Home Kill Beef - Making Various Cured Beef Product

While Jean went off to move cattle across the river and do the other chores it was down to work in the kitchen for me. It has been quite a few years since we made and cured meat products and the stirrings inside me led to accumulating a few different recipes over the last couple of weeks in anticipation of receiving the results of the butcher's hard work.

After a lot of research the styles were narrowed down to those that didn't have anything except beef, salt, herbs and spices. Would love to have done some sausages etc but the absence of Pork limited the range.

Still  there were six to be made. On day one four styles were produced and then on day two another two. Produced means started not finished. Each recipe requires different steps and timings.  

The list is as follows:

Leith's Meat Bible supplied a good Bresaola recipe.

Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn gave another Bresaola recipe from their book Salumi

Culinaria Greece had a Pastrourma recipe but without quantities and required a bit of imagination.

Found a very interesting Pastourma recipe on the web.

And finally River Cottage from an episode aired recently provided the idea for Pastrami and Biltong.

A freezer normally used in wine making has a thermostat set to 4 degrees C and the shelves reinserted. One thing became clear and that was we did not have enough of the right sized containers. Jeans Scone bowl was pinched as were a few salad bowls and other mixing bowls.

In order to keep track of everything each shelf has the product in progress plus a plastic sleeve which contains the handwritten recipe on one side and on the reverse side a tick list with a day per line to ensure all the relevant turning and rubbing and whatever is all done according to plan.

As you can see from the photographs each recipe is different, one requires weights, others are dry salted and herbed and others are soaking in either wine or vinegar.

Some of the inputs

Pastrami

Biltong drying