Was able to locate a couple hog heads.
Made head cheese last year. Going to do the same this year.
Start by splitting the head and removing the eyes and brain, then I brine in salt water for a few days.
Cook the piss outta it with onion and carrot.
Wondering how you make scrapple?
I dont have any livers or what not...just a head.
Most of the recipes use pork shoulder!!!
Anyone got a good recipe? Do I have to go find a liver and a heart now??
Thanks.
In my part of the Amish PA, we use buckwheat flour, cornmeal, rendered fat, liver, heart, head meat, onion, spices. They don't brine here, just boil the scrap meat from the head and bones. There is a good amount of bone meat, so I can see adding some shoulder if you don't have a pile of bones. I really can't imagine it without liver and heart.
At fall butcherings, the ladies usually do that job so I don't have measurements. Guys cut, grind, and render fat and craklins, girls make scrapple and wrap.
My French/Metis Grandmother made headcheese about this time every fall. She never used heart/liver or any other cut except the whole head. I was given the yearly honour of holding the head still, with my thumbs anchored in the eye sockets, it was interesting as a child. I have her recipe here somewhere and will look it up for you.
She also made a little something called "Cretons" it is amazing and spreadable, for snacks and such. A small amount of it makes a great stuffing/dressing to go with small game birds and venison roasts. I prefer Cretons over headcheese.
This is similar to her recipe which I have yet to copy from the family cookbook my Mom has now in her possession.
https://www.instructables.com/id/Creton-Quebecois-Pate/On an oven/grill toasted piece of baguette, I spread some creton, a smattering of room temp brie, and a tiny drizzle of pure honey (not processed). The allspice, pepper, and dry mustard of the creton mixes with the honey and it gives an earthy taste of slightly sweet portobello mushrooms. The brie gives it all that funky aged cream background that ties it all together.
Lynn
Miss Lynn, that looks & sounds awesome !!
Jim, never made it, so I'm no help, until it come time to eat it !
No idea of portions, but good scrapple needs pork liver.
Sort of like a spice.
Not there, it's missing something.
Too much, it quickly dominates. Batchy!
Terry describes the ingredients well.
Around here,the broth is mixed with the buckwheat flour
And other ingredients. Then put in a loaf pan to set up.
The meat is ground. Not sure what might be added (Not much).
Then packed in loaf pans. That's puddin.
I love both.
Scrapple fried with maple syrup on it.
Puddin is often fried and put on pancakes.
I like it cold. On butter bread with ketchup, thick onion, and
a bit of Tabasco. A fine sammy!
Lungs. Some people include that along with a good bit of the oink. Waste nothing. A family friend would get the real deal Pennsylvania Amish stuff for us, I think it was impolite to enquire what's in it. All I can say is frying some up was the one sure way to get this little kid out of bead in a hurry. No scrapple I've had came close to the Pennsylvania scrapple.
We were wasteful butcher's.
We never used the blood. (Saw it saved once. Ugly, ugly scene)
Most stomachs, all large intestines, eyeballs and lungs were pitched.
Liver, hearts, kidneys, tongue, sweetbreads, brains were "Puddin Meat" or
kept for another use. It ain't a butcherin' unless you are standing next
to a kettle fire stirring lard or puddin meat, steam rolling off your jeans,
burning you. Your back is cold, so you twist around to heat it up while you stir.
As the puddin meat gets done, you snag some out of the pot, let it cool
on your axe handle stirrer, pull the salt shaker out of you pocket,
And eat some of the tastiest pork of your life.
Everyone makes a big deal of the Amish barn raisings, and it is.
But, it's rare. You only build so many barns.
We butchered cattle and hogs, separately.
So, it was at least twice a year, often more.
We usually had people want to help we the beef,
But it wasn't a big job.
For the hog killing, cousins would decend out of the hills and come from
the city. All hands on deck, a big working family reunion.
Everybody left with a full gut, and a poke full of pig.
I miss that.
Sorry for the ramble.
Meadows brand scrapple is what I remember. Loved that stuff! Fried until just crisp, bit of syrup and a few eggs.....Wooooo
Liver pudding is another thing entirely. Still can’t forget that taste. It is what disappointment tastes like. Lol.
Most commercial makers use way too much liver.
You should be able to just tell it's there.
Not dominate.
Of course, it's like pumpkin spice and other things...
And, how else do you get a $ out of pork liver?
Liver mush is so much better than scrapple and it ain't even close.
You dont need anything but a pot full of meat on the boneto make scrapple . Most around only ad a pound or so of liver, if any. Boil it off the bones, debone and run thru agrinder. Save all the broth , thats the flavor. Heat broth to boil and add meat. Cook it a while then season with salt and pepper to taste,then start adding corn meal, some like white, some like yellow. We use white. Stir like hell as it thickens and cooks. Pour in pans to cool. For a little extra flavor some add sausage seasoning. I like a little creol seasoning in mine tony catchere’s is good. One tip, pour in shallow pans, when sliced its easier to in the frying pan. Stays together better.we slice and roll up in strips of wax paper then freeze. Keeps well for 90days or so
Brings back fond memories.
Haven't found a commercial scrapple to compare with the stuff a family friend would bring us from somewhere deep in rural PA. I always figured regulations wouldn't allow them to add the good parts.
Dad sometimes worked Saturdays as a courier of intelligence documents (to Eisenhower's farm). When driving through the countryside we'd keep an eye out for buzzards, often somebody butchering. Got some great ground pork (Dad made his own sausage, plenty of rosemary but NO sage) and maybe some scrapple that way. (I was about 7, Dad had a tour in Korea the year before, so every minute with Dad was the best.)
I guess I'm in a minority here, either that, or maybe my tastes are just different. We killed hogs every year when I was growing up, and didn't make any "head cheese," scrapple, souse, or anything related. Later on, I'd kill hogs with my in-laws, and same thing. After the in-laws gave it up, I'd get with a neighbor and we'd kill hogs together and work them up at his place, because he had a building set up for it. I'd keep the hams, shoulders, loins, chops, make sausage and that was it. I didn't fool with the belly or anything else. I'm sure I wasted some good meat, and it really didn't go to waste, as I'd give away what I didn't want, but I've seen what goes into some of that souse or whatever you want to call it, and I've never been hungry enough to want to try it.
Is OK, lotsa people don't want to even think about eating anything except muscle meat. My dad grew up in his father's meat market. So taking animals apart was a quick anatomy lesson for me. Dad would cook something like sweetbreads and say something like try this, good isn't it? Then we'd talk about where it came from.
Watch out for those spendy wieners with natural casings!
When I was a college freshman, at the local community college, the instructor of our agriculture class took us on a field trip to the Frosty Morn meat plant in nearby Clarksville TN. Watching them make bologna and hot dogs was quite an experience. Took me a while before I could ever eat either again. It was always said that if an animal was still breathing when it was brought to their plant, they'd buy it for killing. It didn't matter what kind of condition the animal was in otherwise.
I guess there's a big difference between what you see and what you don't as far as what you eat. My wife was pregnant with our first child when I killed my first deer, and she got nauseated helping butcher it up. As a result, she does not care for deer meat, and for that matter, any other wild game. On the other hand, she helped kill hogs, and that didn't bother her at all.
My grandparents were German and all the head cheese they ever gave us did not have the liver. It was made from the head alone. The brains were save to scramble into eggs for breakfast. The liver and all the other organs went into liver sausage. I’m guessing that some people’s recipes that have the liver going into the head cheese is something that people have developed according to their taste, kinda like a regional thing I guess.
Howz it coming along big Fella ?