spices and pig parts, which include meat, skin, cartilage and offal (organs).  Black pudding, add pig blood.  I know one or two of you pansies will stop there.  Come on, aren’t you the least bit intrigued?

For centuries, Ireland has been a country that relies heavily on its farming community.  It’s rainy and slightly humid climate combined with its vast open spaces makes it ideal for growing grass and grain and for grazing cows, pigs, and sheep.  One concept that too many of us city folk have abandoned or never practiced to begin with is this: “waste not, want not”.  It is too easy just to zip down to the supermarket and buy another sour cream if ours has spoiled.  We gingerly reach inside our freshly purchased whole chicken and with two fingers remove the package of giblets and throw them in the trash.  We have long replaced our mop with a Swiffer and a Costco sized box of replacements.  Have you ever been a guest in a house in which after dinner the leftover food heads straight for the trash?  I have.

Contrast this lifestyle with living on a fifty acre farm which borders another fifty acre farm until you have enough fifty acre farms to warrant a small village supply store.   Before cars, you couldn’t afford the time away from farming your land to spend the whole day hitching the donkey to the cart and riding into town for supplies more than once a week, I suppose.  Even now, whether you are driving your tractor (true story) or driving your car to town, you want to conserve your trips considering gas costs an equivalent of $10 per gallon!

My point is that living on a farm and depending on that farm for food and revenue, your holistic attitude is not going to allow you to waste anything that can repurposed into something else and that includes eatable animal byproducts.  Notice that every ingredient in the black and white puddings can be grown/found on a farm?  Why waste the edible innards, including the nutritious blood, of a pig when they can be repurposed into a delicious breakfast staple?   Given the references to black pudding in Homer’s Odyssey, which dates back to 1000 B.C., I am in no way implying that the Irish invented the stuff.  I am simply stating that at whatever point in history the recipe swept through the British Isles, the concept was embraced and became deeply imbedded in the cuisine.

These days Irish farmers are no longer allowed to slaughter their animals on their farm, even for personal use; they must be driven to the abattoir, in many cases the nearest abattoir is several hours away, and the farmer must pay to have the animal slaughtered.  And, even if the farmer did request their pig’s blood to be returned to them, only a few abattoirs are equipped to process blood rather than simply disposing of it (the blood must be stirred constantly while it is being collected to prevent coagulation).  This renders farm-to-table black pudding near impossible.  Having said that, black and white puddings are still an important aspect of Irish cuisine.  Seriously, if a restaurant has morning hours you can guarantee that you will find “traditional Irish breakfast" consisting of 2 sausages, 2 rashers (loin bacon), black and white pudding, toast, egg, tomato, beans and mushrooms, at the top of the menu. 

This breakfast is no joke, folks!  Photo courtesy of flickriver.com

Ok, let’s get back to Ed’s pudding tutorial.  White pudding: step one: place you meat and offal bits into a netted bag and poach in a giant vat of water until fully cooked.  Step two: reel in today’s catch of pork bits, dump them into the bowl chopper and chop/mix until meat is finely diced.  

Step three: place your dry ingredients, including barley (also poached in the giant vat of water), flour, salt, cracked pepper, marjoram and pimento and your ground meat into a large mixing bucket.  Step four: hand mix until fully incorporated.  Step five: place mixture into the piston stuffer where it will be stuffed into plastic casings and sealed at each end with a metal staple.  Finally, poach the stuffed white pudding.

Now for the fun part (or the disgusting part, depending on your point of view): black pudding!  Follow steps one through three in the white pudding tutorial.  Step four: retrieve the bucket of defrosted, slightly congealed pig blood from the walk-in and commence pouring the contents from one bucket to another until the desired frothy texture and proper red color is obtained.  Side note: due to the difficulty in maintaining fresh blood (preventing coagulation, spoiling, etc.) most commercially made black puddings in Ireland are made from dehydrated blood (i.e. powdered blood), but not Ed’s!  He’s the real deal!  

Step five: place dry ingredients (see above), poached and ground pork bits and blood into a large mixing bucket.  Step six: hand mix until fully incorporated.

STEP SEVEN: TASTE THE MIXTURE FOR SALT!!!  True story!  I ate raw pig blood!  I’ve gotta be honest, mixed with the pork and seasonings, it tasted pretty damn good, not like blood at all!  That was until I noticed a little smudge left on my finger and licked it.  Yeah, straight blood; it was full of iron and tasted exactly like human blood!  Blegh.  (Ok, for clarification purposed, I should say that it tasted like my blood; I’ve never actually tasted anyone else’s blood before.)

Poached Pudding

Finally, stuff the black pudding and poach until the lovely bright red color of raw blood turns to dark brown color of cooked blood.  Upon purchasing the pudding, remove plastic wrapping, slice to desired thickness and fry in a skillet until heated through and crispy on the outside.  Truly fascinating stuff, folks.

When pallet after pallet of sausage meat and spices were finally mixed and stuffed into casings, we helped Ed package and label the finished product.  The mindlessness and repetitiveness of the task allowed Jonathan and Ed to share pictures of some of their record sized foraged mushrooms (Ed’s five pound giant puffball won, hands down).  They traded stories of nightmarishly nitpicky health inspectors and fussed about equally absurd rules and regulations (why do processors of local Irish pork need to take measures against trichinosis when the stuff doesn’t even exist on the island?).  In truth, I think the conversation was mutually beneficial in that both parties ultimately felt a little better about their respective challenges in the meat processing business and the sometimes fire-ringed hoops through which the small processing plants are forced to jump.  In this respect, PigWizard’s spirit redeeming revelation was that the stuff that grows out of the Irish soil is the only grass that’s actually greener on this side of the pond.  Pay attention, folks, cause this little detail may prove to be the key to the renewal of spirit that will spawn the PigWizard empire upon our state-side return.

We ended up talking for hours, long after the work day was done.   Not only was this experience a positive glimpse into our potential sausage-making, bacon-curing future, but I think Jonathan found a truly like-minded bosom buddy if not a respectable figure to add to his short list of mentors.  Thanks again, Ed and Brendon Hick; keep it alive and take no prisoners!  Cheers!