Hunter Angler Gardener Cook

It’s zucchini time in California. The annual Overrunning of the Squash has arrived. Yes, fresh zucchini are good — excellent, if you get them before they’re as big as truncheons — but anyone who grows zukes always has too many. And don’t get me started on zucchini bread. Not a fan.

I pickled some zucchini last year and they were good, but not as good as cucumber pickles. How else could I preserve them? Drying.

I’d read somewhere that the Southern Italians sun-dried their zucchini to keep them through the year. I’ve even seen a web page offering dried zukes from Sicily jarred in olive oil — at $10 plus shipping. Seriously?

But, try as I might, I could find no recipe or method for sun-drying zucchini anywhere on the web, or in my not insubstantial cookbook library. So I improvised.

I began by slicing the squash into disks. I then sprinkled salt on a large cookie sheet and set the disks down on them, and when the cookie sheet was filled I sprinkled the tops with salt.

I let this sit an hour. Now zucchini are basically squash-flavored water, so I was pretty sure an hour would draw out a lot of moisture and get the salt all the way into the slice — to preserve it from mold. It worked. Too well, in fact. In my next batch I’ll only “cure” them for 40 minutes if I am not going to put them up in jars. After an hour, the zucchini is borderline too salty to eat fresh, but would work well as a preserved product.

How to dry them? This took some thinking. I’d heard that the French string-dry their zucchini like apple rings, so I tried doing that. Not so good. The string will sag and the zucchini will all touch each other, slowing drying and trapping moisture — promoting mold.

Better was a metal or wooden skewer. At first I hung these in an ingenious ghetto fashion: I attached the skewer to the clips on the kind of coat hanger designed to hold skirts or pants. Nice, but then Holly couldn’t dry her clothes. I then switched to using our sausage/pasta drying rack.

These zukes above had been drying for a day in our very hot, very dry garage. I guess it was about 110 degrees in there at its peak, “cooling” to 70 at night. At that rate, the zucchini only took 36 hours to get to the soft, quasi-dried apple texture I wanted.

Could I have dried them all the way? Sure, but then I’d need to reconstitute them, and why bother? I might have dried them another 12 hours if I wanted to preserve them in oil. When they’re done, they look like this:

Kept like this in the fridge, I bet they’d last months. In this state, zucchini are still pliable and soft, but feel more like soft leather than watery squash disks. Chewy instead of crunchy. Savory instead of thirst-quenching, as a raw zuke can be on a hot day.

I plan to make more of these to preserve in olive oil later. But to start I wanted to cook these as I’d heard the Sicilians do: In olive oil, with mint and chiles. Holly thought I should add garlic, and I might do that next.

The dish couldn’t be easier, although there is one tip I can offer: Dried zucchini lack the water that normally causes that pleasing sizzle in a hot pan, so you might think you’re not heating the squash enough at first. Trust yourself, they will brown nicely. Keep turning them over until you get the look you want. I like a combination of well-browned bits with those just kissed by flame.

Make more of these than you think you need — Holly and I ate four zucchinis’ worth at one sitting with no trouble. Here is the full recipe.

When I lost the James Beard Award to the crew at Sunset magazine’s One Block Diet this May, I found myself far less disappointed than I thought I would be: After all, their message is pretty similar to what I am trying to do. Besides, as we got our snark on during the insanely long awards ceremony, we found that we liked each other pretty well.

Sunset is based in the Bay Area, so I offered to have them over for dinner sometime. They accepted, and finally made it out to Casa de Hank and Holly yesterday — on what had been the hottest day of the year (It’s 108 degrees out now, which is even hotter than yesterday’s 106). We feared the Bay Area peeps would melt, but they proved plenty hardy.

Can I just say how fun it was to have an evening of food, wine (lots of wine) and conversation with a group of people equally excited about learning where their food comes from, and how to make good things from scratch? Holly and I are typically ”conversation pieces” among gatherings of the Normal – but with the Sunset Crew’s Margo, Peter, Alan, Sara, Julie, George and Amy, discussions on beekeeping or making your own wine or chicory coffee is normal conversation.

What’s more, we’re usually the ones bearing odd gifts, but this time Margo brought some vinegar and honey from their garden and Sara the Sunset Wine Guru brought us their homemade Syrah (I served my Rainy Sunday Sangiovese at the table, which Sara liked enough to have two glasses and called “well balanced.” In my world, hearing that from a Sunset wine editor is as good as it gets).

I had a feeling this would be a good night, so I wanted a feast fit for them. I knew it was going to be hot, so I went with cold salads, pickles, cured meats and some fresh grilled venison sausages.

Laying out the spread before everyone arrived sparked a little epiphany. If someone asked me what makes my food different from someone else’s, it distills down to this: My food is a juxtaposition of the cured and the fresh, laced with fresh herbs and grounded in wild game and fish. It’s not like I hadn’t realized this distinction before yesterday, but seeing the spread hammered it home.

First off was the pickle plate:

At the center are olives I’d been curing since November. Elise, Garrett and I gathered them, and I’d been storing the olives in a spicy brine since then. I wasn’t too sure they’d be OK, but after an hour’s soak in fresh water and a coating of olive oil, they were delicious: tangy, meaty and firm.

Even more tangy were the fermented carrots. These were also brine pickles, but the carrots had soaked up a good deal of the chile I included in the brine. Now datsa’ spicy carrot! The crew had to restrain themselves leave one last carrot for Margo and Peter, who got stuck in traffic and arrived late.

I also had beets from the garden pickled in balsamic vinegar, and the always-popular sweet-and-sour sunchoke pickles, which are spiced with chile and colored with turmeric.

On to the charcuterie plate. I pulled the wild boar lonzino I had been making, and it looked and tasted wonderful, although this batch was a little saltier than the last one I’d made.

I also put out some wild boar saucisson sec, which Margo and Peter pronounced excellent — high praise, as I suspect this is not the first such salami they’ve eaten.

I’d meant to slice some coppa di testa, but it fell apart when I tried to cut it. Lesson learned? The gelatin that helps a testa set doesn’t survive freezing. Now I know. We plan on using now-loose meat to make cabesas tacos. Mmmm!

Summer means fish to me, even on a cured meat platter. So I hauled out some Alaskan pink salmon a friend of mine had caught last season and gave it a cure with fennel seeds, fennel pollen and ouzo. I love this recipe.

I also decided to make something new: Smoked Shad Rillettes. I had all this shad that my Dad, brother and I had caught last week, and I’d heard of chefs making smoked trout pate and salmon rillettes, so why not?

Besides, as a by product of my recent pork fat orgy, I had tons of creamy lard kicking around. Spread on table water crackers, these rillettes were awesome: A little smoky, a little sagey, rich with a slight zing from lemon juice. I’ll make this again — and I bet it’d be just as good with smoked trout, mackerel or bluefish, too.

For the main course I made a big batch of the octopus a la Gallego with my homemade paprika and oregano from the yard, a barley salad with sage and sun-dried tomatoes, a fregola salad with bocconcini, lemon zest and lots of basil, and a beet salad with feta cheese and lovage.

The only hot item on the table were sandwiches with fresh made venison sausages, flavored with bay leaves and garlic, topped with mustard and some pickled jalapenos and onions from Elise.

I think I made a bit too much food, as I am pretty sure Amy came close to exploding by the time we hauled out the honey-lemon verbena ice cream to go with Margo’s peach and raspberry pies.

Just about the only thing to get us out of our collective food coma was a round of my homemade absinthe. Yep. Nothing like the Green Fairy to get the digestion going. And if you don’t like absinthe, you can always use it as lighter fluid.

At the end of the evening they all piled into their cars for the long trip back to the Bay Area. But before heading into the night, they invited us to their place for a shindig, Sunset style. We’re looking forward to Round II.

UPDATE: Here’s Margo’s account of the evening, complete with pictures of the tour I gave her of our “ancestral manse.”

Hot weather has finally arrived here in Sacramento. We’d been having an unusually cool summer up until yesterday, when the temperature in my backyard hit 101 degrees. Today should be the same, and temperatures higher than 90 should be the rule until September.

While Sacramento can be simmer in the summer — we had 114 degrees a few years ago — it is not a humid place, and most evenings we get a wind we call the Delta Breeze. This cools off the nights and moves the air around. Good for tomatoes and grapes. But the breeze also makes Sacramento a perfect place to dry food.

I do a lot of drying, and over the years I’ve settled on what works well and what doesn’t. Technically you can dry anything, but I remember those dried vegetables in the foil soup packets from my college years. Ick. In my climate I see no reason to dry veggies, with a few exceptions.

Mostly I dry herbs, fruits and mushrooms. Tomatoes are my mainstay, but it’s still June and they are not really ready yet; I’ll come back to sun-drying tomatoes in a few weeks.

What’s the big deal about drying? It’s easy, right? Put whatever it is you want to dry out in the sun and come back later. Not exactly. In reality, only a few things can be sun-dried. Sun bleaches and sun steals flavor in things that lack the acid or sugar to hold the rays at bay. Try drying oregano in the sun and you’ll be left with something closer to straw.

Most things I dry in my garage, which has several advantages: It’s hotter than hell, dark (ish), protected (for the most part) from insects and birds, and it has a ceiling fan to move air around. Not too shabby, eh?

Stop for a second. Why dry at all? To those of you who are deeply into food, the answer is obvious. But for many of you, it’s a legit question: Why bother to dry products when you can get them fresh at the store, or the farmer’s market, or even your own garden? The answer is flavor and cost.

Dried oregano, for example, has a very different flavor from fresh. Drying mushrooms concentrates their flavor, and, even when reconstituted for a stew or a sauce, are never quite the same — in a good way. Besides, you can’t make mushroom powder, a delicious element of a dry rub for meat, without dried mushrooms.

Other herbs have a season, even here in California. Lovage is a prime example. Lovage is a heady herb, tasting of celery, parsley and something bolder still. It’s a prima donna of an ingredient, but plays well with beets and beans. It is especially good in stews. But stewing season does not coincide with lovage’s whims. As an herbaceous perennial, it has died back for the winter by Thanksgiving. The solution? Dry it. I keep it fresher by vacuum sealing it in one of those special jars until winter.

Lemon verbena is another example. I have a verbena bush outside my window and it kicks out hundreds of those lovely serrated leaves that smell wonderfully lemony; incidentally, this is the smell that those bastards at Pledge stole to scent their wood polish. Now I can never, ever smell lemon verbena without feeling the urge to clean the table. Damn you Pledge, damn you! But I digress. Like lovage, lemon verbena drops its leaves right when I am thinking about verbena tea. Solution? Dry it.

Another reason for drying is cost. Spring porcini mushroms are in high season now, and the price has come down from that exorbitant $30 a pound I paid earlier this spring; I just got a bunch from Oregon for $14 a pound. It’s more than I could eat fresh, so I dried a lot of them. Why not just buy dried porcinis from the market? First, store-bought are of indeterminate age, and really old mushrooms have the texture of cardboard and the flavor of feet. And, ounce for ounce, they are more expensive than spending the money for fresh and then drying them.

Another cost issue comes in with ingredients that only live in certain places. Mushrooms fit in this category, but so are herbs such as California white sage or California bay laurel, which I just used in a wild boar salami. I am not often in Monterey, three hours away, so when I get those herbs I dry them. Saves me gas money.

One more reason to dry is if you are a gardener. I am more than a little obsessed with growing onions in all their forms, and I save seed from those that set it. Not all alliums do. But those that don’t always have bulbs that can be replanted later in the year. Shallots, potato onions and garlic are the prime examples. When you harvest, keep the small bulbs from heads that do not fully develop — sometimes you’ll get a garlic that’s one big clove, for example — and save them for fall planting.

But you need to “cure” these bulbs so they will store properly over summer. Curing is just drying, by the way. Once the outside layers and stalk are dry, you should then store the bulbs in a cool place.

For me, all this drying comes easily. I place whatever it is on a wire rack in the garage and let it dry. Mushrooms and herbs should be brittle, fruits leathery. My Mission figs are coming ripe now, and they are huge — so big I need to cut them in half to dry. Since bugs like sweet figs, I am drying these indoors. Uncut figs I dry in the sun.

But I know not everyone lives in a semi-desert. Moisture is the enemy of drying, and it makes the process trickier. When I lived in Virginia, I used a gardening shed for things like curing onions, and my oven for everything else. Oven-drying is pretty simple: Put the oven on its lowest setting and keep it ajar for air circulation. I still do this for venison jerky.

With the drying season just beginning here, I have many projects in mind. I have a Bartlett pear tree that bears more fruit then I know what to do with. I am thinking of drying them like apples in rings. Anyone ever do this?

I am also planning on drying some apricots and of course my endless fig supply. If we get a real heatwave, I may just dry some meat in the garage for machaca or carne seca. Never done this before. 

But what I am really waiting for is tomato season. Tomatoes, to my mind, are perfect for sun-drying. And of all the tomato products I am waiting to make, strattu is chief among them. Mmmm…strattu. It is a Sicilian type of tomato paste that makes store-bought seem like baby food. And the tomatoes are almost here, so it won’t be long now…

UPDATE: Looks like my friend Lang was drying porcini at the same time I was. He wrote about drying mushrooms here.

As I write this, my father and brother are in the air headed back East. They were here to celebrate Dad’s 75th birthday, piggybacked on Father’s Day. Naturally, we went fishing.

My mum was here a few months ago, making her first visit to our house here in Northern California. Likewise, we went fishing.

A love of fish binds our far-flung, split-up and spread-out family. Mum is a native of seaside town of Ipswich, Massachusetts; Dad was in the Navy. My stepfather Frank spent a fair bit of his leisure time fishing off the Jersey Shore. My brother fishes, as do two of my three sisters; the other sister just likes eating them. Some of my fondest early memories are of catching fish, and I will never forget the colossal flounder fry Mum would make after we’d hammered ‘em off Point Pleasant aboard the Norma K III. Even 30 years later, I still can’t quite stomach tartar sauce.

Almost every time Dad and I get together we fish. A few years ago we shared an epic striped bass fishing trip in the salt marshes of Cape May, New Jersey, that morphed into a striper-bluefish-herring trip that did not end until well after midnight. Somehow we weren’t exhausted once we cleaned the fish and returned home, so we opened a couple beers and sat talking. A couple beers became many. Before we knew it, dawn had broken.

This trip was supposed to be our first big Alaskan trip, but finances have been pretty tight all around. But I know the rhythm of the fishing seasons here and figured we could get on some California halibut in the San Francisco Bay, some shad in the American River, and maybe a striper in either spot.

Dad and brother Fred arrived Wednesday in time for dinner, so I cooked the striped bass I’d caught a month ago with some fresh porcini mushrooms, wine and some of my homemade bacon. (Here is my recipe, if you are so inclined.)

We got up at 3:30 a.m. the next morning and headed to Emeryville, where I’d booked us on the C-Gull. It was packed, even on a Thursday, which was a bit disappointing. We’d decided to push ourselves and go Thursday to beat the Father’s Day weekend crowds. No such luck. But the day was cool and the bay was calm, and we had coffee. Life was good.

Almost as soon as we began fishing, Fred hooked into a big halibut — a really nice one, probably 16-17 pounds. Holly hooked a shorty, then I did, and then things settled down for a bit.

Eventually I had a decent halibut on the line. As I brought it up, my line got tangled with my neighbor’s, which is never good. The fish was well over 10 pounds, and was pretty green: Green fish need to be tired out before landing, or they can break you off. I got the halibut to the surface, and was about to let him head back down for another run when the captain appeared with the net. “Drag him in!” he shouted, dipping the net in the water. I was thinking “no way,” but just then the fish rocketed to the surface, thrashed his head — and bit off the hook. Gone. The captain mumbled something about me being too slow, which got my ears hot: I’ve caught hundreds of flatfish before, and I know how to land them.

I got over it when Dad reeled in a keeper halibut, and then a striped bass. Late in the day Fred caught another halibut, and then the wind blew up and things got sloppy. We all spent the last hour inside the cabin; Holly and I would go fishless.

Normally I’d fish until they dragged me off the deck, but I felt oddly serene about the whole thing: I had been worried that Dad and Fred would not catch fish — when I took Mum out in early spring, we’d gotten skunked — but I honestly didn’t care if I caught anything. This never happens. Just seeing Dad and my brother so happy to be out on the San Francisco Bay, catching fish, seeing the sights — including a century-old fishing schooner — was enough. Maybe I’m growing up. And besides, we’d have some fish for dinner.

And it wasn’t over. Friday night we went shad fishing with John Harrison from Five Rivers Guide Service. I’d hoped Dad and Fred would get a different experience, and I was right. John took his drift boat out, which has no motor — so we could hear the river. What’s more, he took us to a quiet spot downstream from Sunrise Boulevard where no one else was around; to look around us, we could have been fishing in 1850.

The good thing about shad fishing in California is that even on a slow day — which is what we had — we still caught 15-16 fish. We kept a dozen and tossed back the rest. Once again, Fred had the hot hand and started catching first.

I followed up with a few, and Dad finally got the hang of it and began catching as the sun went down.

In the end, we wound up with 15 pounds of halibut fillets, a nice striper and 10 pounds of shad fillets that will soon become smoked shad.

We ate well yesterday. I made a raw porcini salad dressed with a saffron vinaigrette, deep-fried honegiri shad fingers, a shrimp risotto made with stock from the striped bass, a salad of halibut poached in olive oil – and, just for good measure, gadwall duck breasts with a morel sauce.

To wash it down, I pulled out a bottle of 2005 Grillo — a Sicilian white wine — that Dad had made; I’d saved it just for such an occasion.

I can’t think of a better way to end a family visit. Now I need to get Mum back here when the fish are biting, so I can cook her a similar feast. But I’m still skipping the tartar sauce.

I was awash in pork fat this past weekend. In the past few days I have made two types of bacon, a dry cured wild boar salami, more than six pounds of lardo — cured back fat — not to mention a gallon of fresh rendered lard.

I blame John Bledsoe.

Bledsoe is the local hog farmer I buy from, and I always knew his pork rocked (his pork shoulder and bellies have been the only meat we’ve bought regularly in several years), but didn’t quite realize just how good it was until Saturday.

Let me back up a bit. Earlier in the week I smoked my two slabs of bacon, made from Bledsoe pork bellies. These were a good inch thick at their thinnest, and nicely striated; I love that the English call this “streaky bacon.” The first slab I rubbed down with red wine and then cured with a set of Italian herbs and spices, like a tesa. The other I decided to make quasi-French, with quatre epices and some local wildflower honey.

I smoked the Italian bacon for just an hour, the French bacon for four hours. Can’t say how they taste yet, because Holly wants me to wait until she returns from a trip to South Dakota. That’ll be this afternoon. I’m betting she won’t be disappointed.

But when I finished smoking the slabs, I rummaged through my box freezer and found I was out of pork fat; I needed some for a wild boar salami. I know, it’s sad. So I emailed Bledsoe and asked if he could bring in some back fat to the Davis Farmer’s Market on the weekend. Sure, he said (or rather wrote): How much do I need? Maybe about 5 pounds, I said. He said he’d bring 40.

Thinking this was some sort of hog farmer humor, I forgot about it. But when I arrived at the market Saturday morning, there was John with a giant cardboard box full of back fat. He was grinning: “Here ya go!”

“Uh, what am I going to do with 40 pounds of back fat?”

“I don’t care. Throw it out if it’s too much.”

Head spinning, I lugged the crate o’fat back to my truck and drove back to Orangevale. Christ. Forty pounds of pork fat?! What the hell am I going to do with it? My first stop was my neighbors from Argentina, who love All Things Meat. Except, as I learned, pork fat. Damn healthy people.

I called Elise, and she said she’d take some to make a moose salami at some point. No problem, I said. OK, there’s a pound-and-a-half allocated.

I’d need another 1.5 pounds for the salami I was making that day, and I reckoned I could cut some into 1 pound-plus chunks to use for future sausage-making endeavors — it is a rare wild game animal that is fatty enough not to need pork fat, so this would come in handy.

I set about cutting pork fat. That’s when I realized that I was in the presence of a master hog farmer.

Now I’ve cut back fat before, many times. I prefer it for sausages because it is hard and flavorful, unlike some of the softer intramuscular fat I am forced to use pretty often. Back fat is the preferred pork fat to use if you can get it. When I have in the past, it’s usually been in thin strips, sliced from the back of the hog; it’s trim from the shoulder and loins, because consumers don’t want thick fat caps on their pork these days. Foolish humans. But Bledsoe’s back fat was different.

One piece was — and I kid you not — two inches thick. I have never seen anything like it. Many others were more than an inch thick, all with the slightest wisp of pink meat within. I knew then what I had to do: Lardo.

Good lardo is a gift from God. I first had it years ago in New Jersey at an Italian deli (we call them “pork stores” there), served to me by the owner on the sly. “Here, try this.” What is it, Timmy? “Just eat it.” I looked and it was a slice of white something on a piece of rye bread. I ate it, and it tasted like a porky, aromatic butter. Awesome. Can I have more? “Sorry. We just got back from Italy and this is all we got. Next time.”

Next time was 20 years later, at Chef Cosentino’s restaurant Incanto. By that time lardo had become fairly common in the US. Cosentino, who knows his way around a hog, makes an excellent lardo. I resolved to make it myself at that point, but had never seen back fat worthy until Saturday.

I separate the pieces out and wound up with a little more than six pounds of perfect slabs. I read a dozen or so recipes for lardo on the web, and in my charcuterie library, and came up with my own recipe for lardo that relies heavily on rosemary, star anise and black pepper.

We’ll know in a month or so if it comes out.

That still left the scrappy bits of fat, which I rendered down into lard. Ever tried making lard on a large scale? Good lord does it take a long time! I tried an oven-cooking method featured in the most excellent book Fat, but that took an astonishing eight hours! I really don’t want the oven on that long in June. Yesterday I did my stovetop method, and it took only four hours. Better, but still. And both methods wreck the bottom of the pot.

I needed a break after that, so I snacked on success. I’ve had some tough luck making salami lately — I’ve had three batches in a row fail, including the Spanish chorizo I was so proud of. But I think I have finally figured out the problems, however, and one major problem was solved when I cut into a batch of French saucisson sec I’d made a few weeks after the chorizo.

As you can see, this one, while not perfect, fermented, cured and dried well. It is tangy but not overly so, and the meat bound decently. What made this different from the failures? I used a lot more of the starter culture. I think this made a huge difference.

I upped the ante on my next batch, which I made Saturday. I made it from bits and pieces from Maximus the Wild Boar, plus some of Bledsoe’s awesome fat. This, I hope, will be a spectacular salami.

What makes it special to me is that I could put to good use the old saying that if things live together, they will taste good together. I shot Maximus in Monterey County, and while I was there I found a lot of this resinous, sweet-smelling herb I later learned was California white sage. I saved and dried some.

I also had some California bay laurel given to me by our neighbor who goes to school at UC Santa Cruz. To these herbs I added some home-grown garlic and wild fennel pollen — another wild plant I saw a lot in Monterey.

To go one further, I used a 1974 Heitz Cellars Angelica for the liquid in the salami; Angelica is a sweet wine made from Mission grapes, the first grapes brought here by the Spanish missionairies in the 1700s. It is California’s first wine. Pretty cool, eh?

In making this sausage, I added plenty of starter culture and mixed the meat far longer than I normally do — and I hand-cut the fat, which I dropped in as the meat was mixing. It looks like everything went well, and I just put the salami in the curing box this morning. Cross your fingers that in a month or so I will have a glorious Wild Boar Salami California.

If you want to try it yourself, I wrote the recipe down here. In case you had not noticed, I’ve also added a new main page to the site, “Cured Meat Recipes,” which is my catch-all for anything cured or in sausage form. Those of you interested in sausage-making or curing will find my recipes there.