S4 ● E67 Hop Poles, Midsummer, Sheep butcher & Sausage Making, Salmon fishing and Pond Making

Today we're taking the spring rams and learning about processing, butchering. Technically, you're not allowed to serve food that's been butchered outside of a government approved slaughtery. So with our chickens we can eat them, but with the sheep we can't do that. But we can put it in the home freezer for winter food supply. So that's what we're going to do. Lamb gets quite dry easily, so it's all about the mixture of fat with it. So we're using three parts lamb to one part fat. We're doing it in the context of trying to spread our meat supply out. And so we're using cuts you wouldn't normally use in sausage, like the legs. So what we did yesterday is we kind of quartered the lambs, we took the neck off and that's in the sausage. And then we took the front leg and we've taken the half the shoulder to put in sausage. And the what they called shanks, we've left on the bone. And they go in a stew pot because that's a slow roasting thing. Although Albert put one of them in there. But they're really tough, you don't really want them in sausage. And then we took the shoulder, we've taken the breasts off, which is those sort of flap and a bit of the ribs. And then we have a square shoulder minus the leg. Basically a square shoulder would have most of the top of the leg. Then we took the saddle ribs. So we've got these three sets of ribs to put in barbecue from four sheep. There's a lot of it. Then we took the back legs and all of that is in the sausage, which is, you know, premium cuts you wouldn't normally put in sausage, but it's going to be good. And so there's about €1500 in them sheep at the price we plan to sell on. But I think our price is going to go up 30% over that, actually, just looking at what other people are doing now. And so this meat here is about 6, €700 of premium now. So we got to make it good. The only trouble with scaling up recipes is you don't know until you try it how that works. And we don't have harissa, we have chipotle and sambal, so we don't know how that'll go, but we try. But then to mix it, you want four parts. So this is all premium, nice cuts. And one of the first jobs is cubing it into little pieces for the mixing with the spices and putting it through the Blender. And then we're mixing it with Linda Root's pig fat. So this is belly fat, which you typically make lard with. It's super good fat. And then we have shoulder fat and more belly fat. This was out the freezer yesterday, so it might still be cold, but we want it cold because ideally we would be mincing into a bowl in ice water to keep it really cold, but we don't have. But this one's going to be a bit more of a pain in the ass. It's back fat with the skin on. So we need to separate as much as we can to make up the weight ratio. So the weight ratio is super important with lamb because it gets dry. Then these are the skins we have. And I was hoping, like, the North African sausage is normally like this thick, but these are going to be thick. But when we're ready and we've minced everything, we'll set the pusher up and soak these in water, warm water, for half an hour, and then they get threaded onto you just get it all on there. And then we'll just cut them off at whatever lengths. Good. So we have garlic, we have coriander, we have cumin seeds, salt, fennel, paprika and this stuff. And we need to weigh these and cook them and then add them and then add all that to the mince. Mix it, mix it, mix it with some cold water. Maybe we mince it again, we see how it does. So what I did with the recipe, it was a household recipe. And so I'm scaling it up 23 times. But when you scale up recipes that many times, it's not. You don't just scale everything up 23 times. Like salt. You need the right amount of salt per minute. So that's scaled up accordingly. Pretty much any sausage is 1 to 2% salt. And up to 3, 3 and a half is acceptable, but then it's quickly unpalatable. And so what I did is I scaled it up with a factor of 12 for the spices, and the rest of the recipe is 23 times scaled up and the spice is 12. And I then cross referenced that with, like. Typically for most spices, in most sausage recipes, you want one to two grams of spice per kilo of meat. So we're in that around 2 gram mark by factoring it up by 12. I have no idea if that will work. So we make it and then we taste it and we decide, yeah, we like it. Charcuterie making here, Richard Tuli Mamayon Bethesda. The hottest sausage in Sweden. Look at that. Wow. It's so fun. Like the process. We're doing a taste test to see if we like it because you never know. We're scaling up recipes. Looks good. Smells good, Smells good. What's the verdict? Verdict is very flavorful. Purple salt. I think the fat composition is really like really, really good. It's so tender. Yeah, the meat is tender. We're gonna. What you have to do with this kind of thing is take a sample from multiple places just to be sure. To be sure. To be sure. So we're gon do that and then we'll just mince the rest. Taste test number two. So now we're splitting half of each batch and putting them together and mixing it all through with water, which helps bind it and it'll make it sticky. And then we're ready for the skins. The skins are in water ready to be put onto the filler here. And then we'll be stuffing sausage. So strong out. And then to go up, Then twist. And put the two back through the. Then you put one at a time through. So this one this time the double and the other one the next time. Nice. Nice, John. And we end up like it. Testing, testing. Schedule, test multiple times. You never know. You never know. So. Pull that tail back through. Keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going. Sally, you got a knot in your sausage. Oh, there's a knot. Go back through. Just weighing and bagging the sausage and we're going to look at the price it's cost us per kilo. And then also look at what it's worth on the marketplace and decide whether we want to make a sausage plant some year out of an old wagon. Because it's quite fun making sausage. So sausage is all made and Nicholas and I come to meet Targa, who was one of our delivery people last year to go salmon fishing. There's Targa and this friend and they've already caught a kilo of salmon, it sounds like. There's the first flow. We're fishing off the weir. There's piking grayling and salmon about. I'm gonna have a look at the deep water underneath here. No lockdown now. We're going up the top side. Fish up top of the damn. Gonna keep him for supper. Nicholas just got one. That's one each. Beautiful. Going home for dinner. Nan stew and salmon for breakfast. Love it. We're gonna build a pond. What side are you. What side are you putting your shelf on? Maybe all round or certainly around the back edge here. We're turning this into A pond. Soon we're just doing some rough calculations to work out how much liner we want to put in. Seems like one roll of GCL will do it. And now we're just calculating volumes and earth moving. Yeah. And now we can make trigonometry. So we calculated what we've got. The length of the liner. Now from here to here with a 60cm shelf and then a 2 to 1 gradient which is about the max. You want to go with GCL liner on both the front wall of the dam and on the shelf that will go. And we do that because most plant life is happening in 80 centimeters of water. So. So we want to shelf the plant up. So 9.65 meters is the total length of liner. And now we just want to check the length because the liner comes in 5 by 40 meters and if you overlap it, it's going to give you like you overlap this GCL 40cm with some bentonite powder in between. So 9.6 allows us to cut the liner in half and it adds up. So we need to know now if 20 meters is enough to go across the pond and then we know we need one liner. So as part of visualizing, we've put in the bank wall the water level all the way around and we've got a shelf 60 centimeters wide starting here. And so this just helps to visualize it through. This is the lowest point. It's actually just got a meter, one and a half meters water depth. So we're trying to ascertain if we've got enough soil to build this whole bank up slightly and decide if we like it. So now we are making a form of the profile of the back and sides out of wood just so that we can cut a strip. We've got the horizontal distances. This is the water level and this would be the start of the shelf. So what we want to know is the shelf going to be able to be horizontal by taking soil away or do we need to add soil? It looks like measuring the height differentials we're going to be taking away and hopefully enough to have soil excavated all the way around to build up this wall. It's going to go down at least 60cm here. So there will also be soil coming out of here. And we're just trying to get to a napkin calculation of whether we have enough soil to chuck there. The next part of this is we've been using a laser level to determine the height differential between the dam that we built last year and the water level of this pond. And it's about one and a half meters higher. And so we can run a siphon over the bank of the pond through the pipe under the road that's lower in elevation and back up again to here. So we've just pumped water to fill up this pipe from the pond pump that feeds the market garden. And now they're making an assembly with a float and a weight to start a siphon. And then we'll test that that works. And that's how we'll have flowing water in this pond from this pond that came from the stream up in the forest. And we'll overflow back to it at a lower point. So Lucas is making a float and a weight. And that will keep the inlet for the siphon down from the surface of the water. Like for the market garden pump supply, we want to be taking from below the surface where the water is cooler. And we don't want to get clogged up by sinking to the bottom. So a simple float weight assembly. And then we can test if the siphon work. Perfect. So now we get to see if the siphon holds. It calculated the time to fill 10 and 20 liters. And it flows on the siphon at 720 liters an hour. And we estimate, without doing any proper calculations, that this will be, I'm guessing, between 35 and 45 cubic meters. And now they're digging to put a form in. This is the profile, length and angles of the walls and bank around here. So here's the soil profile. And let's just see it from the side. So what we've learned from this is that we have our bank here, our shelf planting out. We'll be planning submarginals or the way down to here. And this is how deep it goes. About one and a half meters deep at the lowest point. But what it tells us is we have a bunch of soil that we'll be taking out from everywhere here. And as we get around to here, it'll become a lot because we're going up into the corner by that hot pole. And it makes me confident we're going to have plenty of soil to build up this wall. And it's just started to rain, so we're off just in time. Rain's come in, so we're taking the rest of the day off. It's quite noisy here because the roof above me with the rain. But thanks for watching our videos. Don't forget to subscribe. Click like and share the videos if you find them beneficial. We'll see you next time.