Home made Head Cheese

The time before Christmas was, is and always will remind me holidays and time spent with my grandparents. My grandma is celebrating today her 80th birthday and though we can’t be physically together right now, we are very close each other. My grandpa was butcher and with grandma they taught me lot of tricks and cooking and baking skills.
My grandpa taught me slaughtering and how to process meat from beginning till end with lot of interesting home made specialities. I’m very thankful for this skills. Unfortunately I do not have enough time and space to create all his recipes but some of them I can present with simple kitchen stuff too.
In the honour of them both I would like to present my grandpa Mojmír his classical Head Cheese. The taste and smell going from basement to the roof of my Canadian house totally remind me the time of my childhood in small village of Lukavice, The Czech Republic.

Ingredients:

1 pork head
1kg pork shoulder
1 pork knuckle
1/2kg pork side
1 pork tongue
10 bigger garlic cloves
10l water
1/2 cup salt
1 handful ground black pepper
1 handful marjoram

Directions:

1. Clean head and other meat put into a large pot with cold water with salt and cook for at least 4 hours until all meat is soft.

2. Take all meat out of broth and let partially cool down, then cut the lean pieces into cubes.

3. All other remaining parts and shapeless meat (incl. fat, skin and garlic) pass through meat grinder direct to the broth. Add some salt, pepper and marjoram. Make sure the taste of the broth is slightly over salted (meat will take the salt by cooling and the taste will be optimal. I kept just about a half of the broth to make white pudding “jitrnicový prejt” (see next recipe).

4. In this stage I needed to make an experiment. In Czech you would go to the store and buy a special sleeve to fill head cheese into, but I didn’t find a source here. So the improvisation went ok with empty 2l PET bottles from soda water. Fill about the half of the bottle volume with meat cubes, fill the remaining of volume with the broth, apply closures and let cool down (best outside or in the fridge) over night. Turn the bottles regularly so the content won’t sediment.

5. Serve with bread or with onion rings and sprinkle of vinegar.