Bozeman Mountain Bike TEAM

Summer in Montana comes late and by most measures, its short and sweet and gone all too quickly.  Especially this past year when it snowed until July and started again in October.  But no matter, we still managed to grow quite a crop.  And some folks might ask…with all those months of cold…what do they DO up there?  Well, first and formost, we harvest the crops and “put things up”.  Second order of business…go out and kill something.  Fortunately for me, I’m Italian…so I just order the killings.Then with freezers stocked…I have 3 which is perfectly normal around here and most people know down to the cubic foot not only how much space they have, but also how much space a deer or elk takes up…we move on to the preparations. 

I digress.  I arrived home one evening to find an entire deer carcass in my garage, left by a friend.  Without skipping a beat I got fellow Luna Mariann van den Elzen on the horn and asked if she wanted to help butcher a deer.  “F-bomb yeah” was the resounding answer and Mariann screeched up the driveway hours later.  We set to butchering and in just an hour had tenderloin, whole frenched rib roasts (backstrap for those in the know), shoulder roasts, fajita meat, scrap for grinding and makking sausage and whole hind legs for curing into prosciutto.  Yes, you heard it right…whole legs of venison prosciutto. 

Next, we got the pig.  That was already broken down into primals (large cuts for the amateurs) so the most exciting part was the whole heads, the gallon of blood and again, a whole hind leg.  In order to “prosciutto” something it has to be covered in salt for days or weeks.  So into large marine coolers the venison and pork legs went, along with pounds of sea salt and weights from the basement gym…we’re not in training around here you know.  There they stayed for weeks with Mariann and I constantly monitoring the temperature to make sure it stayed below 40 degrees and adding ice when neccessary.  In the mean time, we ground pig fat and mixed it with the blood in a quest for the perfect blood sausage, black sausage or blood pudding.  We continue to test this recipe because while the flavor is unsurpassed, the texture is still off.  Moving along, we cut the jowls out of the pig and along with the pork belly, hung those to dry with different spice preparations, making guanciale and pancetta. 

We also made bresaola with a beef eye of round; duck prosciutto; duck confit, duck cracklins and are getting ready for another round of blood sausage and everything goose but the honk.  Stay tuned for further adventures…