Living Homegrown Podcast – Episode 58 Preserving with Salt and … · 2019-10-20 · mean...

Living Homegrown Podcast – Episode 58 Preserving with Salt and Smoke

Show Notes: www.LivingHomegrown.com/58

Theresa: This is the Living Homegrown Podcast, episode number 58. We're smoking and salting on this one.

Announcer: Welcome to the Living Homegrown Podcast, where it's all about how to live farm fresh without the farm. To help guide the way to a more flavorful and sustainable lifestyle is your host, national PBS TV producer, and canning expert, Theresa Loe.

Theresa: Hey there everybody. Welcome to the Living Homegrown Podcast. I'm your host, Theresa Loe, and this podcast is where we talk about living farm fresh, without the farm; and that can mean canning, preserving, pickling, all sorts of other artisan food skills, small space food growing, and just taking small steps towards living a more sustainable lifestyle. Here we talk about different ways that you can just live closer to your food, even if you have little or no garden space. If you'd like to learn about any of these topics, or my online Canning Academy, where you can learn to preserve food safely and confidently at your own pace ... Then just visit my website livinghomegrown.com. All right, so this week's podcast is part 2 of a 2-part episode, so if you missed last week's episode, episode 57, you might want to stop and go back and listen to that one first. It's a little bit of an introduction to the guests that I have on this week's episode. Now, I'm interviewing Joel MacCharles and Dana Harrison of the Well Preserved website, and they're also the authors of a brand-new preserving book called Batch.

In last week's episode, we talked a lot about the book, the different techniques that are featured, and we really focused on different ways to preserve citrus, and it was a fantastic episode really packed with a lot of recipes, and a lot of information, so if you missed it, be sure to listen to that one. Now just to recap, Joel and Dana started their blog Well Preserved all the way back in 2008, so they've been doing this for a long time, and in fact, they have over 1,800 blog posts on that website, with over 700 recipes, developed just by Joel. Now, Joel is a home cook and a writer with a special focus, or a love, for all things preserving. He also loves to teach, and he is a former TEDx Toronto speaker. I should say that, that Joel and Dana live in Toronto, Canada, and Dana is Joel's wingman in the kitchen. I think Joel said somewhere that Dana is like the seasoning to his cooking.

They work together really well, and Dana helps him prep, and she tests and tastes everything, but she's also a professional graphic designer and illustrator for the last 20 years, so she is the creative director for everything that they do, and she makes sure that it looks as good as it tastes, so ... Together, they're a great team. Now, I asked Joel and Dana to come on the podcast to talk about their book Batch, but we ended up having so much that we wanted to cover, we broke this up into 2 episodes, with last week being about lemons and the book, and this week is all about salting and curing different foods. This week's episode is a really interesting conversation, because we cover all the different ways that you can salt and smoke, for both flavor and preservation.

© 2016, Living Homegrown Media, LLC

We talk about cold and hot smoking, and we also talk about how you can easily use your barbecue to add smoke flavor to a whole variety of different foods, but before I dive into the interview, I just wanted to talk a bit about bacon for a minute, because I know many of you are interested in making your own bacon, I've had people ask me about it, and I know that a majority of my listeners do not want to use any nitrates or nitrites, or any other preservatives in your food. I think most of us are all about knowing what's in our food and being very careful what we put into our food, so that was actually one of the main reasons why I wanted Joel to come on the show: Because I wanted him to talk about making bacon without nitrates or nitrites, and that's what we talk about, so I think you're really going to enjoy it. However, I thought this was a really good time to bring something up in regards to bacon, especially here in the United States.

There's something that a lot of people are not aware of when it comes to labeling, and you probably know that labeling can be kind of an underhanded thing in some of our food, so I wanted to bring this up in case you were unaware of it. Here in the United States, all bacon is either cured or uncured, and any time that a bacon is labeled as cured, according to the USDA and the FDA, which are the regulatory agencies here in the United States, any time that it is labeled as cured, it must contain nitrites. Now, before you freak out and say, "No, no, Theresa, I buy nitrite-free bacon at my local health food store or Whole Foods store," hear me out on this. If it has the words "cured bacon," it has to either contain synthetic nitrites, or naturally occurring nitrites.


Now, you might see either cured or uncured bacon labeled as "contains no nitrites or nitrates," except for those naturally occurring ingredients, such as celery juice powder, parsley, cherry powder, beet powder, and spinach, so yes, all of those foods that I just mentioned have naturally occurring nitrites, and in fact, if only a small amount of celery juice powder or beet powder is used, they can get away with saying, " ... and naturally occurring ingredients," so in other words, even though it says "contains no added nitrites," it actually does, if it has celery juice powder. It's just a natural nitrite, it's not a synthetic nitrite, so it's kind of a misleading way for them to use nitrites and make it be a preserved product without actually telling you that there are nitrites in the bacon, so if you truly do not want to have any nitrites or nitrates, then what you have to do is buy uncured bacon that does not have celery juice powder or any of these spices that I just named.

I just want to make that clear, because people get really up in arms if their real, ultimate goal is to not have nitrites at all. It actually could still be in the bacon that you're buying, so be sure to read the label. I just wanted to make sure that you were aware, because it is possible to create bacon without adding any nitrites or nitrates, and that is what Joel talks to us about, so we are going to get the same bacon flavor, but we use salt and then we smoke it and create a delicious bacon that is a lot more natural than what you might be getting at the supermarket; so I hope that clarifies it for you.


Now, in the show notes for this episode, I'm going to link to a government paper that explains exactly how the labeling for bacon works, so if you want to go and read about this, I will have a link in the show notes, but I'll also have links in the show notes to everything that Joel and Dana talk about, including their book, some of the recipes, and, if you want any of the step-by-step instructions that Joel takes us through in this episode, that is all in the transcript, which you can download and print out if you want to have that; so there's a lot of information in the show notes this week. To get the show notes, just go to livinghomegrown.com/58, and I will have everything there for you, so ... Sorry for the long-winded intro, but I just thought the whole thing with bacon was really important, because here in the U.S., the labeling can be really confusing. All right, so without further ado, here's my interview with Joel and Dana of Well Preserved, and the authors of the preserving book Batch. Hey, Joel and Dana, thanks so much for joining me.

Joel: Awesome.

Dana: Thank you. Thanks for having us again.

Theresa: Yeah, well, I'm ... This is part 2. I'm excited that you guys are still here, and we're recording the second part of this interview, because there was so much to cover, we really needed to break it up into 2 parts, and this time, we're still talking about your fantastic book, Batch, but we're going to be talking more on technique, instead of just particular recipes, and Dana, I would love for you to explain to everybody how the book was laid out with techniques being in one section, and the different fruits and vegetables being in the other section.


Dana: Yeah, we have ... There is 2 different parts to the book. The first part is 7 different preserving techniques and how they all work together, so if you want to learn one weekend about water bath canning, you can obsess over water bath canning and really get that technique down, and then if you want to spend another weekend learning about fermenting, you can do that; and then at the end, when you go move into the second half of the book and you encounter a big flat of plums, like we said the last time, is like, "How many techniques have I looked and have I mastered, that I could possibly preserve this ingredient with?" In the beginning of the book, there's a icon system, so each preserving technique has its own little icon, I like to call them like girl guide badges, almost, so you earned your badge, but so ... It follows through throughout the book, so when you're in the fermenting chapter, you really get to know that little circle icon.

It really represents the idea of fermentation, so when you move out into the second half of the book, when you see a recipe, it'll have a different icon to the left of it, and you'll know immediately that it's a fermenting recipe, and you're like, "Oh, I know how to do that," so ...

Theresa: It's laid out really nicely, and it's really easy to find anything. You may just read about the technique and then decide to dive into the recipes, and you can go back and forth, and I would love to talk about salting and smoking, although I've talked about salting on the podcast, I've never talked about smoking, so I'm really excited to dive into this, and Joel, I know this is your area of expertise, so if you get a little long-winded and we don't hear anything from Dana, she's still there, folks, she's still there.

Dana: Still here.

Theresa: Yeah. I just, I know Joel gets very excited talking about smoking.


Dana: We're going to let him talk.

Theresa: Yeah, we're just going to let him rip on all of this, so ... Okay, so Joel, can you tell me a little bit about the salting technique that you have in there? I know there's one particular recipe that everyone talks about, and that's your chilly salt.

Joel: Chilly salt's awesome, and I mean, it's just a great example of how easy this can be, so if you take an amount of chili peppers, and you cut them up, whatever amount you want, and you cover them in 4 times their volume in just non-iodized coarse salt, kosher salt, you can leave them in a jar, you can put them on the back of your stove, which is where I leave mine, and they'll stay indefinitely, and what happens, it's really awesome, is, the salt just works to pull all the [capsaicin 00:11:48] and all the liquid that's in the peppers, it actually pulls it into the salt, so what ends up happening is, you have a spicy salt with a couple of chili flakes left over. Why this is really cool, Theresa, I don't know if you're a spicy person.

Theresa: I'm a medium spicy person. I'm not a hot spicy person, so I would use this sparingly.

Joel: Well, here's my theory, and this is going to be a challenging paradigm. I believe that people who are moderate spicy should be eating hotter peppers, but the way they should be eating them is with salts, because here's the great thing about this. If I take a ghost pepper or scorpion pepper, 2 of the hottest peppers in the world, and I cure them in salt, what I can do for you is put a couple of grains of salt, if that, into your bowl of soup or chili or pasta, and what happens is, the salt grain will, of course, dissolve, so we can add actually less heat than you can add by commercial hot sauce, even though it's a way hotter pepper.

Theresa: Got it. Got it.


Dana: You get the flavor of the pepper instead of all the heat ...

Theresa: Right.

Dana: ... that might be what's overwhelming to you.

Theresa: Right.

Joel: You can have a chili with really subtle flavors, and add heat. If you added a commercial hot sauce that was diluted with a lot of vinegar, what ends up happening is, every dish you make ends up tasting like that vinegar hot sauce ...

Theresa: Yes.

Joel: ... but by making a chili salt like this, or pulling anything into the salt, what you can do is dilute that heat over a bigger area, and add less heat, and still keep all the subtle flavors that you have underneath it. My mother struggles with black pepper, and eats my ghost pepper salt.

Theresa: Wow. Okay, you just ... I will be your taste-test dummy.

Joel: Awesome.

Theresa: I will try this out, because that, I love the flavors of peppers, but sometimes the heat overpowers it, and all I get is the heat, and I miss the flavor.


Joel: Using that technique, that's as simple as it is, you can add just a little bit, and it's awesome. We do 5 or 6 different types a year. We've even done it with pickled habanero peppers as an example. Chopped them up, covered them in 3 or 4 times their volume in coarse salt, and you're done.

Theresa: Now, do you ever have to strain it out, or you just leave it sitting like that?

Joel: I leave it. I think if, A, would be tough to strain. You could do bigger chunks, so it would be easy to pull out, but there's no reason to pull that out unless you don't want the chunks of pepper in your food.

Theresa: Right. You could leave big chunks that you don't get the, so you don't accidentally put a big chunk of pepper in there.

Joel: Absolutely. If you cut a jalapeno into disks and dumped it in, you, would be very easy to keep the disks separate.

Theresa: That sounds great. Okay, yeah. That sounds really, really good. Now, when we're talking about salt and salt curing, I know one of the things that we were going to talk about today is bacon.

Joel: Yeah.

Theresa: Bacon, and smoking bacon, is something I've always wanted to try, and I've been reading about you doing it, and I see you have it in the book, so I'm going to totally try doing this. I would love for you to talk about making bacon, and I know that you use salt with the smoking process, so tell us about that.


Joel: Yeah, whatever I'm preserving with smoke, I'm generally using the smoke as a flavor, and kind of a throwback to preserved foods that were done with smoke, so if I look at the real traditional recipes that are preserved with smoke, you think about something ... I imagine you know what a chipotle pepper is?

Theresa: Yes.

Joel: Almost all smoke, right?

Theresa: Yes.

Joel: Unless you want things to be really, really super smoky, which we do at occasions, we typically pair smoking with something else. Lots of charcuterie. Bacon is smoked after curing and salt, but we do all sorts of different techniques, so you might smoke something and then dehydrate it, or you might smoke something and ferment it, or in the case of bacon, you actually cure it with salt first, and then you smoke it after.

Theresa: Okay, now since we're talking about salt, I know that there can be some confusion with people, because when you read about salt curing, a lot of times they talk about pink salt, and people assume that they mean the pink Himalayan salt, but they don't.


Joel: No, not at all. When we looked at Batch, we wrote Batch, my original introduction, and I only have I think 1,800 words to introduce the whole world of salt and smoke, we were at about 15,000 words to try to explain all the uses of pink salt and all the rest. We put a little nod to it. What you need to know about some curing of meat is that some meat cures, you need pink salt. Pink salt, or curing salt, using nitrates and nitrites, to allow you to ferment or cure meat without it going bad, and it doesn't ... It protects it from stopping things like botulism. In the case of bacon, you can do it without nitrates, a lot of people do, obviously a lot of commercial mass-produced bacon, almost all of it, is done with nitrates and nitrites, but you can make fresh homemade bacon without that pink salt, that ...

They call it pink salt, by the way, it's not the Himalayan stuff, as you mentioned, just simply because it's dyed pink, because if you eat too much of it, it can actually be deadly. You would never use this curing salt for regular cooking.

Theresa: Right. They dye it so you won't accidentally pull it off the shelf and use it.

Joel: Exactly, but you don't ... If you want to make bacon, and you don't want to worry about that, you don't have to. You can actually make it with regular salt.

Theresa: Yeah, and that's why I was so excited that you put that in there, because using nitrates and nitrites, I know a lot of my listeners are trying to avoid those, any kind of processed food always has that, and they're trying to avoid nitrates and nitrites, so by doing this particular bacon, you are curing it with just regular salt, and then giving it the smoke flavor, and then you either cook it right away, or you keep it in the refrigerator, correct?


Joel: Yeah, so the technique is actually not far off of the chili salt we just talked about. You take a pork belly, as much as you want, cover it with salt, but the key here is that you weigh things. The magic ratio for salt for bacon is about 2.5, between 2.5 and 3.5% of the weight of the belly in non-iodized coarse salt, so that works out to roughly 1 ounce of coarse salt for about 2 pounds of a pork belly.

Theresa: Got it. Okay.

Joel: What we do with that is, we just ... We literally put salt on the pork belly, we put garlic, and we put some other things. Often, sugar is used. We actually used a bit of black coffee in ours ...

Theresa: I saw that. Yeah.

Joel: ... and I used bourbon, because I use a lot of bourbon.

Theresa: Yeah, because bourbon!

Joel: Yes, because if I have to explain it, I can't.

Theresa: Right.

Dana: Bourbon is the answer.

Theresa: Yes.


Joel: Absolutely, and then you literally refrigerate that for 8 days, and what happens is, you'll notice every day more and more liquid is in the bowl, and you tend to pour that liquid off, and I know that gets rid of the bourbon, but that's okay. You've already got the flavor in there. What you're doing in that, you're keeping a high salt content, and it's just pulling moisture out of the pork, and it's turning it away from a raw pork belly into something that looks like bacon. After 8 days, you rinse it really, really well, you want to really, really rinse it well, because if you don't, you'll end up with an over-salted bacon. If that ever happens to you, don't worry, cut it up small, put it as bacon bits in salad. That's the worst thing that you can do here. We finish the cure in the oven, so the idea here is raising the meat's internal temperature to 150 degrees. The way that we do that is, we bake it really low, 200 degrees for an hour and a half.

Then we end up smoking it, and I ended up smoking it for 4 or 5 on something called a cold smoke, and I don't know if you want to talk about cold and hot smoke now or if you've got some more bacon questions, but that ...

Theresa: No, I would love to hear about the cold and hot smoke.

Joel: Awesome, so really, when you're smoking, there's 2 types of smoking that happens in the world. If you think about gravlax, which is cold-smoked salmon that's been cured, it's not cooked, but there's other types of smoking ... We often mackerel. I don't know if you have mackerel on the West Coast. It's probably an Atlantic thing.

Theresa: Yeah, it's more Atlantic thing.


Joel: Yeah, but smoked mackerel and other smoked fish, smoked trouts, smoked whitefish, is often done under heat, so the difference between cold and hot smoking, people argue about the temperatures, but ultimately, hot smoking is done in a vessel, be it a barbecue or smoker, that's cooking while it's actually smoking at the same time. Cold smoking is adding smoke without actually cooking what you're smoking, so in the case of this bacon, we've already cured it in the oven, we don't need to cook it, so we can just smoke it ... We put it in the barbecue, and we use what's called a smoke maze. There's multiple ways that you can cold smoke, but this is really easy. You buy pellets from the store. You can also buy chips from the store, I've used chips that I've used from cutting wood at our cabin, and we just bring it up to, with a blowtorch, I light these chips on fire, and this sounds way more scary than it is, it's not, and you blow it out, and the chips will smolder for anywhere from 5 to 10 hours.

Theresa: You don't have to wet the chips, they can be dry-

Joel: Don't have to ... You don't have to wet the chips, and the barbecue's not on, because it's cold smoking.

Theresa: Okay. Got it.

Joel: Yeah, so-

Dana: You need to minimize the airflow, as well, so once you put the lid down on the barbecue, it just seems to smolder for a good long time.


Joel: Yeah, and that's because we're using something called a smoke maze, which just makes this easy.


Theresa: Yeah, now ... I'll just stop you there for just a second. I had never heard of a smoke maze till I saw it in your book, but I already went out and got one, so I'm ready, and ...

Joel: Have you tried it yet?

Theresa: No, I haven't tried it yet. I just got it, like 2 days ago, and ...

Joel: It's awesome.

Theresa: Yeah.

Dana: He has not stopped using it since he got it. It's like the best, and ... It's so easy.

Theresa: Yeah, so what it is, so for everyone understands, it's this box that has this little, like a zigzag pattern, and you can put wood pellets, which is another thing that I wasn't really familiar with. I was more familiar with wood chips, but now all the stores, anyplace that, at least here in the United States, anyplace that you have barbecue stuff, you can get the chips, or you can get pellets, which are just little compressed, little shapes of wood, and you put it in there, and when you light one in, I assume, it's just going to go slowly through the maze, burning from one end to the other. Is that the way it works?


Joel: Yeah, so just a couple modifications or clarifications, but you're exactly right. The pellets, so people know, have no adhesive. They're put through pressure. In the cherry wood pellets, I found cherry seeds ... They're the real deal. They're quite neat. Now, some barbecue people really believe in using full wood, and I get that, that that's a much finer piece, but if you want to learn, and you want to get started, this is a way to turn a regular barbecue into a smoker for 30 or 40 dollars. You light either end, Theresa, or both. If you want to get a lot of smoke, you can actually light both ends. You can even light the middle, if you want, and I would leave it burn for about 2 or 3 minutes. After it burns for 2 or 3 minutes, you just blow it out, and when you blow it out, it's created enough of a cold base that it literally just works its way through the maze.


Dana: Kind of like incense.

Theresa: Yeah.

Joel: It's exactly like incense. That's a great analogy.

Theresa: Yeah.

Joel: The bacon ...

Dana: Tastier.


Joel: ... in the book, you can see the color of the bacon in the book. It's this dark, golden, smoke color. We left that in our fridge for months, and you can ... If you want to make bigger pieces, you can also cut it and store it in your freezer. It won't lose any of the smoke flavor, it won't lose any of the bacon flavor.

Theresa: Okay, so the trick here is that you're just smoke flavoring it. You're not cooking it, because you're doing a cold smoke. You've already salt-cured it, you've already put it through the oven, and so now we're just getting that smoke flavor.

Joel: Yeah, so my cheat is that I've put it in the oven and got that internal temperature to 150 degrees. If you were hot smoking, and you've probably got some listeners who haven't done the cured bacon piece before, and they have a hot smoker, and are familiar with that, if you have a hot smoker, you can skip the oven. You just cure the bacon 8 days, rinse it off, rinse it real well, and put it onto your hot smoker, and slowly bring the internal temperature up to 150 degrees. That's your goal, so hot smoking just means you would be smoking it, often it's somewhere between upwards of 200 degrees, some people go up to 300 degrees. People play with different temperatures.

Theresa: Okay. Wow, so it's really not difficult.

Joel: Cold smoking is as easy as lighting the pellet maze that you talked about, and shutting the barbecue lid.

Theresa: Yeah, and just not forgetting about it.

Joel: Yeah, and don't do it in your apartment.


Dana: You can, if you want. Yeah, and don't do it near an open window. I've always said, "Tell me when you're doing it so I can close the back window."

Theresa: Yeah. Yeah. Well, everyone loves that smell, and it's ... I think you wrote, I don't even remember where I read it. You wrote somewhere about how mesmerizing it is to watch the smoke coming out of it.

Joel: I got to tell you, after almost a year of writing the book, and it was actually the bacon that's in the book, to sit down, and I lit the smoker, and I shut the lid of the barbecue, and I sat, and I drank a beer, and it was like the shell shock was over. Just watching smoke waft off it, you mentioned watching it. If you're cold smoking, your biggest fear is predators, i.e., like raccoons in the city of Toronto are notorious ...

Dana: Yeah.

Joel: ... so I've done full nights where I've left something on the barbecue. If the barbecue is not on, the cold smoker is sitting there in the middle of the barbecue, where I've just put a brick on the top of the barbecue and left it overnight.

Theresa: Yeah, because some little critter's going to come along and open it up?

Dana: Have dinner.

Joel: That's my biggest, that's my only biggest fear, yeah.

Theresa: Yeah.


Joel: It'll probably be my puppy.

Theresa: Yeah, or the neighbor, right. Yeah.

Joel: Yeah.

Theresa: Very good. Okay, that ... Yeah, okay, I will let you know when I get mine done.

Joel: Awesome.

Theresa: I'll let you know how it turns out. Well, there's other things in the book that you smoke, and I just ... It was so exciting to read about all the different things, so tell us about some of the other things that we can smoke.

Joel: Yeah, so you can really start mixing these techniques, so now that you know a bit about salting, and you know a bit about smoking, you can really play with them interchangeably, so if you remember the technique that we did with the chili peppers, cut up a bunch of chili peppers, cover them in salt, we did another recipe where we pitted cherries and smoked cherries. They're in bourbons, they're great in Manhattans, they're great to infuse, you could drop them in vinegar, or drop them in the booze of your choice, and literally just leave them in that bottle, and they'll add flavor, smoky cherry flavor, but the reason I pit them is because smoke really likes moisture, so the more moisture that you have, the more it'll absorb that flavor, so yeah, so if you smoke cherries, you can actually put cherries, and then do the chili salt technique that we talked about earlier, and you end up with a smoked cherry salt.

Theresa: Oh, my gosh.


Joel: You could smoke the chili salt-

Dana: Which makes a nice simmer on a cocktail.

Joel: Yeah, great for when you want a cocktail.

Theresa: Okay, so when you're smoking the cherry, we're talking cold smoke here, right? You're not cooking it, you're doing the same technique where it's ... The barbecue's off, you just have the smoker in there.

Joel: Yeah, and the reason I talk so much about cold smoking is because when you're into hot smoking, although you can do it in a barbecue or an open pit, most people who are learning hot smoking have made a significant investment. They've jumped up to that 5, 4 or 500 dollar, or maybe a cheaper version, but they've gained their experience with cold smoking to move into the world of ... That takes a bit more of an investment, and a bit more of equipment, often, for hot smoking.

Theresa: .... so it's like the gateway drug. Cold smoking is the gateway drug to hot smoking.

Joel: Absolutely, and when you get into these nuances, you have so many people that ... I have friends that say, "You're only smoking if you're hot smoking on this 600-dollar unit." I have another friend who says, "You're only hot smoking if you're using coal from wood you cut." You know, like it's ...

Dana: It's a very nuanced ...

Theresa: Yes, I guess so.


Dana: ... and you might notice, with the book, too, is, we actually live in a third-floor apartment in downtown Toronto, so anything that we're making is conducive to our particular urban lifestyle as well, and we've never ... He's wanted a smoker for ages, but I'm 100% sure it's going to be stolen out of our backyard that we share with an entire neighborhood, so it just wasn't a practical thing for a lot of people too, so if you have limited space, or if you're living in an apartment, you can still do all this stuff. You just maybe don't need the giant smoker.

Theresa: Yeah. I'm really glad you brought that up, because this is not, so you don't have to have a farmstead, you don't have to ... You guys probably know my tagline is ...

Dana: Yeah.

Theresa: ... "without a farm," and you don't have to have a big space, you don't have to have even a countryside. You can be in the city and be creating everything that's in your book.

Dana: That's it, yeah.

Joel: We live on the busiest street of Toronto, which is the biggest city in Canada, and we're 50 yards away from the biggest highway in the country.

Theresa: Wow.


Dana: We definitely don't have a homestead. We have a yeah, not a homestead, but we also, we're within close proximity to so many amazing farmers markets, and so many food people, like Joel's learned a lot. We go out for dinner, and we have friends who are chefs, and we've learned a lot from them, who they also cook in small spaces, and have a lot of constraints when it comes to things like cost and storage and all that, so we've sort of picked things up from around our urban lifestyle, and then we can get out of the city, and hopefully one day, and learn to grow some stuff. I'd really like to get into gardening, actually.

Theresa: Yeah, well, it's a perfect match for what you guys do, and you're absolutely right. The smoking just takes a little bit to take it to a whole new level. I know you had smoked peaches, and a smoked red pepper?

Joel: The smoked red pepper's such a neat technique. It's based on chipotles, but not spicy. If you cut red peppers in half, and I'll often cut them into a bit finer strips, and the reason I'm doing that is so that there's more of the edges exposed. Remember what we said about moisture?

Theresa: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Joel: The more I have edges exposed, the more that that's going to take on the flavor of smoke, and I take the red peppers, and I smoke them until they're unedible. They're not ...

Theresa: That sounds a little weird, Joel.


Joel: All right. They're not nice to eat at all, but if you then take one piece, I dehydrate those so that they become rock solid, we store them in a jar, and then when you're cooking through the winter, whether you're doing like a slow-cooked pork roast or a slow-cooked pulled pork, or a stew, or something braised, and you drop one of those peppers into the sauce while it cooks, it disintegrates, and when it disintegrates, it just breaks up, and it adds smoke to the entire dish, so it tastes like you smoked whatever you were eating, even though it wasn't smoked.

Theresa: Wow.

Joel: That's a really neat-

Dana: Flavor. Yeah.

Joel: Yeah, to me, a really neat flavor-forward technique. We have a pulled meat recipe in the book, I can't remember if it was pork or beef, that was done with that pepper, that's really cool.

Theresa: Have you tried taking the dried smoked peppers and putting them through like a Vitamix or powdering them, so then you could just take the powder and sprinkle it? I'm asking because I dehydrate a lot of my tomatoes, and then I powder it, and I use ...

Joel: We could-

Theresa: ... the tomato powder.

Joel: We could fill 2 episodes with powders. I love powders.

Dana: That's true.


Theresa: Me too, because it's so concentrated, and you just need like a little pinch, and it adds so much nuance. It's like this whole layer of flavor, and people can't figure out what it is.

Joel: We have smoked onion powder, smoked garlic powder, smoked onion scape powder, a smoked paprika ...

Dana: Mushroom powder.

Joel: ... that we made ourselves, so we smoke a lot of vegetables that we turn into powders for cooking. Smoked mushroom powder, that's really awesome.

Dana: You might want to put the dehydrator outside. It depends on how, Joel has habit of jamming strange things into the dehydrator and then leaving me, because I work at home, so he leaves for the day, and he wants to put like drawers and drawers and drawers of jalapenos in there, and the liquid was like, my eyes were burning all day, and ...

Theresa: You couldn't figure out why.

Dana: Yeah, and I find it depends on your level of smoke, how much smoke you've done, you might get ... Yeah, I mean, it's a beautiful smell.

Theresa: Sure.

Dana: I also have like an incense burner that leaves that nice campfire smell, so if you like that, it just might be something you want to take into consideration.


Theresa: Good thing to remember, though, especially if you're having a party later or something, but yeah, you could put down the garage around on the patio, for sure.

Dana: Do it camping-themed you know, S'mores.

Theresa: There you go. Absolutely.

Joel: One recipe that's not in the book that I think would really resonate, because you probably have a lot of dog people in your audience.

Theresa: Yes.

Joel: We buy 10 pounds of yams or sweet potatoes at a time, we cut them into French fries, French fry size, and I smoke them for about 8 hours in the cold smoker. Then we put them in the dehydrator and dehydrate them just as crisp as a rock. We then have treats for probably 5 months to feed the dog.

Theresa: Wow.

Dana: He loves them ...

Joel: The dog, he loves ...

Dana: ... and they're good for him, and there's nothing else in them, and they're cheap. Really, really cheap, so ...

Joel: We were probably spending 50 or 60 dollars a month on treats that we have replaced 10 pounds of yams last us 4 months.


Theresa: That's so good, because I know yams are good. Carrots are good, too, for dogs. My dog loves carrots, but doing that so that you can store them, so they're all preserved ... Preserving for dogs, that's fantastic.

Dana: Yeah, well, and the smoking, I think, adds that kind of ... I guess because a lot of the dog treats are smoked. Even dogs that aren't vegetable dogs. Like ours is a vegetable dog. He eats all the cuttings and peelings. He's our other recycle bin, but he eats anything, pretty much, but even dogs that aren't partial to vegetables, it kind of fools them a bit.

Theresa: Yeah.

Dana: They think it's something else.

Theresa: Smoking it's a trick.

Joel: Yeah, even if you kept all your peels in the freezer in a bag or a container for a month, of things like yams and carrots and that type of thing, you could smoke those peels, you could dehydrate those, and either A, turn them into a powder, because carrots are ... Carrot [peels 00:33:32] are made of carrots, or you would have a dry chip to feed your dog again.

Theresa: Nice. Very, very nice. I know that you guys probably feel like you've ... Don't even want to think about doing another book after all of this, but I know everyone's going to be asking, "What's up next for you guys, now that you've finished this book?"


Joel: We really vowed that we would not even talk about it. We had a good friend who's been a mentor to us, Alison Fryer, who used to be at the Cookbook Store that's now shut in Toronto, and this book wouldn't exist without her, and she said, "Just know that when you publish a book, you're one-third of the way done the work," and she said, "Everything else is publicizing it, getting it out there, talking about it," and we thought we would wait until we were a bit further down the trail to see if, see what the whole experience is like to decide what's next.

Theresa: Yeah, and ... Well, and you still are working on Well Preserved, your website. You still have things coming out there, and so that's where people can connect and see what you guys are up to; and I know that you have your Facebook, and you've been doing all these live trainings, which were awesome, by the way. Joel's been doing these for the promotion of the book. Joel's been doing these live teachings, these little short little snippets of how to make some of the recipes in the book, so in the show notes for this episode, I'm going to link to everything of you guys, so that people can find you and find what you guys are doing, and check out the book, and all of that, so I just ...

Dana: Thank you.

Theresa: Yeah, and I'm just so thrilled that we finally got to connect, and I just wanted to thank you guys again for not only coming on the show, but being so generous with all of your knowledge and information and sharing so much, and I just am thrilled that you were able to come on the show, so thank you.

Dana: This is so much fun. Yeah.

Joel: A giant thank you to you.


Dana: Yeah, lots of fun.

Theresa: There you have it. That was my interview with Joel and Dana of Well Preserved, and the authors of the preserving book Batch. Now, remember, I'm going to have, in the show notes for this episode, links to everything related to Joel and Dana, as well as information on the U.S. Government regulations for nitrates and nitrites, and how it relates to bacon. If you want any of that information, just go to livinghomegrown.com/58, and everything will be right there for you. I hope you really enjoyed that. I learned a lot, and I plan on making a ton of bacon myself this summer, and experimenting with all the tips that Joel gave in this episode. I thought it was really fun. Until next time, thank you so much for joining me here today. I really appreciate that you took time out of your busy day to spend it listening to this podcast, so until next time, just try to live a little bit more local, seasonal, and homegrown. Take care.

Announcer: That's all for this episode of the Living Homegrown podcast. Visit livinghomegrown.com to download Theresa's free canning resource guide, and find more tips on how to live farm fresh without the farm. Be sure to join Theresa Loe next time on the Living Homegrown podcast.

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Living Homegrown Podcast – Episode 58 Preserving with Salt and … · 2019-10-20 · mean...

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Transcript of Living Homegrown Podcast – Episode 58 Preserving with Salt and … · 2019-10-20 · mean...