Heart recipes. / back-fat location

[GUS]

Love heart (predominantly lambs), & spend an hour a week slicing heart (pig) for the dogs. ...oddly enough nice thin slices attained via a "stellar" cheese knife ..my preferred weapon of choice.

As there were 25 pages related to the word heart, forgive me I scared myself off, however you lot will doubtless have infinite knowledge of it.

We loved the heart / pork sausages that tesco "tried out" but despite asking for more (before I found the forum) our local store never had any, ..they were popular by their own admission, so I see it as a short PR exercise with availability so short (they simply disappeared).

If I go for my own mix I'll need to order in bulk, fresh thus around 10+kg, delivering around 600ml of blood product from that weight.

Is anyone able to magic me up a decent recipe / video of select cuts (dog's are not fussy, it's a steak supper to them) ..my pig hearts come from cranswick foods, barn born, field raised, the only way imho!

& on the same front, back fat, !? how much these days per kg, & from where amongst supermarkets will I likely strike gold, ..I do have a very pricey "poncey" butchers asking daft prices just down the road, but also an abbatoir / processing plant not far from me..

Before I go for it with the nipper, anything to watch out for?
cheers.

Gus

[jenny_haddow]

Hi Gus, now, given that I am very much a person that 'wings it' when it comes to recipes. If I made heart and pork sausages I would go 50/50 heart to pork, and adhering to the 10%ish rule of liquid and rusk to weight, I would add the herbs and spices that I felt would enhance the meat. I did this with some venison and it worked well. Another good recipe using heart is Oddley's recipe for faggots, you should be able to find it on a search here. To source the ingredients for this I used Morrisons supermarket in Cambourne, they tend to sell a lot of interesting stuff on the meat and fish counter that you don't find in the other chains. The butcher behind the fresh meat counter also sold me some back fat from his trimmings when I wanted to do some black pudding.
The faggots recipe is superb, my OH won't eat heart, but loves the faggots, I just don't tell him what's in them.

HTH

Jen

[wheels]

Wasn't there a TV programme where the Jimmy's Farm guy developed the pork/offal sausage?

Maybe try the online TV resources.

HTH

Phil

[GUS]

Wasn't there a TV programme where the Jimmy's Farm guy developed the pork/offal sausage?

Maybe try the online TV resources.

HTH

Phil

Yup I think so, however (& this will sound odd) we don't watch tv as there is so much crud on it, ..radio4 yes 24/7 but gave up on the bbc when we realised all that dancing on /ice / stars heads / celebrity antiques type malarkey keeled over & submitted to increasingly cringeworthy bbc3 type programming, ..instigated by our kid we sit & watch a bit of the walking dead & a few bits that are on our amazon prime account, ..it makes for less brain rot when tied in with books, talking & the like.

& Iplayer as a platform for anything you do want to watch is pretty useless as a platform, so we typically pass that one by too (streaming is dire for the software).

[GUS]

Jen, oddly enough Cambourne morrisons was the 1st place I tried, having had really good experiences / advice in the past, but when I rang it was a simple "we don't do that, sorry" ...hit & miss depending on who is on shift I guess, what a shame, kinda fly's in the face of "real butchers" they tout as a selling point, ..ah well.

I'll see what my locally reared butchers is like, cost wise, as its on;y down the road, (but caters to the high faluting folk round here, so can be very pricey).

I did see the faggots recipe, however as the nipper would be a scoffer & likes sausages it seemed sensible to go down that route, (you know kids, same food presented in a different way & what was a favourite becomes a struggle again, ..plus it would be good to just get the one sausage shape, many different fillings & flavours into overdrive with her helping (she's still young) truth be told, I'm the reverse, never liked faggots (industrial sauce I think, ..makes me balk, need to get over it), that & I seem to recall them not cooking well in an aga as a kid. ..& my mother was anti offal beyond liver, because of the war "food"

[kil2k]

As for the back fat, I tried two butchers near me. One had to check with his boss, because they only had it with the rind on. Said if I phoned back in the afternoon, he might be able to get some in for the next day.

The second butchers I went in pulled out loads of the stuff. I think 2.1Kg came to around a fiver, which seemed reasonable to me.

[GUS]

Thanks for that (again) Kil2k, will be good to make a comparison & put potential costings into effect.
I'll let you know when the blood arrives safely & we can get it sorted

[NCPaul]

Ask about pork jowl as an option if back fat is in short supply or overpriced.

[GUS]

Good point, just nothing near the pituitary glands eh!

..whilst doing a background check (on my dogs, ..mainly) pig hearts from cranswick I came across this old but excellent piece, must get the nipper to read it when she has a moment.

Read some of this out last night ..needless to say, eyes were on stalks!

http://www.theguardian.com/food/focus/s ... 17,00.html

[GUS]

2kg of loin fat (£3.78) in the end obtained & cubed this evening... local outdoor Welsh cross raised pigs.

& finally for some bacon, got a set of dope-tastic micro-scales off ebay, bout time, now to get me some chemicals measured, rather than rely on others for micro-grammage of the hard stuff ..(nitrites & all that, "obv's" ) progress.

Unfortunately i've got to take some smoked mozzerella in for the butchers tomorrow though (my precious dwindling supply)

[Swing Swang]

Good point, just nothing near the pituitary glands eh!

I'd have thought that there's no danger of this unless you break into the cranial cavity

[GUS]

Good point, just nothing near the pituitary glands eh!

I'd have thought that there's no danger of this unless you break into the cranial cavity

Having read this bit from the link posted (re economy sausages)... I'd prefer to stay away though "For a bit of economy texture you would probably also add pork cheek or jowl. The jowl is the bit of the pig from the earhole to the end of the snout, which is cut off, deboned, skinned and block frozen. But while many manufacturers use jowls, some worry about including them. They contain the pituitary glands and therefore tend to be where drug residues or disease are concentrated. "Put it this way, you wouldn't knowingly fry them for breakfast," one explained. Because it has been in direct contact with the animal's food, the butchered jowl tends to have high microbiological counts and degenerates at twice the speed of the rest of the carcass.

I'm new & ignorant to butchery though