Grinding and the Grind

I stared at the two huge bags of wild pork, bits and trim and half roasts and a piece of loin that hadn’t gotten shot up. Deep breath. Exhale. Let’s do this.

I’d been butchering and trimming and vacuum sealing and salting and curing for days — it’s my annual post-Oklahoma deer camp ritual, my own private matanza or schlachtfest. This year, thanks to the guides’ itchy trigger fingers, I came home with more wild pork than I have in years.

And while I can take or leave pork chops, I dearly love sausages and smoked pork, especially as an addition to slow-simmered beans or greens. A whole ham, four hocks, two small sides of wild bacon, a few Canada goose wings, and a couple deer tongues had bathed in a brown sugar and salt brine for days. These would be smoked over cherry wood.

No lie: I was tired. And honestly, I still am. Managed to catch a cold while attending my last book tour event last weekend, too. Meh. It would have been all too easy to simply grind those bags of pork. Call it good. Take a nap.

But then I remembered that I am Hank Shaw. I do weird shit, make beautiful, wonderful things to eat with that which most discard or abhor. And I have always taken the hard way out. Thus the deep breath.

I wasn’t going to get another chance at this. I have an almost unbreakable rule about meat in my house: Wild or nothing, since 2005. Yes, I have made a handful of exceptions, most notably for pork fat, but these wild hogs had been fat enough to skip a trip to Von Hanson’s.

I’d already made four “normal” sausages in Oklahoma: Silesian bratwurst, which have a bit of caraway, garlic and paprika in them; a proper kummelwurst, where caraway is the main player; a simple garlic-and-black-pepper sausage; and a mess of cudighi, a sort of sweet Italian sausage unique to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

None of these links were technical. One or two grinds, nothing too small, all very rustic and wild game-centric; the garlic and black pepper sausage had deer, goose and wild hog in it. Everyone in the pool!

But there are certain things you make only with pork. Pork is magical because its fat is perfect for sausage — beef or lamb can be too, well, tallowy — the meat has the perfect moisture content, and it grinds better than other meats.

The first project was, oddly, easier. At least for me. A wild boar salami done very simply, with black pepper and tons of fresh garlic. It was my first dry-cured sausage since moving to St. Paul, but I’ve made this many times before.

The process requires extra sanitation, and since it was a wild hog, extra salt: You need a minimum of 3 percent total salt to render any possible trichinae parasites inert. I normally go for 2.5 percent with domestic pork or venison, which are not carriers of trich. (The 3 percent level would work for bear, too.) Salami also requires a special starter culture, and sodium nitrate — which breaks down into sodium nitrite over time, and not only gives you a particular color and flavor, but also is an insurance policy against botulism and listeria.

Oh, and any of you wrinking your noses at my use of nitrites, but who happily buy “uncured” things like bacon and whatnot are being deceived: None of those meats are uncured. They all use a celery extract instead of curing salt, but that extract is so high in nitrites that you’re actually ingesting more than if you eat my sausages. It’s a huge lie in the industrial food system designed to make people feel better. OK, rant over…

Anyway, you hang a young salami in alarmingly warm conditions — 65 degrees Fahrenheit in my case — for three days. You need to do this to allow the good bacteria in the starter culture to outcompete any possible bad bacteria. You know they’re winning both by the rosy color the meat takes on, and a very specific aroma. I have an unsually good sense of smell, and I can smell that aroma all over the house, despite the fact that the links are hanging in an enclosed chamber.

This is the uncertainty phase: If that aroma doesn’t develop, you may or may not have ruined your salami. Time will tell. And there’s no fixing it by hovering. You need to live with uncertainty when you’re a home salami maker. After those initial three days, you drop the temperature to somewhere around 50 degrees, and wait. These links will need a month or two. And then they will keep, well, for years if handled well.

I decided to do this because I’d gotten in the habit of eating a few slices of salami with cheese and triscuits for a quick lunch. I’d been given one link, the other I bought when I was in Duluth with a friend. Time to make my own.

The second link was far more challenging.

I decided I needed to make a fine-grain, German sausage — the kind most people cannot fathom making at home. I landed on a zweibelwurst, a kind of white sausage with onions. It requires a triple grind when working with bits of wild hog because their connective tissues are so tough.

The endless clean-up and waiting between grinds — at least 90 minutes, even putting the meat outside in weather that rarely rose above 2 degrees — was taxing, especially in my tiredness. Several times I found myself wondering why I put myself through this. After all, I live alone. Chances are only I will eat these links.

The answer isn’t performative, it’s existential.

Doing things the hard way makes me me. Pushing myself in all the ways: physically, intellectually, even emotionally. I am strangely attracted to things that are difficult, uncomfortable, occasionally sharp. I am unbothered by time. I have waited for the payoff for much of my adult life: I can easily wait three years to open a bottle of homemade wine, or a year to unscrew a jar of homemade sauerkraut.

The payoff with these onion sausages was worth it. The texture was smooth and firm, the skins had that knacken, that pop, that the German wurstmeisters strive for, the flavors mild and integrated — restraint in sausage, as in life, is a learned skill.

Cooked simply and served with a bit of spicy mustard, sauerkraut, and rye sourdough — all homemade — and for a moment, I believe I reached peak Hank. I ate this little meal standing at my counter, looking out at the robin couple who live in my backyard, scarlet against a sea of white.

I needed sleep. And sleep I shall. But when I wake up, I know what my first thought will be. What should I do next?