Salt and Woodsmoke

I am feeling weak and unsteady. Reeling, like a small but not insignificant part of me is missing; lost down the wastepipes at smokery. I am broken like a sensitive coalminer’s son in a DH Lawrence novel. Only part man.
No, it’s not Joss Stone’s outfit and performance at the Brits that has caused this. It is something graver and more embarassing than even that.

This is going to be difficult for me to write, but I feel that I owe it to you. My reader.

You may need to sit down.

Pour yourself a stiff drink.

Drink some of it.

Now.

Ok.

Erm.

I…..

I threw an uneaten pork pie in the bin today.

Worse than that, I didn’t even want to try it.

How can this be right? How I could I stoop so low? How I could betray my friends and work colleagues like this? Oh, as they say, woe is me.

How did it happen I hear you ask? How could I get to a point in my life where I couldn’t even cut a slice from a small hand-raised pie and pop it, unadorned, into my mouth?

Well - and this is no justification my dear reader only an explanation - the answer is: I was just too porked out.

Let me rewind to Kirstan’s birthday (which came not that long after the Sheffield brined pork experience) where he cooked a wonderful shoulder of Gloucester Old Spot using Hugh F-W’s ‘Donnie Brasco’ recipe. Much rumination and discussion on the success of this dish lead Kirstan to suggest we try something similar at the smokery. A quick call to our friendly butcher resulted in the delivery of a perfectly pink loin, skinned and boned and ready for the brine tub.

However, that cunning loin didn’t arrive on its own. Oh no, it came skipping into the smokery hand in hand with a kilo of PORK SCRATCHINGS. And those scratchings spoke softly to me. In a seductive, porky whisper. ’smoke me’, they said.

I have this problem. At work I am surrounded by food. I like eating food. Food likes to be eaten. It’s what it’s there for. Raw fish is less appetising. Especially after you have spent an hour gutting the slippery little things. Bacon, it needs cooking. Olives, yes. Smoked salmon, yes. A tastes of eel, yes. Pork scratchings - AWOOOGAH! Hold me back cowboy.
On Monday I had to seal them in a vac pac bag to stop myself from snacking on them. On Tuesday I smoked them but I also smoked Polish sausage and the pork loin which had been brined, rubbed with a spice mixture and then tied.

Naturally I can’t smoke these things and not taste them. It would be cruel. So, I had a little sausage and I had a little pork loin and one or two scratchings and then in the morning I had to try the pork cold to check the texture and I needed to check just how smokey the scratchings were and then later in the day we had to slice some samples for the shop and I wanted to make sure our customers would be getting the full porky flavour.

So, when the pie arrived I was running at close to 98% on the pork-meter and I thought: ‘I’ll leave it for now. I’ll want it later. And anyway it won’t go with the chocolate I just ate. Or the sardine.’ But come clean-down time the pork level hadn’t subsided and I just couldn’t do it. I had to say no and it went in the bin. It was a truly crushing moment.
And I’m sitting here thinking. Maybe I could pull it out tomorrow and give it the end that it truly deserves.

Smoked Pork Loin