Coppa. What is coppa? Coppa is a muscle of the pork right behind the back of the head, at the top of the shoulder. In the cute little picture of pig parts on the left, it is #4. I guess in English it could be called "pork collar". In Italy this specific piece of meat is available at grocery stores to braise and to roast as "coppa fresca", but here in the US, it takes some effort to get a hold of. When cured it is a wonderful combination of meat and fat, heady from the aromatic spices and herbs in which is it cured. Sliced thin it is a classic on a plate of salumi (cured meats) and makes wonderful sandwiches. You may also know it by its southern Italian name of "capocollo", which translates to "top of the neck", which makes sense. Or you may have heard the word mangled and pronounced "capicola", which is a derivative of capocollo. How about we just stick to the real word: coppa.
So lets start with getting ourselves a piece of coppa. Your best bet, and what I normally do is harvest it from a whole pork shoulder/boston butt which i get at Costco. Sometimes unfortunately the Costco butchers mangle the shoulder so badly when they remove the bone that getting a nice hunk of coppa is near impossible. I've also found if you can find a nice LARGE piece of bone in shoulder/boston butt at the supermarket you can usually get a nice coppa out of it. With the rest make salame!
On the left here in the picture you see a whole shoulder from Costco. I put a blue rectangle around the coppa. I also labeled the direction where the pig's legs and head would be and where the shoulder bone used to be. Hopefully you can orient yourself.
Here the shoulder is lifted on its side. Again I labeled the coppa, and the direction where you'd find the feet, and the side where the skin would have been.
This is the same coppa but flipped over. You can see the nice fat striations in the muscle which will keep the coppa soft and make it tasty once cured. Hmmmmm faaaat.
Cut away the generally circular coppa, and shape it generally into a cylinder of meat and fat.
This is the other side of the coppa. It will end up being about 90mm/3.5" in diameter
You now have a coppa ready to be cured. Stay tuned for that post, which will be coming shortly. I'll be posting about 2 different methods for curing it.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Coppa butchery - How to harvest one
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33 comments:
Jason, thanks so much. I understood the vague location but the pictures help tremedously. My experiment with Ruhlman's Coppa recipe using chunks of pork ended poorly so I'm looking forward to trying with the whole muscle.
I'm glad the images helped. Honestly, i'm not sure where Ruhlman got the idea that coppa is made from chunks, and is entirely wrong.
That is one of the very few issues i have with that book.
Jason-
This is very helpful. I could never figure out where the Coppa was no matter how many explanations I read. Your pictures are perfect.
Elie
I just played with a 5+ lb. pork butt. I think I was able to harvest the coppa myself. Is it possible that the coppa would only weigh slightly more than 1lb.? If so, I did it.
Scott, that is possible. It depends on how big the shoulder is to begin with, depending on how the butcher cut it. I think mine are pretty small too most of the time.
I'm assuming I got it. Cutting up the rest of it for sausage, none of it looked like coppa, so, lucky guess by me.
Cool! Glad you were able to track it down. After you've done it a few times you learn to see it in whole pieces, and picking out pieces that have nice big ones.
THANK YOU FOR THIS EXPLANATION, SOMEONE TOLD ME COPPA WAS SALAMI -
CHEERS
TOP CUT FOODS
SYDNEY AUSTRALIA
how can i cut a Culatello from a ham??
thnx
Peter, i wish i knew. I'd like to know that one as well.
Jason, Do you pasted the curing process fro the coppa?
I'm not sure what you're asking, but here is the coppa recipe:
http://curedmeats.blogspot.com/2007/11/coppa-dry-cured.html
You have to de bone the ham and use only the meat from the back side of the ham. Once it is cured you tie it in a pear like shape and hang for about a year. After that you have Culatello. Hope that helps ;)
KRdub, thanks..it helps...sort of:)
Are you freezing your pork for 2-3 weeks to kill off the trichinosis? Seems a lot of folks are not doing this. Mostly curious.
Carl, trichinosis is essentially non-existent in commercial pork. I don't plan to do the 2-3 week freeze, but sometimes it does end up that way based on schedule and all that.
It certainly can't hurt to do it.
Agreed,
BTW - many thanks for your blog. I've read most of the better meat science & Charcuterie books - some of them several times - but they don't have the space to devote to the detail you do.
The CDC reports 40 cases of trichinosis in the USA annually with 10-20% of them acute. However, the don't seem to break these out by meat sources, so they might be wild game. Hard to find source about commercially processed pork because everyone is talking their book.
I'm moving towards doing this semi-professionally so I'm trying to "dot my i's & cross my t's"
thanks again
Carl, i believe the majority/all the trichinosis cases come from wild animal consumption...but if you're going to do this commercially it certainly can't hurt do freeze for safety
Jason,
Ever tried to vacuum seal your meats for curing? I just vacuum sealed a couple of round eye roasts in "breaola cure" into a seal-a-meal bag. Wondering if the meat needs to out-gas for some reason. There are a lot of different theories.
BTW - putting the final touches on my curing chamber tomorrow with a bathroom exhaust fan on a timer w/ a couple of insulated foam baffles (to keep in temp/humidity inside when it's not running) A timer will set the thing off once a day & vent the stale air.
I haven't tried vacuum curing, but i've read of people doing it and it working well b/c it keeps all the brine in direct contact with the meat.
good idea with the bathroom vent
Hey Carl, when your bathroom fan comes on, where does it suck the fresh air in from?
I'm just going to let it run for five minutes.
Prima facia it seems that it would need a fresh air input, but its a 50 CFM fan running in a 16 cf freezer.
I'm guessing that it will just keep making a fresher & fresher air-mix at the top which will migrate through out due to the internal fan running 24/7 in the freezer. I have a remote RF temp/humidity sensor & I can monitor how quickly the RH drops to test efficacy. If I need to, I can simply install a baffled input on the bottom, but I think it will be unnecessary
Got the exhaust fan set-up & it pulled down the humidity 6% in five minutes and that was w/ out the interior fan running - so I'm thinking an input vent is not necessary - replaced the 16cf freezer w/a 20.5cf
Running 21 lbs of Sopressata as soon as the back fat freezes up
thanks for the update carl
Jason, I've got 40 pounds of Sopressata, Loma, Bresola & Capicola drying in the chamber want to send you a photo - were do I send it to?
Carl: send it to jasonREMOVEmolinari@DONTPUTTHISyahoo.com
when i was a kid i remember getting Capicola that had a red spice hat seemed to ge drawn into the fat veins. i read capicola is coppa. Have you seen this? do you have a spice recipe or it? I remember it being more like ham texture and not very hard.
anhony
when i was a kid i remember getting Capicola that had a red spice hat seemed to ge drawn into the fat veins. i read capicola is coppa. Have you seen this? do you have a spice recipe or it? I remember it being more like ham texture and not very hard.
anthony
Anthony, capicola is generally coppa, yes..but i do not have a recipe for what you're referring to. You can experiment and develop your own recipe. Sounds like it would use red pepper and paprika for the red
I too have had issues with Ruhlman's coppa. This makes way more sense. I was recently butchering big berks, and there is a fantastically marbled piece running through the upper shoulder that would have been awesome to cure whole. Next time.
Costco does not have butchers. Great post, the neck is best.
Jason, I have made a mistake with using cure #1. ONE WEEK LATER I RINSED WELL AND APPLIED MORTONS TENDER CURE. Will this be ok if I keep refrigerated? Also the butcher gave me a shoulder about 2.5 pounds, I assume this may not be wht I need or more than the coppa portion. Can I stioll trim it and hang it? I have a basement conistently at 61 degrees and 72% humidity. is that too warm?
I can't say if that piece of meat will be ok. I don't know the % of nitrates and nitrites in morton's tendercure, but i'm pretty sure it's not meant for long term cures, and you don't know if you've now overcured the meat.
You can trim any shoulder..it might be a small coppa.
61 is borderline too warm, in my opinion...really would be better below 59-60.
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