Lessons

Well when something doesn't turn out the way you want it to....there is a lesson to be learned.
I love dark chocolate. I prefer semisweet over milk. When M&Ms came out with the dark chocolate ones I didn't mearly eat them I devoured. So I decided to buy Hersey's dark cocoa for stocking up the new kitchen. I then decided to make some brownies for a dinner I was going to attend. Well let me just say lesson learned. From here on out I will buy regualar cocoa.

As explained in Dessert First's wonderful post called Crash Cource in Cocoa, dark cocoa powder is pressed with alkali which reduces the acidity of the chocolate therefore mellowing the flavor. This is not exactly what I wanted to have on hand....a mellow chocolate. I never knew about this, I have heard of buying dutched cocoa and thought that it would be a deeper chocolatier flavor. But I had never used it, partly because my mom always did the shopping and kept regular cocoa powder. In a way the fact that I didn'thave the knoledge eats away at me because on some level I feel like I should have known. But I guess it is better to learn first hand than to just assume. There are many many many things I do not know about baking and cooking so I guess I had better get used to it. Therefore, this is my first little lesson learned in my first little kitchen. I am pretty sure it won't be the last.

Stuck Pig

Last wednedsay for my food science lab we got the pleasure of waking up for a 6 am hog slaughter. I think one of my two new least favorite words are slaughter and carcass.

I have never seen an animal becides a fish actually be killed and made ready for eating. It is quite an experience as one of my classmates said,"This is intense." He was right it was in fact very intense. But there were only a few parts that I didn't enjoy, the squealing of the pigs before they were stunned, the flipping around of the hair removal process, and the cutting off of the head. Once the pig didn't have resemblance to a pig it was easier to watch. It is a rather clean process once the pig is bled out.
During a slaughter the animal is first stunned and rendered unconcious by either a bolt or electric shock. This puts the animal into a state of eplictic seisures. I was not prepared for the first pig as it thrashed around uncontrollably. This part is extremely dangerous for the workers, as the pig is unpredictable in it's movements. The pig is then "stuck" meaning that a knife is inserted and cuts the main artery for the exanguination to begin. A shackle is placed around a hind leg and it is lifted into the air for it to continue bleeding. The pig is then moved over to a water bath where it is scalded for around 2 minutes. It is then places onto the hair remover. This has paddles on one side that rotate to remove the loosened hair from the pig. What I was not prepared for is that it flips the pig over and over in circles, quite disturbing when first seen. It is not a delicate procedure as hair and some blood fly all over the place. But they practice a CAYGo system Clean as you go. Then the workers torch and polish the animal to get rid of the rest of the hair that the paddles missed. The animal is then evicerated and decapitated. The head removal was done by knife in front of us but in large facilites they have these sharp clamps that cut right into the neck to remove it. There was a USDA inspector there to make sure that all processes are done properly and he also inspected some parts of the animal, like the lymph nodes to ensure that the animal was in fact healthy. After the head is removed inspected and the entrails are also inspected the body is split down the middle with a power saw. This saw cuts right through the middle of the spinal cord to ensure that no meat is lost.
And that is where our tour ended. In pigs the skin is not removed and the carcass will be further inspected, washed with hot water and then taken into the cooler. They had priviously done lambs that day and they had removed the hide and washed the carcass to then be chilled.

This was all done at our meat lab. It is a very small facility and they were in total only slaughtering 4 pigs that day. I was impressed with how clean most of the process was. But I can see how quickly things could get out of hand, espically on a larger scale where they are doing 10,000 a day. That is something not so comforting to think about.
Next week for lab we will be making sausage. Can't wait.