Smoke-fest

My friend Stephen has been out hunting again. This time he brought around a heap of hare hind legs to turn into an experimental salami, and some goat backstraps as a gift. Stephen doesn't like the gamey flavour of the back legs of the hares he shoots but he doesn't like to waste the meat. He had this idea that salami might be more palatable than anything else. I have my doubts, I think they'd be better in a nice rich bacony-mushroomy casserole, but we'll see how the salami turns out. They're just flavoured with garlic and black pepper, and we had to add a good bit of pork fat as the hare is extremely lean. We made three, one of them being for me. Here it is hanging in the spare shower alongside a couple of new pork salamis:


Hare back leg muscles have lots of myoglobin, hence the extremely dark colour - it almost looks like black pudding. The pork sausages were made from some pork leg that was on special last week. I put garlic, cayenne, allspice and cumin in them. I need to get more smoked paprika, so far that's my favourite flavouring, but I've run out.

I removed a hunk of the pork leg meat before mincing the rest for salami and cured it in some salt and brown sugar along with a goat backstrap in preparation for smoking:


I rubbed the pork with a mixture of paprika and cayenne after curing overnight, but left the goat plain:


Here are the finished products after smoking at ~90°C for two hours:


They're quite delicious.

While I was setting up the smoker I discovered I'd had a bit of a freezer disaster. The freezer door wasn't shut properly! That would explain why I've been using so much electricity over the last week or so. One of the things that had nearly defrosted was a hunk of corned silverside I'd bought when it was really cheap. I thought I may as well have a bash at turning it into pastrami seeing as the smoker was going. I finished defrosting it and rubbed it all over with ground black pepper then put it in the smoker for about four hours.

It looks OK, no?


It may be a bit peppery, but it's OK. Next time I'll plan ahead and make a tastier sort of rub.