Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World (25 page)
Read Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World Online
Authors: Kelly Coyne,Erik Knutzen
In an apocalyptic scenario, the fat would come from animals you’ve hunted and butchered yourself. But while civilization holds, you can get fat from a butcher. Butchers are few and far between these days, but if you have a meat seller you deal with regularly, such as someone you know from your local farmers’ market, he or she will be able to provide fat for you if you give a little advance notice. It shouldn’t cost much. If you’re using pork fat, use fatback, not the fine fat from around the kidneys that is used to make leaf lard for pastry cooking. Such high-grade fat is wasted in soap. Some supermarkets sell packaged ground suet, which you can use to make tallow. You can also buy premade lard at the supermarket, near the shortening. However, it’s usually hydrogenated and full of preservatives.
TO MAKE LARD
Put the pork fat in a heavy-bottom pot. Add the water. The water’s only purpose is to protect the fat from burning until it begins to melt, so you need very little. Cook over low heat, letting the fat melt slowly and the water evaporate. Stir occasionally to keep the fat from sticking to the bottom of the pot. How long this process takes will depend on how much fat you have and how finely it is chopped. Count on about an hour. Keep the heat as low as possible so you don’t burn the fat. It should barely bubble.
When the fat chunks have completely dissolved into liquid, it’s time to strain the fat. Put a large bowl in the sink and rest a cheesecloth-lined colander over it. Working very carefully (hot fat = ouch!), pour the hot lard through the colander and into the bowl. The cheesecloth will catch all the little fried meat bits. These are called cracklings, and they can be eaten as a snack.
The strained lard should be clean enough to use at this stage, meaning it looks like fat and nothing but fat—you should see no crumbs, chunks, or discoloring. If it looks good, pour it into clean containers for storage.
If it seems a little dirty, you can “wash” it. While the lard is still warm, stir in about a cup of water for every pound of fat and put the bowl in the refrigerator overnight. The clean fat will rise to the top, leaving impurities behind in the water. The next day, just lift the disk of fatoff the surface of the wash water. Use a knife to scrape off any gelatin or impurities that might be clinging to the back side of the disk, then pack it into a clean, covered container.
Lard will keep in the refrigerator for about a month. Freeze it for longer storage.
TO RENDER TALLOW
Put the chopped fat in a heavy-bottom pot. Cover it with an equal amount of water (e.g., 1 quart of water per 1 quart of fat scraps). Bring it to a low, steady simmer. Skim off any foam or blood that rises to the surface. Watch for all of the fat to liquefy and the meat bits to separate out and become free floating. This should take about an hour.
When the fat chunks have melted into the water, so the only solids you see are bits of gristle, put a large bowl in the sink and rest a cheesecloth-lined colander over it. Pour the hot tallow/water mix through the colander and into the bowl. The cheesecloth will catch all the little meat bits. Unlike lard cracklings, these are not considered a tasty treat for humans, but birds like them.
Let the tallow/water mix cool to room temperature in the bowl, then refrigerate the bowl overnight. The tallow will harden into a disk of solid white fat, leaving beneath it a layer of nasty water and gelatin. The next day, carefully pry the disk of solidified tallow or lard out of the dirty water. Turn it over and check its underside. If there’s gelatin or anything else clinging to it, scrape that off with a knife. Cut the fat into pieces and transfer to covered containers.
Store tallow in the fridge, where it will keep for about a month. Freeze for longer storage.
Part 3: Making Soap
PREPARATION:
2-3 hours
Soap made with wood ash lye (potassium hydroxide) is always soft soap, its texture ranging from jelly to paste, its color from cream to dark caramel. It may retain a faint animal scent. In some circumstances, it will dry into something firm enough to cut into bars, but it won’t have the consistency or staying power of real bar soap. In the old days, white, sweet-smelling bars of hard soap were a store-bought luxury.
For the purposes of demonstration, the following recipe makes only a couple of cups of soap. Your ancestors probably made soap in quantity once a year, because between making the strong lye, rendering the fat, and cooking the soap, the whole venture was a major undertaking. You’re welcome to increase the size of this recipe, but we suspect that until the zombies come, you’ll prefer making soap in a blender. If you would like to increase the recipe, just remember to always use twice as much fat by liquid volume as lye water.
E
RIK SAYS
. . . If you ask me, they didn’t make the soap very often because cooking it makes your house smell like a rendering plant. When the zombies come, I’ll just stay dirty, thanks, and hope my BO drives them off.
YOU’LL NEED
- 2 cups clean, rendered fat (any sort)
- Saucepan (for heating the fat)
- 1 cup lye water
- Heavy-bottom, nonreactive pot with a minimum capacity of 4 quarts
- Wooden spoon, wooden stir stick, or silicon spatula for stirring
PUTTING IT TOGETHER
Start by melting the fat over low heat in the saucepan. Melt it very gently, so it doesn’t scorch. Meanwhile, heat the lye water in the larger, nonreactive pot, until it just simmers. Keep the heat as low as possible.
Ladle the liquid fat into the hot lye water bit by bit, stirring in between additions. The lye will turn creamy with the addition of the fat. You’d imagine that it would keep thickening from that point, turning creamier and thicker. What it actually does is more distressing: The creaminess breaks, and you’ll end up with a transparent liquid layer on the bottom and an oily foam on top. Cook this unlikely looking brew over the lowest heat possible for at least 2 hours. If you’re making a larger quantity, the cooking time will be at least 3 hours.
You don’t have to stir constantly, but you should keep an eye on it. Stirring will cause the mix to foam up. You might have to take the pot off the heat for a moment if it foams too violently and looks ready to overflow. The texture of the foam will range from cappuccino fluff to pond scum. Just keep stirring and cooking.
At some point in the second hour, the transformation will occur. First, you’ll probably notice a thick, soaplike substance clinging to the neck of your spoon or the sides of the pot. Start stirring steadily. The liquid in the pot will thicken rapidly, acquiring a texture like grits or mashed potatoes. Beat it thoroughly to make the texture as homogenous as possible.
Transfer the soap to a bowl, crock, or whatever storage container you prefer. Because the soap is cooked for so long, the saponification process is completed in the pot. You can use the soap immediately.
SAFETY NOTE
Since you’re working with lye, you should wear gloves and eye protection, at least until the lye is incorporated with the fat.
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Cabbage Patch pH Indicator
PREPARATION:
5 min
It’s useful to be able to test the pH of homemade soap, cleaning solutions, and beauty products. Sure, you can buy pH testing strips, but you can get a general idea of the pH of any substance using nothing but a red cabbage. You may have a hazy memory of doing this when you were in school.
All you need are the outer leaves of a red cabbage—the leaves that you’d normally discard before cooking. Save the rest of the cabbage for dinner or a batch of sauerkraut.
YOU’LL NEED
- ½-1 cup chopped red cabbage (Exact proportions are not critical.)
- Distilled, filtered, or bottled water
PUTTING IT TOGETHER
Put the cabbage in a saucepan and cover it with water. Bring to a simmer and cook over low heat for about 10 minutes to extract the pigments from the leaves. The water will turn deep purple. Pour off the water into a jar. It will keep in the fridge for a couple of weeks. You’ll know it’s gone off when it turns cloudy and loses color.
This liquid is your indicator. Its pH is about 7, which is neutral. While this test will not give you a specific pH number, it will help you compare like to like and give a general sense of the nature of whatever you’re testing.
TO ESTABLISH A BASE-ACID RANGE
Pour a spoonful of indicator in a small, clear glass. Choose a substance you know to be acidic, like lemon juice or vinegar. Add it to the glass until the cabbage juice turns color. The color should shift toward red, depending on the acidity of the substance you’re testing. Hold the glass up to the light to see the color shift better.
Now find a substance you know is base (alkaline). Washing soda is alkaline, and lye would be one of the strongest bases found around the house. Stir in washing soda or a few grains of lye to the liquid. Handle lye carefully! Washing soda should turn the indicator acid green, while lye should produce yellow. A mild base, like liquid laundry detergent, would turn it blue.
Red is acid, yellow is base, and purple is neutral. All reactions happen along the spectrum of red to magenta for acids, and from blue to green to yellow for bases. Knowing this, compare your homemade solutions with store-bought equivalents. Test shampoo, laundry soap, lotion. Most soaps test in the blue range. Milder soaps lean toward purple; harsher soaps lean toward blue green.
TO TEST HOMEMADE BAR SOAP TO SEE IF IT HAS CURED ENOUGH
Wet a portion of the soap with water and rub it with your finger to liquefy a small circle. Drip the indicator on it. It will turn color on contact. Compare this reaction to one on soap that you know is fully cured. When your homemade soap is ready to use, the color reaction should be similar to the control bar—probably blue. If the color leans toward yellow, turning turquoise or spring green, you’ll know that its pH is still high and it needs to cure for a couple more weeks.
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How to Slaughter a Chicken
PREPARATION:
1 hour
At this peculiar junction of place and time, few of us know where our food comes from, and fewer still have any hand in its production. Food comes from the store. It appears on the shelves by magic, picked, washed, and wrapped, devoid of any context. If we are what we eat, what we are is dislocated. Eating should be highly temporal, regional, specific, intimate, and reverential. Anyone who has raised his or her own food, even just a little, knows its true value. Food is not a unit of exchange. It is life itself.
All of our food production systems need reform, but the way we raise and slaughter animals on the industrial scale is particularly troubling. If you eat meat, you know how difficult is to be a conscientious carnivore. It’s difficult to have any assurance that the animal you consume for dinner was treated with kindness and respect unless you know a farmer personally or raise animals yourself. Among the many urbanites who are keeping backyard chickens for eggs, there are people who will quietly cull a chicken for dinner every now and again. In doing so, they take full responsibility for the life of that animal, and its death, and so know the value of what is on their plates.
For those of us who are new to keeping chickens, the line between pet and livestock can be fuzzy. We start out thinking we’ll keep hens for eggs only, never intending to slaughter one, but we might come face to face with the choice anyway. Hens lay fewer and fewer eggs as they age. What do you do if you’d like to bring in a few young hens but there’s no more room in the coop? Or say one of your new chicks, which you believed were all female, grows up to be a rooster? Or what if one of the hens in your flock develops cannibalistic tendencies and is becoming a danger to the other hens? Perhaps you’ll be able to pawn off your unwanted chickens on some kind-hearted soul. If not, and if you eat meat, it might be time to make a clear distinction between livestock and pet.
We put this project in the book to give you a solid overview of what’s involved in slaughtering a chicken. However, we are not fans of what we call dilettante slaughtering. The animal shouldn’t suffer because of your ineptitude. If you plan to raise chickens for meat, we encourage you to find someone else who slaughters poultry regularly and apprentice with that person. Visit on culling day and lend a hand. Watch and learn. Read up on chicken anatomy, paying particular attention to the placement of the veins in the neck, the location of the crop, and the arrangement of the internal organs. Have your mentor over as backup the first time you go solo. If you don’t plan to make a practice of it, find someone experienced who will do it for you, quickly and competently.
BEFORE YOU START
Identify a work place outdoors. You’ll need some sort of sturdy overhead support for the bird to hang from—this might be a tree branch, a swing set, a laundry line, or something you rig up for the occasion. It’s best to work in the shade and to have easy access to a hose or tap.
Twelve to 24 hours before you intend to harvest, withhold food from the bird you’ve chosen so it will have time to clear out its crop and bowels. Waste matter in the bird can contaminate the flesh during evisceration.
If you’re new to this, you may not want to eat immediately before the slaughter, either. The sights and smells are a little intense. You should anticipate that you may not have a big appetite that night and—unless you’re made of stronger stuff than we are—you definitely won’t feel like eating chicken.
YOU’LL NEED
LENGTH OF ROPE OR A KILLING CONE.
The rope should be affixed to an overhead support and finished with a slipknot, the length of the rope calculated to the height at which you want the chicken to hang. The chicken will hang by its feet. Some people prefer to work sitting down, others standing up. An alternative to hanging is to use a killing cone, an open-ended metal cone fastened to a wall. The chicken is placed in the cone, head down, so its head and neck pokes out the bottom. The advantage of the cone is that it restrains flapping. The disadvantage is that blood will end up on the wall. The slaughtering method is the same. Killing cones can be purchased from poultry suppliers.
EYE PROTECTION.
This is necessary only if you’re hanging the bird instead of using a killing cone. You don’t want to get poked in the eye by the tip of a flapping wing. Ordinary glasses are fine.
APRON
PLASTIC WASTEBASKET OR BUCKET
to catch the blood and later to use for feathers and viscera.
VERY SHARP SCALPEL, OR 2 FRESH RAZOR BLADES
(one for slaughtering, another for butchering) per bird.
LARGE POT
for scalding, big enough to submerge an entire bird, filled with water heated to 130° to 150°F. It’s most convenient to have this set up outside on a portable gas burner, but it could be done indoors on the stovetop.
WHAT ABOUT GLOVES?
Note that we don’t include gloves on our list of tools you’ll need. It’s hard to do this work in gloves, though you could use them if you like. Your bare hands should be very clean and washed frequently as you go. Use hand sanitizer between steps, if you’d like.
STURDY WORK SURFACE
for butchering, covered with a clean plastic tarp or butcher paper or similar. A waist-high table is most comfortable. The table need not be wide if you’re only doing one bird at a time.
CLEAVER
to remove the head.
CHEST FILLED WITH ICE WATER
to hold finished birds if you’re doing more than one at a time.
SMALL COVERED BOWL
if you want to save organs.
BUCKET OF CLEAN WATER
so you can rinse off your hands.
PUTTING IT TOGETHER
It’s not easy to kill. It shouldn’t be. It’s okay to be sad, but for the sake of the bird, you need to be clearheaded and steady. If you’re not, postpone. Remind yourself that this killing is the kindest killing a chicken can have, and that all of those other factory-raised chickens you’ve eaten throughout your life lived poorly and died brutally. By doing this, you are taking responsibility for your food, accepting that dinner involves sacrifice, and committing to seeing this bird to its end in the most dignified and humane way possible.
Acknowledge your feelings and make your apologies, but once you begin, you must be businesslike.
CATCHING THE BIRD
This is no time to panic the bird. You want it as calm as possible. So you must be calm yourself when you go to collect it, and through speed or guile you need to capture it quickly and quietly. Hold it in your arms, stroking the breast, neck, and beak to calm it. If you cradle it like a baby and tilt the head down, it will calm even more.
HANGING THE BIRD
Take the bird by the legs, gripping it with one hand just above the feet, and turn it upside down. If it’s calm, it will accept this with remarkable ease and hang quietly with its wings slightly spread. Being upside down has a tranquilizing effect on chickens.
Bind the feet with the hanging rope, using a simple slipknot. The bird should now be hanging upside down from your overhead support. Again, the chicken should be calm at this point. If it’s a little agitated it might flap a bit, but not as much as you’d expect, and it should quiet down quickly. In the very unlikely event the bird has a total freak-out, release it and try another day. It’s imperative that both of you remain calm, for many reasons.
Position the wastebasket beneath the bird to catch the blood.
THE KILLING CUTS
At this point, some people take off the bird’s head with sharp shears. The method we describe is not as direct. In it, the bird’s jugular veins are cut neatly and quickly. It takes more skill and requires your continued presence with the bird as it dies. When you do it, you’ll understand why the proverbial chopping block is more appealing to us humans: It’s over fast, so it’s easier on us. But the method we were taught, and we’re sharing with you, kills the bird with the least pain if done correctly.
Gently stretch out the bird’s neck and brush its throat feathers downward so you can see the bare skin on the neck. You need to identify the two jugular veins that run on either side of the throat. They are usually visible as blue lines beneath the skin. They may be harder to see in older, fatter birds. Feel for the pulse with your fingers.
You are going to make two cuts, opening the arteries on either side of the neck. Stretch the chicken’s head downward while you do this, to keep it still and to expose the veins. You must cut both veins, not one, or the bird will die slowly. You should make the cuts deep and sure, one immediately after the other. Once you cut off blood circulation to the head, the bird will be brain-dead. So locate those veins, and when you act, act decisively.
The scalpel or razor will part the flesh with frightening ease. The bird will not struggle against you at this point. Your only worry is positioning the cut. The incision should be about an inch long and deep enough to sever the vein. A fast, copious gush of blood over your hand, or sometimes an arterial squirt, will let you know you’ve hit a major vein. If you do both sides successfully, you can take a big sigh of relief.
If there’s only a little, slow-pooling blood in the wake of your cut, you’ve probably missed the jugular. Don’t panic. Take a breath and deepen the cut. Don’t be afraid to get in there with your fingers and find the vein if you have to. Once this begins, it needs to end fast, for the chicken’s sake.
As the chicken bleeds out, it will usually go through two rounds of physical struggle, which shows as wing flapping. The first round comes soon after the cuts, and the second signals death. Remember, you’ve cut off the blood supply to the brain, which means the bird is brain-dead at this point and these struggles are the final throes of the nervous system. Still, out of respect for the bird, you should sit with it as it dies, holding its head so that it doesn’t move much when it flaps. This also keeps the cuts open and the blood flowing freely.
Let the chicken continue to hang and bleed for about 5 minutes after it dies. Five minutes is all it takes to drain the blood from the body. There’s not as much in there as you might expect.
SCALDING
Scalding loosens the feathers to make plucking easier. Immediately after the bleeding is complete, untie the bird and grasp it by its feet. Using the feet as a handle of sorts, dunk the bird upside down in the scalding pot. The temperature should be at least 130°F. This temperature is suitable for young, tender chickens. For older birds, the temperature should be 150°F. The difference is cosmetic. The higher temperature results in looser skin but is necessary to loosen the feathers of older birds. Keep the bird under water for 60 seconds.
PLUCKING
Take the carcass to the work surface. Enjoy the distinctive odor of scalded chicken. Move the wastebasket from beneath the bleeding site and position it by your work surface to catch feathers and guts.
Begin plucking. Don’t be afraid to be forceful. Start with the wings, because they are the hardest part and best done when the body is fresh out of the hot water. Yank out the wing feathers. It takes considerable force. Pull them straight out, in the direction of growth. Use pliers if you have to. Once that’s done, the rest is easier. Pull out the smaller feathers on the breast and back using raking motions of your hand, pulling against the grain of the feathers. Grab as many feathers as you can at once and rip them out. Some force is necessary here, as well. Toss the feathers in the collection bin, but they’ll inevitably end up everywhere.
The tiniest feathers are called pin feathers, and they can be hard to remove. Sometimes its easier to squeeze them out than to pluck them. You might want to do as much plucking as you can quickly do outdoors, then do the fine work inside later, in the sink and under running water.