Pork and leek dumpling! Yum. I always make extra to freeze for quick dumpling soup lunches.

Bison part 2

Above is the bison after 6 days in a salt and herb cure. I returned him to his ziploc bag in the fridge after taking the picture to show you. Around March 18 we'll hang him in the basement to dry.

Above is the roast after the "trimming", before the start of the salt cure. It's actually really quite small. I confess we don't have a kitchen scale, but my guess is that we (accidentally) trimmed it down to about 1.5 pounds, probably less. We have high hopes for this little guy!

Our first post is about bison.

        When our local Farmer's Market reopened after being closed for most of January and February, we were pumped to buy some locally farmed pork and get started on some of the recipes in Charcuterie. It turns out that if you'd like pork other than ground, you have to order it in June. Sad for us, but nice for the farmers so can't complain too much. 

        Then we saw that Northern Unique raises wild boar and bison. We thought, "Wild boar coppa!" But there was only one frozen roast and it was $53. We think we could justify the price since it would make quite a bit of cured meat that would last us awhile, it's not like we'd be using it to make a sunday roast that you scarf down in one sitting. But we passed on the wild boar (for now) when we saw the beautiful bison roast pictured above. We thought, "Bison bresaola!" It was only $16. We defrosted it overnight in the fridge and proceeded to follow Michael Ruhlman's directions to remove all visible fat and sinew, at which point our beautiful, soft roast promptly fell apart. ("Wtf!") And then we wondered if we had actually trimmed away the extra bits to get the INSIDE round, the cut of meat actually asked for in Ruhlman's recipe. Don't know for sure but would like to think we did. We used the extra bits as stew meat in tomato sauce the next day.