Cured Meats

Culatello – Tasting Notes

2012-01-25T21:01:00.001-05:00

It was a long journey, but the culatello is finally ready. Actually, it was ready about 4 months ago. We cut into it to celebrate the birth of my son as it just happened to have lost enough weight by then and felt hard enough to go for it. It lost a total of about 40% weight in about 7 or 8 months in the curing chamber. I guess I was so excited to taste it that I forgot to take a picture of the whole thing before cutting it!

Here is a nice picture of the culatello after being cut. This is about 1/2 (excluding what i’ve eaten). The other 1/2 was taken by my brother and quickly devoured.

There was a small air pocket on the top left which I think is where I cut around the bone. Luckily it didn’t affect anything. Next time I’ll be sure to clean up loose flaps of meat

Backside of the culatello. It molded up nicely on the areas where there was meat contact with the casing. Where there were thick layers of fat the mold didn’t grown, which is something I’ve noticed before on other meats too.

Sliced and ready to eat. So good. So, so good.

Overall it’s delicious. Really really fantastic. The aroma is intoxicating. It smells like old caves and ancient places. It’s has a nice strong flavor sort of like a prosciutto but with some added……funk. It’s hard to describe. It’s very tender. There is a small ring on the outermost edge which is just a little harder. I think if i had followed the traditional method to wrap the culatello in a wine soaked cloth for a couple days before cutting it would have softened it. I may still do that.

The flavor is much better than the fiocco, The additional waiting time was certainly worth it. It’s a more mild flavor than fiocco and quite different. Somewhat surprising to me given that they both came from the leg, just opposite sides. The fiocco has more “funk” and this has more meaty, pork flavor. Not sure if it’s due to the different casing or the additional time. Just like for the fiocco I think a nice pasture raised hog would make a big difference here.

Capocollo di Calabria

2012-01-21T14:47:00.002-05:00

In the southern part of Italy what’s “coppa” in the north is called “capocollo”. That’s where the American term “capicola” or “gabagool” comes from. Most of the Italian immigrants to the US were from Southern Italy, bringing with them the term and product “capocollo”
I’ve already gone through the whole coppa making process in a previous post, but this one is slightly different. My buddy Scott at Sausage Debauchery, who’s family is original from Calabria, is a Calabrian FREAK. He’s so obsessed with the place that he opened a store to source and resell Calabrian chili pepper and other goodies. All I hear from him is how Calabrian cured meats are the best, tastiest, blah blah blah. Mostly in an effort to shut him up, I made a capocollo following the Calabrian DOP production methodology.
Capocollo di Calabria is pretty interesting in how it’s made. As you can see above the cure is done very simply with just salt and Cure. After its salting period it’d then rinsed in vinegar and rubbed in peperoncino/chili powder (Calabrian please! Cayenne is not an acceptable substitute!)
I’m guessing the rinsing in vinegar is an old world remnant when it was done to make sure the meat surface was as “clean” from bacteria as possible before entering its long drying phase. Now days I think it’s just done as part of tradition as i can’t imagine a rinse in vinegar could impart that much flavor.

	Nice whole coppa muscle. Big one too, 2688g! Didn’t do much trimming to this
	Salt, cure and that’s it. I’ve been putting stuff to salt cure in vacuum bags. I like how it keeps everything clean, no leaks and makes sure all the salt is in contact with the meat during the cure.
	After cure. Meat looks pretty similar. Rinsed and dried.
	Vinegar rinse and then heavily rubbed with Calabrian peperoncino.
	The muscle is cased in “pelle di sugna”, which is a casing made from the lining of the inner walls of the pig organ cavity. You can’t get it here, as far as i know. I don’t even know the name for it in English. I suggest a beef bung as a substitution.
	Tied and ready for the fermentation box for 48 hours at 75 deg F.
	A quick 3.5 months in teh curing chamber and the capocollo had lost about 45% of its weight. The chamber was running around 75% RH at 55 deg. F.
	Sliced thin, it’s delicious!

The capocollo is deeeeelicious! It’s a little salty, so I think iIll lower the salt content next time. The peperoncino is barely detectable. I would like it a little spicier. I think I’ll try curing it with peperoncino as well as rubbing it before casing, see if i get a little more heat.

Prosciutto Cotto / Spalla Cotta

2011-11-27T15:29:00.006-05:00

Prosciutto cotto is just an Italian cooked ham. Not really all that different from good American cooked hams, except maybe for the spicing. Technically, what I made here wasn’t a prosciutto cotto, as I didn’t use a prosciutto, I used a “spalla” or shoulder. No matter, this same method applies to both. I used a shoulder because that’s what was available at the market, and because a whole cooked deboned ham would have been a little unwieldy.
The method I used was developed by a fellow on Sausagemaking.org which involved pumping the meat with 10% of its weight with a brine and also adding a surface rub. The spices I used came from another fellow with a bed and breakfast in Italy. I modified the quantities I used to more suit my tastes.

The reason I chose to both inject and rub was to make sure that the whole muscle reached salt and cure equilibrium quickly. It’s also a way to make sure that there are no uncured spots where the meat might be touching the bag or other surfaces as it floats in a brine.
If you run the numbers I've listed above, using the brine at 10% of the meat weight, and the amount of rub listed above for each kilo of meat, you end up with a product with 155PPM of nitrites (Thanks to reader Yeo for catching my error, previously listing the PPM at 175), 3% salt and 1.6% sugar.

The formula for calculating the PPM of added product in a pumped item is:

((grams of ingredient) * % pump * 1000000) / grams of pickle = PPM

Using that formula correctly the PPM of nitrite added to the ham is in fact about 72.

((14.53g cure #1 * 6.25% nitrite in cure)) * 10% pump * 1000000) / 1250 (pickle weight including water, salt, sugar, cure) = 72

The calculation for the PPM added by the dry rub is as follows:

((grams of cure mix)*(% nitrite in mix)*1000000 / weight of meat) = PPM

I would not include the additional 10% pumped in the weight of the meat, so the PPM added by the dry cure would be (1.34*6.25%*1000000)/1000 = 84PPM

That would give a total of 84+72 = 155PPM nitrite.

	Here is the brine “tea” I made. I heated 1 liter of water, added the salt, sugar and cure, then the spices, brought it to a simmer, turned it off and left it covered for the spices to steep. It was then filtered and used for injection.
	I started with a whole picnic shoulder. You can see I like to lay out my cutting path with toothpicks. I poke toothpicks following the bone, so I know the general area where to cut.
	The leg split open and bone removed.
	The leg flipped over. I cut off the ankle piece to give it a more even thickness and width.
	Front side of the deboned leg. Leave the skin on there!
	I injected 10% of the deboned leg weight with the brine tea from above. I did this on a plate so I could collect any brine that squirted out and put it in the bag with the leg. I then rubbed the dry rub all over the meat surface as well as a little on the skin. I then put it in a vacuum bag and took out most of the air and sealed.
	14 days later the product was opened and rinsed. It’s now ready to be cooked
	Traditionally prosciutto cotto is cooked in metal pots which have spring loaded tops to keep the ham compressed as they’re cooked in the oven, taking on a nice “hamly” shape. Since I didn’t have one of those pans, I tied the leg up super tight instead……..
	And vacuum packed it so it could be cooked in a water bath for 9 hours at 155 deg. F.
	9 hours later, and an overnight stay in the fridge to let everything set up and the product is ready!
	Here’s the spalla cotta! It’s quite a bit fattier than a prosciutto cotto as there is more fat in the shoulder than the ham. It’s nice to see no uncured areas.
	Slice it thin (or thick) and you’ll have some of the best “ham” you’ve ever tasted. Fantastic stuff!

This is a definite winner. I’d make this again in a minute, and in fact I will for sure. I’ll vary up the spices a little even though it’s pretty perfect as it is!

Salam D’La Duja - Tasting

2011-11-25T16:27:00.001-05:00

The Salam D’la Duja has been ready for a little while now, but I haven’t had a chance to post about it. The one pictured here on the left is about 10 months old. I tried some at 4 months and the flavor is pretty similar. This one might be a little more intense.

	Here is my tub of lard. There are more salamini under there, buried in their fat tomb.
	The 10 month old salame extracted and wiped off a little. It’s still very soft obviously as it doesn’t really lose any moisture during its aging time in the curing chamber.
	And here is the salame sliced. It’s very soft. It feels pretty much like raw meat. I must admit it is very disconcerting eating a salame that hasn’t lost any moisture. It’s texture is soft, it’s not really spreadable as the acidification has bound up the meat. Imaging eating a beef tartare and that’s about the texture. The flavor is, surprisingly, incredibly mild. Slight sourness from the fermentation and a faint meaty flavor, but not much else.

I’m glad I made this singular salame as I always have fun trying new stuff, but to be perfectly honest, I don’t know that I care to make them again, they just aren’t to my taste I guess. The texture is disconcerting and the flavor too mild. Maybe if I used a super high quality pastured pork the flavor would be better.

Boccia al Finocchio – Tasting

2011-09-18T22:48:00.001-04:00

The boccia al finocchio has been ready for a while, but I’m just not getting around to writing about it.
I apparently forgot to take notes on timing so I can’t say how long it stayed in the curing chamber, nor how much loss there was when I took it out! I’m assuming it was 2 or so months and about 35% loss.
Either way, I’ve been enjoying it quite a lot!
It’s got GREAT flavor, but the fennel is not strong enough, in fact, I can barely taste it. It could easily use twice as much next time.

	Picture of the sliced boccia. I’m surprised I was able to pack the meat into the bladder well enough to avoid air pockets. There are some small ones, but they’re pretty minor really.
	Nice thin slice. Plain or on a sandwich this stuff is fantastic. Fat content is right on, salt is nice, but fennel is way too low. I don’t know if the salame is particularly good because I used pastured pork fat, or if it was just a good batch.

Fiocco – Ready to eat

2011-08-25T22:08:00.005-04:00

The poor brother of the Culatello is ready! As described in the Culatello post, the Fiocco is made from the small muscle of the hog leg. It’s cured in the exact same way as the Culatello is, but because its quite a bit smaller it takes a lot less to dry.
This piece was in the curing chamber for 4 months and lost about 40-42% of it’s weight.

Let's look at some interior pictures, shall we?

	The fiocco as a whole is nicely firm but not dry in any way. The slices are very supple and soft. The color is beautiful as you can see in this picture.
	You can see in this picture there is a small air pocket which is where the muscle was folded over itself before it was cured. I’m not sure if I cut the muscle incorrectly or if i just didn’t tie it up tightly enough. Either way, the air pocket, fortunately, did not seem to cause a problem.

Overall, I’m quite pleased. One interesting thing i noticed is that when i first cut into it the flavor was VERY mild, almost boring really. I wrapped it and put it in the fridge for sort of forgot about it for a couple weeks. When I tried it again it was MUCH better. The flavor had intensified and become much more pronounced. I can’t explain it. Funny thing is, Scott at Sausage Debauchery experienced the same thing!

Sliced thin it has a nice flavor. It’s a little prosciutto-like, but clearly recognizable as something else. It has a pleasant “funk” to it which I THINK is attributable to it being cased in a beef bung and molded, but I’m not certain.

I have a feeling this is a product in particular where the quality of the pork would make a detectible flavor difference. I used a commercial ham as I wanted to learn how to butcher it before spending a lot more on a pasture raised pig. The very simple curing (just salt really) really would allow the pork to shine on its own as there are no strong flavors or spices to cover up the pork flavor. I think the extra intramuscular fat on pastured pigs would make the texture even better.

It’s a good meat for sandwiches, for sure, and I'll enjoy eating it. I am looking forward to the Culatello to see if the extra 6+ months of aging develop more flavor.

For anyone is still reading....

2011-07-28T07:23:00.000-04:00

I've been busy, really busy. I acutally have a couple things I need to post about, I just have to find some time to do it. One of them is quite interesting, so stick around if you're still there!

Salame Gentile – Ready to Eat

2011-05-15T16:54:00.004-04:00

After a long 4+ months drying in the curing chamber, the salame Gentile is finally ready.
It took over 4 months for it to lose 40% of its weight; it’s still quite soft, as Gentile should be.
It’s normally hard to achieve such a long drying time with salami because they would tend to be way too hard by the end of 3-4 months unless they're huge in diameter. This one isn't that big in diameter and the reason it was possible this salame so long is because it was stuffed in a hog bung. The bung is a good 2-3mm thick with tremendous amount of fat in it which slows the drying considerably, making the wait for a first tasty nearly unbearable.
It's finally done, so let's eat!

	Here is the Gentile cut. The bind is great. It has a nice amount of well distributed fat and it has nice definition between the fat and the meat.
	Closeup of the salame. You can see the thick casing around the slices and the main piece.
	I’m really pleased with the flavor. It’s nicely salted and extremely flavorful from the long aging. It’s quite soft which is a nice change from the very dry Mugnano. I think it might have just a little too much fat. Next time i'll use slightly less. Maybe 15% less or so.

Coppa – Tasting

2011-04-13T22:07:00.001-04:00

Well, that took a while. The whole coppa that I found at my local market just came out of the curing chamber.

There really isn’t much to say or take pictures of so this will be a short post. The coppa is AMAZING. It’s wonderfully seasoned, with white pepper being the predominant spice. Juniper comes through, but might got a little higher next time. The texture is great; soft and tender, with melting fat. It’s a definite success. A solid A!

It took about 5 months with the chamber running at about 54 deg. and 75% RH. Weight loss was about 41%. I wanted it to be nice and firm before taking it down.

Let’s just enjoy some pictures.

Nice marbling.

This picture was taken outside on a hot day. In less than 5 minutes the fat started melting, I did the only possible thing; I ate the whole plate as fast as possible!

Salame di Mugnano – Tasting

2011-04-05T21:57:00.003-04:00

The Salame di Mugnano is finally ready! It took longer than I thought it was going to, but sometimes these things have a mind of their own. This was hung Jan 1st after smoking, and it out April 4th, so 3 months. I kept it in the curing chamber this long because I wanted to achieve the same texture as the ones I ate in Italy last summer; pretty firm. It lost 42% of its weight over these 3 months.
This was "head to head" salame making between Scott at Sausage Debauchery and I. We thought through this together and decided to both make our salami then trade to see how interpretations could vary the results.

	Here’s the salame hanging after its 3 month vacation in the curing chamber. Note how basically no mold grew on the outside. This is due in great part to the fact that the salame was smoked.
	Nice picture of the slices salame. It’s nice and red fro the peperoncino powder added to the paste. The one in Italy wasn’t actually this bright red.
	Closeup. Because it’s beautiful!

As far as the flavor goes it’s delicious, but it’s pretty far from the one I ate in Italy. It has a nice spicy tang and the smoke is barely noticeable. The salt level is nice. It has a really nice chew to it being a bit drier than many of my past salami. Sliced thin this would be pretty good in a sandwich as well. It MIGHT have a little too much whole pepper. I know after I eat more of it. Quantity of fat is good.
If I grade this as a salame in general, I’d give it a solid A, but as a Mugnano I’d have to give it a C-. It’s too spicy (it’s not very spicy, but the Mugnano I had in Italy had a bare bare tingle in the throat), not smokey enough, and the grain needs to be a little bigger.
Would I make it again as it is? Yeah! Definitely.

La Boccia al Finocchio

2011-03-30T21:53:00.005-04:00

Boccia translates to “ball”, and the reason for this name should be obvious given its shape. This isn’t a salame that’s classic of anywhere, as far as I know. The round shape is from the fact that it’s stuffed in a hog bladder. I’m guessing any salame paste can be put in it, I chose to use a fennel based one.

I read about this salame on an Italian cured meats blog called Salumi Casalinghi. The owner of the blog made it with chili pepper, calling it a “Boccia Piccante”,

	I used pork shoulder that I trimmed up a little bit. The fat was from a pasture raised pig from Caw Caw Creek.
	Meat and fat mixed up. Very exciting. This was put in the freezer to harden up before grinding.
	Meat and fat was ground with 8mm plate.
	The meat was well mixed with the spices, salt, cure and starter. It was mixed until a good bind was achieved. It took about 2 minutes on low speed on the Kitchenaid mixer.
	This was then stuffed into hog bladder. It was actually kind of a pain to get it really stuffed full, get any air pockets out and then tie up the open end.
	The boccia was tied up, and fermented at 70-72 deg. F for 48 hrs. After fermentation, it was off to the curing chamber, running at 55 F and 75% RH.

I’m guessing, given its size and the fact that a bladder is pretty thick and relatively moisture proof, this will take a good 2-3 months to be ready. My main fear is air pockets in the meat paste; stuffing these large diameter salami is tricky.

Culatello - The King of Cured Meats

2011-02-18T22:56:00.006-05:00

If there is a King of salumi, it's definitely Culatello di Zibello. Many might think that honor belongs to Prosciutto di Parma, with it's 5 pointed crown branded onto it's skin, but in reality, those in the know, understand that Culatello is the true King.

Culatello is made from the large muscle mass in the rear leg of the pig. Creating it means destroying the possibility of making a prosciutto. That, combined with it being a relatively small part of the whole leg, its tremendous aging time, the fact that it's the best part of the leg, and the expertise required to make it, make it one of the most expensive salumi in Italy, particularly if it adheres to the DOP regulations to be a Zibello culatello.

The flavor of culatello is indescribably delicious, but I'll try. It has a soft, supple texture similar to prosciutto, but a tiny bit dryer. The flavor is robust, and redolent of the 500 year old, humid, caves where they spend their 12 months drying. The pork flavor is the main thing you can taste (which is delicious because to adhere to the DOP certain criteria for raising the pigs have to be adhered to, and they must be pigs from either Lombardia or Emilia-Romagna), followed by the funk of the aging and the caves It's really something special. There is obviously no way I can recreate the flavor from the 500 year old caves and the native molds, but I'm hoping I can create something similar and delicious.

You can see the cure is exceedingly simple. Nothing to interfere with the pork flavor and the flavor of the 500 year old caves, which I was unable to import from Italy. This would be a good candidate for using a high quality pastured pig. I'm sure I'll do it again with one, but for this trial I was trying to learn how to make the cut and the complex tying.

I have to thank Scott @ Sausage Debauchery for pushing me to make this through some friendly competition, as well as my friend Alberto in San Francisco (don't know if he reads the blog) without whom I wouldn't have known where to begin the cutting, and also Angelo Competiello and his dad for also showing me how to make the cut.

This is a BIG post with a lot of pictures. It's a complicated process so make sure you understand what you're doing before you hack away! Since i've never made this, and its a complex salume, there is the chance that what I've done will fail....so follow at your own risk. I'm going to also show the curing of the fiocco which is the other side of the leg...a poor man's culatello if you will.

	Culatello starts with a whole rear pig leg. I got the biggest one i could find. This one was about 23 lbs.
	The first step is removing the aitch bone. Just feel around the front for it, and gently cut around the bone without gouging too far into the meat. Don't want any excess cuts or slices.
	Aitch bone is removed and on top of the leg for demonstration.
	Next step is to skin the ham leaving behind as much fat as possible.
	This is the other side of the leg. Nice and skinless. Ooops! i nicked the fat there in the middle.
	It's important to "milk" or "pump" the femoral artery in the leg to get any remaining blood out of there. Leaving it in there risks rancidity.
	It's easier to watch a video of someone milking the artery than try to explain how to do it...found this on Youtube. Thanks to Kim Adams @ Gangofpour.com
	Now it's time to cut the precious ham into a culatello, a fiocco and a bone. The culatello is the the large side of the leg shown inside the green area on this picture. The fiocco is the small side, shown in red on the picture. In between is obviously the bone.
	Locate the bone and understand how it runs inside the leg, then cut the hunk of muscle off it. The flap on the front of the culatello is cut off to square up the face. That's the small piece you see there. Use it for salame, or make little pork steaks to eat fresh.
	This shows the culatello on the right, the bone in the middle and the fiocco on the left. The fiocco is considered the poor cousin of the culatello, but it's still good. I cured using the same exact formula ratios as I used for culatello.
	Here is the culatello. Trimmed to its proper shape. Use all your trimmings for salame.
	The other side of the culatello. Ready for its first tying.
	Using slip knots the culatello muscle is tied really tight so it keeps its nice round shape.
	Tie tie tie
	Rear side. Use twine big enough to not cut into the meat and fat
	Salt, pepper, cure #2. That's it.
	Rubbed and massaged all over the culatello and then bagged with all the cure. This was left in the fridge for 21 days. Turning and massaging every 4 or 5 days.
	The fiocco/fiocchetto is tied up as well and salted just like the culatello.
	The culatello is cased in a pig bladder traditionally. I wasn't able to get any, but, I was able to get a beef bladder. It took some wrestling to get it in there, and then I sewed the cut I made back up, pulling the bladder tight. Kind of looks like Frankenstein. I should have used thinner twine for the trussing. Next time. The fiocco is stuffed in a beef bung. Instead of a bladder, collagen can be used, as can strips of beef bung which can be cut open, and used to wrap the culatello. Cut the bung open so it's a flat sheet and wrap the culatello in that. It might take more than one, no problem, they'll fuse together where they overlap once they dry a little. The tying is complex and takes quite a while. It took me about 1.5 hrs to case and tie. See the video below for how to tie.
	This guy is awesome! I must have watched this 20 times.
	I sprayed the culatello and fiocco with MEK 4 mold spray and put it in my fermentation box at 70-72 deg. for 30 hours. This is after the fermentation.
	It's so beautiful I can't stop looking at it!
	The fiocco was nice looking too.

Now the waiting game starts. The culatello and fiocco are in the curing chamber at 55 F and 75% RH. I'm guessing the fiocco will be ready in about 4-5 months and the culatello in about 8-10, maybe longer. I guess it'l be a Thanksgiving treat!

Bresaola di Cervo - Deer Bresaola

2011-02-11T21:39:00.000-05:00

Everyone knows beef bresaola.....it's a common salume that's generally a good starting place for people new to the hobby. In talking to Scott at Sausage Debauchery, I told him I was going to make a deer salame from a piece of deer roast a coworker gave me from a hunt. He intelligently suggested making a deer bresaola since I had such a nice piece and it would have been a waste to grind it up! I followed his advice, and this is what I ended up with. If you have a hunter friend who is willing to share his kill, I say give it a try!

	Here's the venison roast. I have no idea what part of the deer this is from. Shoulder or leg I imagine. It's REALLY lean, and looks like really nice dark red beef.
	The curing salt and spice mix
	The roast was rubbed with the salt mix and put into a Ziplock bag for about 16 days. I massaged it and flipped it about every 5 or 6 days. It was then rinsed and dried before casing it.
	Cased in a beef bung and tied as tightly as possible.
	Sprayed with M-EK-4 mold spray and fermented for 48 hours at 70 deg. F. Ready for the chamber. Chamber is currently running at 55 deg. F and 75% RH.
	Here is the bresaola after 30 days in the curing chamber. It's lost an indeterminate amount of weight, because I forgot to weigh it before it went in! I'm guesstimating about 25-30%. It actually feels hard, I think because it's so lean. I wrapped it in a wet towel and let it rehydrate the casing for a couple of days.
	A month or so in the curing chamber, a couple days in a zip bag in the fridge and it's ready to eat. It's an amazing super-red color. It looks really beautiful. Smells delicious.
	Sliced thin. It tastes quite similar to a beef bresaola, but richer and slightly more irony. It has a strong, delicious, flavor. It's very slightly salty, but not overly so. The herbs and spices are quite delicate and nicely balanced. Overall this is a definite success.

Violino di Capra - Goat prosciutto tasting

2011-02-03T22:44:00.001-05:00

The Violino di Capra is ready! It didn't take that long to dry. I forgot to write down when it went into the curing chamber, but I estimate it it's been about 40 days. Not long, but it's a very lean meat, and not very thick, so I'm not surprised it didn't take long.

The leg is very dry and almost stiff as a board! I don't know how much weight it lost, since I forgot to write that down too!

Sliced the leg looks beautiful. A rich crimson/dark red/purple color.
The slices are chewy and extremely rich and gamey. This isn't for the feignt of heart! It has a spicyness that hits you in the back of the throat.
The aroma is definite goat. Really good.

Overall i'm very pleased. I'm not really sure if there is anything I'd do differently. It's pretty much like I remember it in Italy!

Salame Gentile

2011-01-23T16:07:00.001-05:00

If one were to translate Salame Gentile into English, it would be "Gentle Salame", but the direct translation is meaningless. The name derives from the use of the hog bung as the casing. In Italian the hog bung is called the "budello genile". A hog bung is the last piece of the intestine in the pig, and it has very thick walls and a lot of fat within the membrane layers. The hog bung being so thick and fatty keeps the salame very soft and allows for a long drying time without over hardening, often up to and over 90 days, which for a salame of this diameter (80mm or so) is a long time. It's also supposed to give the salame a particular flavor.

	Pork belly and pork shoulder cut into strips. Nothing new here really. They were nicely firm from the freezer.
	Meat and fat was ground through a 1/2" plate, and put back into the freezer to stiffen back up before mixing.
	Closeup of the ground meat. Nice and distinct fat blobs
	Curing mixture. This was added to the meat with the starter culture and mixed well until there was a nice bind in the paste.
	Here is the stuffed hog bung. It's pretty massive, weighing close to 2Kg (4.4 lbs). Notice the casing is so thick you can't even see the meat mix through the casing as you normally can. It was well perforated and sprayed with M-EK4 mold spray.
	The salame was fermented at 70 deg. for 72 hours. I didn't get a picture after that fermentation. This is a picture after 3 weeks in the curing chamber. From the curing chamber there was a nice mold coating but not as heavy as it is seen here.

As of yesterday, 3 weeks since hanging, it had lost about 19% of its weight, and it was still really nice and soft. I'm thinking this will need a good 80-90 days, but we'll see.

Salam d'la Duja

2011-01-10T21:46:00.003-05:00

I enjoy researching and making salami that are sort of obscure, maybe not to the region they're from in Italy, but certainly here in the US. This one qualifies as one for sure.

Piemonte is a region that is close to my heart in that that's where my Italian side of the family is from; my Dad, Nonna, Nonno, and Zii. I like finding cured meats from that area as a way to stay connected to my family. This salume is from the eastern area of Piemonte.

Salam d'la Duja was born out of the necessity to cure meats in an area where the humidity is generally too high, not allowing for proper drying and preservation. Because of the high humidity the salami are dried for just a short while and then buried in liquid lard inside a clay pot, called a Duja. They're kept here for anywhere from 3 months to a year. They stay soft and age in the lard becoming spicier as they age. I've actually never eaten one in Italy, I can't explain why not, so I'll really have no idea how mine compares to the real stuff.

	Pork butt sliced and ready to go. A nice stay in the freezer hardened it up nicely to get a good clean grind.
	Pork belly sliced. Also was placed in the freezer for a little while to harden up. We want a nice clean cut.
	Here is the pork butt and belly mixed and ready to be ground.
	Meat was ground through a 5/16" / 8mm plate.
	Closeup of the ground meat. Keeping everything cold insures a good clean cut without fat smearing. Before mixing this another quick trip in the freezer will make sure the fat stays distinct while mixing
	The curing mixture.
	The meat was mixed well, by hand, and then stuffed and cased in beef rounds. Tied into short links. These were then fermented for 72 hours @ 68-70 deg. F. I thought I had a picture of that, but I don't. It wasn't very interesting. They came out the same as they went in, since I didn't spray them with mold. Into the curing chamber they then went.
	They spent just a short week in the curing chamber at 55F / 75% RH. This was to dry the surface off before their long lard bath. Here they after a week drying off. I gave them a quick water/vinegar wipe down to remove small traces of mold that had formed.
	Tub full of lard. Please don't use that Armor brand hydrogenated crap. That stuff will kill you. This is fresh rendered lard. You can find it at many Mexican groceries. This was warmed in the microwave to liquify and then let cool until it was about 80 degrees.
	I was short a Duja (clay vessel), so I used a glass container with a snap lid. This is why they were linked the size they were. So they could fit into the container. Strings were snipped short.
	Buried under lard. What a way to go. I put the container with its lid on in the curing chamber.

Now we wait. I had a spare salamino which didn't fit in the container, so i just hung it back up in the chamber, and I'll eat it as a normal dry salame..no problem!I'll come back to these in at least 3 months, and I'd like to let some go 8-12 months, we'll see if I can resist.

Nasone and Cotechino Tasting

2011-01-08T23:52:00.001-05:00

I'm a week late for the traditional Italian new years sausage, cotechino, but no big deal. Had some friends over for our 8th annual cotechino party and of course had to serve the Nasone too!

	I wrapped the Nasone in foil and put it in a pot of cold water, and brought it up to a simmer slowly. I simmered it for about 2 hours, the let it sit in the pot of water for about 20 minutes. Unwrapped and here you have it.
	Here is the nasone after 2 hours of simmering, and the cotechino after 1.5 hours of simmering. I did not wrap the cotechino this year, and had no problems with it bursting!
	Nasone cut. During the cooking the skin turned to very soft and very sticky gelatin. It "glued" itself to teh stuffing inside and to itself as the wrapper. Looks great.
	Slice of nasone Note the thickness of the snout and the beautiful filling of meat, fat and skin. Yum. Of course the snout wrapper is eaten too.
	Here are the nasone and cotechino sliced and served on top of lentils and steamed Savoy cabbage. Good luck and money will come to all those who ate it! Belated Happy New Year!

As for the flavor? I'd say it was good. There is no hiding the nasone is made from pig. It has a strong "barnyard" flavor. It had a great texture, like nice soft braised pig skin. As it cooled it became kind of rubbery, which is to be expected. I liked it, but I must admit, if I had to choose, I preferred the cotechino. This years cotechino was the best to date. The ratio of meat, skin and fat was perfect. The sausage was tender, moist, and appropriately sticky and smooth from the skin. Really fantastic.

Salame di Capra - Goat Salame Tasting Notes

2011-01-05T19:54:00.000-05:00

The goat salame is ready! They smell amazing. I'm very pleased with how they turned out.

Take a look below for more details on how they tasted.

	These were ready after about 22 days in a chamber @ 55 F / 75% RH. I'm guessing that because the goat is so lean, it dried out pretty fast. These lost about 45% of their weight.
	Here it is cut. Nice definition, beautiful crimson color.Smells like herbs and spices.

As far as the flavor is concerned; it's fantastic. Very gamey/goatey, pepper is evident as is the rosemary and the cinnamon. Might reduce the cinnamon just a touch next time. The texture is very nice. They have some good "chew" to them, without being jerky-like. There is, I believe, the right amount of fat. This is a definite "make again".

Salame di Mugnano

2011-01-01T20:39:00.023-05:00

While I was back in Italy this past September I ate all kinds of great cured meats. The variety of different salami available is really mind boggling. I was at a standard grocery store near home, and picked up a couple different ones, including a Salame di Mugnano. One I hadn't had before. It had a fantastic smell, with a hint of smokiness. Upon eating it it was rich, and lightly smoked with just a little hint of heat.
As soon as I got home I started researching this particular salame. It was actually relatively easy finding out about it; a lean, large grain salame that's lightly smoked from Mugnano del Cardinale in Campania. Much harder was actually finding any information on the formula that might be used to make it. So I made up my own. This, I'm sure, is the first of many tries to get this right.

		The butt, or shoulder sliced into strips that'll fit nicely into the throat of the grinder.
		The belly is traditionally used for Salame di Mugnano. I got one that was as fatty as possible, and trimmed the lean off it, and added that to the lean meat.
		Here is the 80/20 mix of shoulder to belly. As you can see, it's a pretty lean mixture.
		The mix ground through a 1/2" grinder die. Everything was kept super cold, close to frozen really. This kept the definition nice. Fat and meat nicely distinct.
		Closeup of the 1/2" ground meat. This was put back into the freezer to get really cold before it was mixed with the spices.
		The spice mix. Smelled great. I used Scott's peperoncino calabrese.
		The mixture was mixed well, and the starter culture with 75g of distilled water was added, and mixed in. It was then stuffed into hog middles.
		Hog middle. All tied up and ready for smoke. The salami were fermented at 70 deg. F for 68 hours.
		Here are 2 of the 3 salami after cold smoking for 11 hours, a full load using a ProQ, with mixed hardwood keeping the smoking chamber at about 55 deg. F. After the smoking they were put in a Tupperware for 24 hours to mellow the aroma a little, and not contaminate the whole curing chamber. I hope it doesn't. Scott told me it wouldn't.... They smell amazing.

These will stay in the curing chamber, at 55F and 75% RH, until they've lost 30-40% of their weight. I remember the Mugnano salame I ate in Italy was quite aged, quite dry.

Violino di Capra - Goat Prosciutto

2010-12-23T20:03:00.013-05:00

If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times. Prosciutto, while commonly associated with a pig leg, can really be made with anything. In this case; a goat leg. This is a a typical salume from Valchiavenna, just a few kilometers from Switzerland. Normally, this is made from the leg of a mountain goat. Unfortunately, mountain goats seem to be in short supply here in Atlanta, so I used what I could find.

The name of the product is pretty interesting. It's called a Violino di Capra, which translated to "goat violin". It has this name because the consumer is meant to hold the cured goat leg like a violin and slice it with a knife as if it we're a violin bow. You can see a good picture of that here. It's passed from diner to diner for each person to slice at will. I vividly remember eating this as a kid in Italy, and distinctly remember the really gamey, bracing flavor and the chewy tough meat. I've been looking forward to making it for a while. I've read that by tradition once the Violino is started, people cannot leave the table until the whole thing is finished! Recipes are guarded very jealously, passed on father to son, so it looks like I'll have to come up with my own recipe. Of course I'll share it here!

Probably the hardest part is going to be finding a nice whole goat leg. If you visit a market in an area with a large Indian population you shold be able to find one.
Here is mine. Really nice looking leg.

Here is the other side. I left it essentially untrimmed. Cleaned off a few pieces of silver skin, but not much really.

The cure mixture. I kept it nice and simple to taste the goaty-ness.

As always, the cure is massaged into the meat, making sure to get it into all the nooks and crannies, and then put into a ziplock bag. Any cure that fell off while rubbing is put into the bag so that the full amount of salt and cure that we planned to get in there, is in there.

After 18 days of curing in the fridge, I took it out, gave it a quick rinse, and dried it off well.

Side A

Side B

I tied a slipknot around the top of the leg (bottom of the leg?) and put it in the chamber set at 55 deg. F / 75% RH.

See you in a couple of months...or more!

As always, I'll report back

Cotechino 2010

2010-12-17T21:56:00.010-05:00

It's that time of year again, when cotechino makes its yearly appearance, in preparation for the New Years feast! I've explained the story of cotechino a couple of times before, both in 2008 and 2009. This year I was fortunate enough to have some concia, or spice mixture, from a fellow Italian in San Francisco. He gets it from his uncle in Italy, and he kindly sent me a pack to try. Sorry, i don't know what's in it, but i think it's the usual spice suspects which you can see on previous years posts.

There was one major change this year. I just recently got a standalone grinder. It a nice #12 electric model. I had had enough of the Kitchenaid not being able to deal with the smallest amount of sinew in the meat. It was taking me hours of trimming. With this grinder I just cut the shoulder into strips and fed it right through. Ground right through it, no problems... nice!

The other reason I wanted a standalone grinder was to be able to grind the cotechino skin without precooking it first, like I've done every other time. I think I've been losing some collagen and unctuousness by precooking the skin before grinding it.

This can be made with a kitchenaid grinder, no real problems, but follow the directions from previous years about pre-cooking the skin.

This year's stack of pig skin. I removed most of the fat attached to it, but wasn't 100% perfect. I figured a little extra fat can't hurt.

I followed by Italian friend's suggestion and cut the skin into strips and froze them almost solid.

I ground the skin through a 3/4" plate first to get it started.
I will say, even with a dedicated grinder (home, not commercial) it was TOUGH getting through the raw skin. The grinder jammed repeatedly and had to be reversed and restarted.

Meat (shoulder) and back fat were cut into strips and put in the freezer until partially frozen.

Here are the fat and meat ground through an 8mm plate.

The skin was then refrozen and reground through a 5mm plate, and added to the meat and fat.

The salt and spice mix.

Thanks again Alberto!

Everything was really well mixed until there was a good bind of the paste. Notice the white film on the sides of the bowl. That's the sticky protein that's pulled out of the meat by the salt, and helps in the binding of the sausage paste.

Not too concerned about smearing the fat, but I tried to be somewhat delicate.

The meat paste was cased in beef middles, as well as a double sides snout.

The sausages were put, uncovered, in the fridge for 48 hours to dry out the excess moisture on the surface. They were then vac. packed and frozen, ready to be cooked in a few weeks.

Come time for cooking they'll be tightly wrapped in foil like giant candies and simmered gently for a couple of hours.
Should be great.

Meet the Nasone

2010-12-11T23:07:00.010-05:00

I'm sure many of you have heard of Zampone, the foreleg of a pig which has been "emptied" and then used as a "bag" for cotechino filling. It's really quite delicious. It's called a Zampone because it's a derivative of the word "zampa" which means "trotter" in Italian.

Well, I decided to invent my own insaccato (stuffed charcuterie/cured meat). I'm naming it the Nasone. I'm going to apply for IGP or DOP status.

The Nasone is 2 pig snouts, which have been cleaned out and emptied from their meaty, sinewy, fatty content, laid back to back, filled with cotechino mixture, then tied up. I put it in a vacuum bag and plan on cooking it sous vide, probably for 24 hours to soften everything up (good idea Scott).

Here is one of the 2 snouts that were used.

Hello snouty!

Stuffed and wrapped, and partially frozen to keep it all together while tying and vac. packing.

This is the underside. It's not as pretty, but hey, snouts don't come in neat tubes like casings!

I wonder if this will be granted IGP/DOP status.

I'll have another post shortly on the 2010 cotechino recipe that I used as the stuffing in this thing.

Salame di Capra - Goat Salame

2010-12-09T20:09:00.019-05:00

As I've previously said, while pork is certainly the main, delicious, animal that is used in cured meats in Italy, pretty much everything else is too. What that "everything else" is is based on the region. In Piemonte, specifically the Canavese area, as well as in Valcamonica in Lombardia, goat is sometimes used in making of salame.
This is my 1st attempt at a goat salame.

In Italy goat salame is often mixed with some percentage of beef, to mellow out the gamey, goatey flavor. Personally I like strong flavors, so I went 100% goat for the meat portion.

I got some goat leg that was cut into bone in cubes. I removed the meat from the bones and cut it into strips and cubes that would fit into the grinder.

The meat is VERY lean, and a dark dark crimson red. It's really beautiful looking.

Fat has to be added to the goat meat, as it's just too lean alone. Pork fat is generally used for this. Here are the pork belly strips after being in the freezer.

Goat and pork ground through the new, super secret, Kitchenaid grinder plate. 3/8".
Keeping everything cold gives good separation between meat and fat. That's good.

The meat was mixed with the pulverized spice mixture and starter culture which was diluted in about 50g of distilled water about 15 minutes before use.
The paste was mixed for about 2 minutes in the KA mixer with the paddle, and then stuffed in beef middles. I tied them off in salamini...or little salami.

Next step: fermentation chamber.

This is after 48 hours at 70 deg. F in my closed fermentation box.

Just after they were put in there they were sprayed with a solution of M-EK4 mold. 1/2 teaspoon of the mold was diluted in about 1/2 cup of distilled water and allowed to sit a couple of hours.

Into the chamber for the next 20-30 days, or until they've lost about 30% of their weight, or they feel right.

The chamber is running at 55 deg. F and 75% RH.

I'll let you know how it turns out.

Coppa - Whole

2010-11-09T20:32:00.014-05:00

A little while ago I was roaming the isles at my local Asian grocery store, and in the pork section i noticed some thinly cut, very round steaks labeled "pork steak". It was really heavily marbled, and I thought to myself, "wow, that looks like a coppa steak....i wonder if I can get the whole piece that these steaks were cut from". I went up to the meat counter and asked if this part was the neck or collar of the pig. He told me it was (although I'm not certain he understood my question), and he said he had a whole one.

You might remember my issue with procuring coppa muscles, having to buy whole shoulders and carving out the coppa from them, in the hope that the butcher hadn't mangled it. Amazingly, what i was able to buy as "pork steak" seemed to be a whole coppa, and on top of that, it was nicely trimmed into the correct shape for me! I couldn't wait to cure it.

Coppa
Ingredient	Quantity(g)	% of Meat
Pork Coppa	1632	100%
Salt ( Kosher)	57	3.50%
White Pepper	16	1.00%
Cinnamon	1.22	0.075%
Cure #2	4.1	0.25%
Juniper	3.5	0.20%

As you can see I kept the flavorings rather simple, actually, essentially identical to my best coppa to date. In that one the close was still quite strong, so i decided to remove it entirely.

This is the whole pork steak as I got it from my market. I hope i can keep finding these

This is the other side of the piece of meat, note the beautiful fat on there. It's going to be TASTY!

Spice mixture ready to apply and massage into the coppa

The coppa was massaged with the spice mixture, making sure to get into all crevices and nooks and crannies.

This was put into the fridge for 3 weeks, and turned once 1/2 way though. I left it longer than i have in the past because it's so thick. I prefer to make sure it's cured through than to under-cure.

After its time in the cure, I washed it off well, and dried nicely. I trimmed off the small flap of meat that was just hanging out there. Small piece, and i was concerned that if I just folded it against the main piece i might have air pockets in there.

I tried stuffing it into a 90mm collagen casing, and there was no way it was fitting.
Here it is stuffed into a 100mm casing. It was really a pain to stuff it in there, but i'm glad i did. Look how nice and round it is, no air pockets and nice and compacted.

Notice i don't tie the end of the casing with string. I used my nice new hog ring pliers. It was pretty convenient and certainly easier than using string.

Rather than using string to tie it up, I had some elastic netting I figured I would try.

Let's go to the chamber. I didn't put it in the "fermentation" box like I have previously, because I'm not sure I fully understand the reasoning behind doing that on solid muscles. I've read that it helps with the initial drying, but I not sure it's strictly necessary.

It's in there now at 55 deg. F and 75-80% RH. I'll leave it like that for about a week, then lower the RH to about 70-75%.

Keep an eye out for a tasting report.

Hey, look what I found!!

2010-10-07T20:51:00.009-04:00

One of the main problems with the Kitchenaid grinder is the proprietary grinder plates that go with it (standalone grinders use standard plates that come in a billion sizes). There are really only 2 sizes...."fine" and "very fine". The "fine" grinder grinder plate is 1/4", which is pretty good for many salami, the "very fine" is not particularly useful except for a few things. So I had a friend in a machine shop make me a larger 7/16" plate (someone on ebay makes them, take a look there, they're a great deal at $15 a piece). It works really well, but it's a just a HAIR too big. The other day I checked out Ebay to see if anyone had made any other custom plates, and imagine my surprise when I ran into a Kitchenaid "coarse" grinder plate, which didn't look like my "coarse" grinder plate!
It appears that at some point, quite a few years ago, Kitchenaid decided that for home use, a 1/4" coarse plate would be more useful than the one they had back then in the kit, a 3/8" one. I would agree that 1/4" is more useful for stuff like burger...but 3/8" i think would be nice to have for salame. I got it for a bargain $12!

Here is the plate I just got in the mail. I think it'll be a perfect size for many salami...excited to use it.

My advice to all those with a KA grinder is to keep an eye open at thrift stores, flea markets or Ebay for an old style "coarse" Kitchenaid grinder plate.

Guanciale - Finally ready

2010-08-31T13:15:00.014-04:00

After 2 months in the curing chamber, starting at 54 deg. F and 75% RH and dropping to 54 F and 65% RH after the 1st month, the guanciale is finally ready. It has a nice firmness and nice aroma.

It's lost about 17% of its weight. Such a low weight loss is to be expected for pieces that are largely fat like guanciale and pancetta. The majority of the water in meat is stored in the muscle, and a small amount in the fat, so on pieces that are mostly fat well...there just isn't much water to lose!
Either way, it had a nice firm feel to it. Probably about as firm as a tennis ball if i had to compare it to something, maybe even a little firmer.

This started off as 1/2 of a face of a Large Black pig from Caw Caw Creek. I've previously stated my preference for pancetta over guanciale....boy was I wrong. I might have to take that comment back after this latest product.

Here it is in all it's glory coming out of the curing chamber. It smells herby and delicious, but not really as strong as you might expect.
It really doesn't look that much different than the picture before it went into the chamber!
Just a little darker really.

Hey look! I can do those artsy, slightly overexposed closeups that other blogs do :) But we all know you're not reading for my pretty pictures, and normally I wouldn't dedicate too much time to it, but this time it was like a beautiful model posing for a camera...it was hard NOT to take beautiful photos. (Is it odd that I compare a cured meat made from pig throat to a model? I don't think so)

This one isn't quite as up-close as the last pic, but it's just too beautiful to not post it. You can see how the guanciale is really mostly fat, with a thin streak of meat in it. I'm sure the breed and DEFINITELY the way it's raised has something to do with that.

Guanciale has a strange textured fat. It's silky and smooth feeling, but when biting it it has a slight "crunch" to it, almost like a beef tendon which isn't fully cooked. I sliced it nice and thin on my slicer because of this, and it was a great choice.

This cured meat is normally eaten cooked in other dishes, but i couldn't help sneak a taste of a slice (note slice missing!). It's amazing. Slicing it thin alleviated the texture issue, making it feel and chew like a slice of pancetta. It's really rich and the salt is perfect this time. The spices are there but it tastes mostly of delicious delicious pig. That was my goal; given the quality of the meat i didn't want to overdo the spicing. I succeeded.

Pasta alla Gricia. This is how the guanciale ended up the 1st night. It's a very traditional Roman dish, sometimes called Amatriciana bianca. It's only oil, black pepper, guanciale and Pecorino Romano. The cheese and the fat from the guanciale, together with some of the pasta cooking water combine to make a creamy, smooth velvety sauce.

1/2 of the guanciale is in the fridge ready to be devoured and the other half was vacuum packed and frozen.

This has to be one of my most successful cured meats so far. It's really amazing. It's perfectly balanced and the flavor is outstanding. No off flavors at all. I have to think a great majority of the success is due to the pork I used.

I've been a slacker!

2010-08-18T13:09:00.005-04:00

As is blatantly obvious by the lack of posting here on Curedmeats, i've been slacking in my duties. That doesn't mean i don't have anything in my fridge that i'm eating, I do, but nothing has been notable enough to blog about. It's just been re-making the standards like coppa and pancetta.

I'm taking a trip back home to Italy shortly where i'll have a chance to indulge in all the delicious cured meats, which will hopefully be of inspiration when i get back.

I do know that the 1st project when I return is going to be Nduja. The Calabrian ultra-hot, soft, spreadable salame that's been all the rage lately. I have a piece from Spilinga, Calabria where Nduja originates, which my parents brought me from Italy, which is amazing, I can see what all the hub-bub is about. I've also tried a few locally (US) made ones, and have been left less than impressed, in fact, I thought some were downright bad, including some BIG name ones which I won't mention.

If you're interested in giving Nduja a try, check out Scott's store @ Sausage Debauchery. That's where my Calabrian chilis came from, and what i'll be using for mine.

So, hang tight with me until I return, reinvigorated and rejuvenated from the Homeland!

Lardo D'Arnad - Tasting

2010-06-16T21:20:00.004-04:00

After almost 90 long days the lardo is done. There really wasn't much to it; no need to control temperature, humidity or anything else really. Just waiting. So the waiting is over, and it's time to eat!

This is what the brine looked like after 85 days. It's darkened considerably, and has stained the outside surface of the fat. Not sure what causes this darkening...i guess something coming out of the herbs.

Here is the hunk of fatback, removed from the brine and dried. Ready to slice super thin.

This is how it's traditionally eaten. Sliced very thin, some black pepper, and eaten over some grilled rustic bread. The warm bread gently melts the lardo, making it almost disappear.

Here is the lardo on some warm rye bread. Not a traditional accompaniment, but it was very tasty...and it was the only sliced bread i had.

Overall it's really good. The herbs and spices can be tasted but not too strongly. It is a little bit salty, so i'm going to take a hunk and follow the recommendation an Italian guy who taught me to make this gave me. Soak in clean water for 24 hours per kilogram of lardo. This will draw out some of the salt. It'll take some time in the fridge for the salt to re-equilibrate throughout the hunk, but it should reduce the saltiness.

I'm not sure what i'm going to do with this much lard. As you might imagine a little goes a long way. It's VERY tasty, but it's rich and eating a whole lot in a sitting isn't going to happen. I'll split it in multiple pieces and vacuum pack it and freeze it. I think it'll keep well.

Guanciale - Off to the chamber.

2010-06-06T21:27:00.003-04:00

The guanciale has been curing in salt for about 3.5 weeks, so it was time for it to go into the drying chamber. I gave it a quick rinse, strung it, and hung it in the chamber, which is currently at 55 deg. F and about 70-75% RH.

I'll give it at least a month in there.

Guanciale

2010-05-13T20:56:00.008-04:00

I've made guanciale before, so i'm not going to go into too many details about its awesomeness. It's basically like pancetta, except different. The fat on a jowl is very different to regular fat. It has a rather odd texture to it, it almost has a "crunch" to it. It's much richer than pancetta too.
Thanks to Jimmy at Eatitatlanta blog, I found myself in possession of a jowl from my favorite pork place of all, Caw Caw Creek.

Guanciale
Ingredient	Quantity(g)	% of Meat
Jowl	1585	N/A
Salt	43	2.75
Sugar	24	1.5
Black Pepper	20	1.26
Rubbed Sage	5	0.3
Thyme	6.5	0.4
Cure #2	4	0.25

Look at the size of this thing! Emile at Caw Caw said he thought it was from a Large Black pig, which apparently refers to the ear size, and not the physical size of the hog. Emile lets his pigs grow to be rather large before slaughter, I can only imagine the size of the head of this pig!

Look at that! I trimmed it up a little but to clean up any soft sinew and connective tissue. Not much though.

This is only the jowl portion of the pig face. Can you picture how big the rest of the pig is!?

Here is the spice mixture well combined and ready to be applied.

The jowl was well rubbed with ALL the mixture.

Given the thickness and the quantity of fat, i'll leave this to cure longer than for a pancetta, probably 20 days or so. It'll then hang for at least 30.

Lardo D'Arnad

2010-04-17T08:59:00.000-04:00

This is a pretty requested recipe, and I'm finally getting around to making a batch, so I hope this answers the numerous questions I've gotten about it.

Lardo in Italian means lard or fatback. It's cured in numerous areas of Italy, with the most famous being in Tuscany, where it's known as Lardo di Colonnata. This recipe is a recreation of a lardo style made in Arnad in the Valle D'Aosta region, or at least my rendition of this lardo. The fatback is cured and then sliced thinly and eating as a salume.

The hardest part of this recipe is procuring a piece of fatback that's thick enough to use. You won't be able to find it at a supermarket, you'll have to source it from your friendly local farmer. The rest is easy. It's just brine cured, not dry cured at all.

Lardo D'Arnad
Ingredient	Quantity(g)	% of water
Fat back	1600	N/A
Water	2250	N/A
Salt	562	25%
Fresh Rosemary	29	1.28
Sage	17	0.75
Fresh Garlic	22	1
Bay Leaves	8 leaves	N/A
Black Pepper	4	0.18
Cure #1	12.3	0.55

Lardo D'Arnad is traditionally brine cured in large wooden boxes called "doils". Clearly I don't own chestnut wood boxes in which to cure my lardo, so i used a large plastic container.

Nice fresh rosemary. It's washed and ready to use.

Sage and garlic cloves.

Juniper berries lightly crushed in a mortar and pestle.

The water is brought to a boil, the salt is added and all the spices, herbs, and curing salt is dumped in. Turn off the fire and cover. Let cool to room temperature. Basically an herbal, salty tea is made.

Here is the brine. Ready to cure the fatback.

I want to take a minute to detail how i calculated the amount of curing salts to add. This is actually somewhat complicated and not exactly agreed upon.
There is a detailed discussion of brine curing on the sausagemaking.org forum. Parts of the discussion on brine curing can be found here and here. Keep in mind that curing in a brine is different than dry curing. In dry curing, it's pretty safe to assume that the amount of salt you add and curing salts you add, pretty much end up in the meat. With a brine, that wouldn't be correct. There are a few brine curing calculation methods which are detailed by the FDA, I'm assuming an equilibrium method for brine curing, which is detailed in the FDA processing inspectors handbook. Based on all this reading, I decided i wanted the residual parts per million of nitrites to be about 150. I decided on 150PPM as that is the residual nitrite allowed by the European Union, which to be perfectly honest, i trust more than our own FDA, which allows up to 200PPM.

To achieve 150PPM, based on experimental analysis by some fellows on Sausagemaking.org, that meant I had to add 175 ppm of nitrites to my brine. The main discrepancy with my product and the FDA book is that the book assumes a piece of meat, whereas my item is pure fat, which means the uptake may be slightly different. Unfortunately, i have nothing else to go by, so i assume it acted the same as meat.

Given the quantity of salt (25% brine), I would actually feel OK about leaving the cure out in this case, but I added it in this instance.

So to calculate my 175PPM of nitrites i used the following math:
(grams of nitrite to add) = (PPM required*(weight of meat + weight of brine))/1000000

Using this equation : g=(175*(2800+1600))/1000000 = 0.77g (the brine with all the stuff added weighed 2800g)

So I could use 0.77g of pure sodium nitrite, which i do not have. I have cure #1, which is 6.25% sodium nitrite. That means I would have to use (0.77/0.0625) = 12.3g of cure #1.

So that's our math lesson for today. Please take the time to read the FDA processors handbook, as well as the forum posts. There is a very interesting discussion in there. The processors handbook has great examples for the calculations, as well as safety limits for many of the products we use.

So here is the piece of fatback that is about to go into the brine. You can see this is no normal piece of fat from a factory pig. This is an Ossabaw fat back from Caw Caw Creek. Attempting this with a piece of fatback that's thinner than 1.5" would be pretty much useless I think.

The fatback is put into the brine, and flipped once a month. It's left in the brine to equilibrate for a total of about 3 months. Once it's done, it's sliced super thin and eaten with some black pepper and some crusty bread.

An idea for the lamb prosciutto

2010-04-09T19:58:00.005-04:00

The latest cured meat I've made is lamb prosciutto. It's some outstanding stuff. Very gamey and extremely tasty. It's so gamey that it would really be too much in a sandwich. So I thought I'd give it a try dressed the same way a bresaola could be dressed.

You can see it here on the left. Dressed with some good olive oil, some lemon, black pepper and some Parmigiano Reggiano shavings. Really amazing. The tangy cheese and the gamey lamb go really well together. The lemon cuts through the richness, and the oil makes everything unctuous.

If you've made cured lamb, give this a try!

Lamb Prosciutto - Tasting notes

2010-03-24T21:06:00.006-04:00

The lamb prosciutto, well one of them, is ready. Sure it doesn't look like the nicest thing in the world, but does it taste good?

Keep reading.

Here is the smaller of the 2 pieces. It's lost 42% of it's weight ( I sort of forgot about it a little bit!), in 30 days. It smells very gamey and lamby. It's pretty hard.

Ideally I should have taken it out a week or so earlier, at about 35% weight loss.

Here it is sliced. It's delicious, and beautiful. I wish I could get a better picture of it, showing off its amazing crimson color.

The lamb flavor really overpowers just about all the herbs and spices. It's perfectly salted and just a little bit sweet. It's pretty chewy from drying so much, but it's so good.

I don't think I could eat this as a sandwich, but it'll be delicious with a nice crusty bread. I'm thinking with a little olive oil and lemon juice, served bresaola style, it'll be fantastic.

The larger piece was only at about 30% weight loss and still felt too soft. I did have to spray it with a 50/50 solution of vinegar since i saw some blue/gray mold developing. There are a lot of air gaps on the bigger piece, so I'm hoping it turns out OK. We'll have to see!

Lamb Prosciutto - Into the curing chamber

2010-02-27T17:08:00.008-05:00

The lamb prosciutto spent about 30 days in its salt cure, and it was time to move it into the curing chamber to dry. I left it longer than i normally would, but I was traveling; no harm though...i don't think. About 13 days into the cure I opened the container it was in, and flipped and massaged the meat. There was a cup or so of liquid that had been pulled out of the meat. By the end of the cure, the container was dry. I guess all that brine got reabsorbed into the lamb. It smelled AWESOME.

You can see here what the meat looked like after about 30 days. It smelled so good. Rosemary, black pepper....yum

I rinsed it off well under cold running water and then dried it off as much as possible with paper towels.

This is the other side of the meat after rinsing. You can see there is a portion of the muscle that is hanging on by a "thread" of meat. I found this also last time i made this. It must just be how it's butchered to remove the bone.

I cut the muscle off, and made it into a second chunk.

I didn't have a casing big enough for the large piece, i would have needed a 120mm casings, which are available, but the biggest i had in house was 100mm. No big deal, i just rolled it up really tightly and tied it up like a big roast, trying to get as many air pockets out as possible....really tie it up tightly.

Same thing for the smaller piece.

This picture shows side "A"

And here is side "B". Not quite as pretty.

Both pieces were hung in the chamber, at 54 deg. F and about 75% RH. I think it'll take about 45 days for them to dry enough (about 30% weight loss). The smaller one might dry a little quicker. Only time will tell!

I'll report back when I slice them.

Lamb Prosciutto

2010-01-26T17:13:00.014-05:00

If you say "prosciutto" to someone, automatically the first thing they think of is a cured pig leg. In reality prosciutto could be ageneric term for a cured leg of any animal. It could be pig, goat; also known as a "violino di capra", or in my case, lamb, which would be "prosciutto d'agnello". I can't claim to have thought of this preparation first, the idea was put into my head when I saw a portion of a show on TV filed at Salumi in Seattle. They have a lamb prosciutto, and I said , "why couldn't I do that?". Well, I could. And I did. You really have to like lamb though, the curing process intensifies the flavor, so if you're not a lamb lover, you won't like this probably.

I've made this with a bone-in leg of lamb, but I prefer it boneless, it's a little easier to slice, and a little easier to handle.

Lamb Prosciutto
Ingredient	Quantity(g)	% of Meat
Lamb leg	1845	N/A
Salt	70	3.8
White sugar	55	3
Black pepper	27	1.5
Cure #2	4.6	0.25
Fresh rosemary	19	1
Garlic powder	6	0.3

I started with a packaged boneless leg of lamb from Costco.

This is the "outside" portion of the leg. You can see there is a little bit of fat, not much, which means not much trimming is necessary.

The inside of the leg. The boning process mangles the meat pretty well, but it sure is convenient not to have to do it myself!

I trimmed just a little bit of fat off, but mostly removed what felt like a slimy sinew that was on top of the fat. On the top right of the picture is a little pile of all that was removed. Not much as you can see.

The fresh rosemary in the foreground and the rest of the stuff in the back. I chopped up the rosemary by hand really fine, and then mixed it in with the other cure ingredients. Smelled great!

Here are all the cure ingredients, ready to be mixed up really well and applied massaging them into the meat.

I like to use a big container that can fit the meat in, and then I apply the rub. This makes sure that all the calculated amount of salt and curing salts actually ends up on the meat instead of on the counter.

I massage the meat really well, and make sure to get cure into all the cuts and crevices of the leg.

Closeup of the meat rubbed and massaged with the cure.

This will stay in the fridge for 15-20 days, flipping and massaging half way through.

Once the fridge cure time is up, I'll roll it up tightly and put it in a casing (probably) to dry in the curing chamber.

Cheap humidity controllers

2010-01-18T17:36:00.006-05:00

I've previously posted about humidity control, and how to control a humidifier inside the fridge. Back then, the only control i could find that was easy to integrate was quite expensive, about $120. Just recently I happened upon (read somewhere, or someone told me, i don't remember) a much cheaper controller. $50! They're available at Grainger.

They have one that is a humidifier controller and a dehumidifier controller. They look pretty nice! The disadvantage of these versus the THC-1 is that each one controls EITHER humidification OR dehumidification. The THC-1 offers a switch.

New supplier of Italian goods!

2010-01-13T19:52:00.004-05:00

Fellow cured meats aficionado Scott, over at Sausage Debauchery, has become so enamored with cured meats that he's decided he wants to help others with their supplies, and while he's at it, with other Italian goods. He's deciding what to carry, so go take a look over at his blog and let him know! I know I want some of that Calabrese hot chili pepper for my future Nduja endeavor!

Good luck Scott!

Cotechino 2009

2010-01-06T18:44:00.011-05:00

Well, it's New Years, or it was just last week, so of course I had to make cotechino, the traditional Italian New Years sausage. I've made it before, and iIreally didn't change the formulation much, but i did make some changes to the process.

Cotechino 2009
Ingredient	Quantity(g)	% of Meat+Fat+Skin
Pork shoulder meat	745	35
Pork belly (about 60/40 fat/lean)	745	35
Pork Skin (fatless)	625	29
Salt	34	1.6
Cure #1	3.25	0.15
Dextrose	8.5	0.4
Coriander powder	0.8	0.038
Nutmeg	0.4	0.019
Clove	0.5	0.024
Mace	0.4	0.019
Cinnamon	0.5	0.024
Cayenne	0.8	0.038
Black pepper (cracked large)	3	0.14
White pepper (ground fine)	3	0.14

As you can see the formula is nearly the same as last years. I increased the pepper and a few spices just a little, and decreased the salt. Last year I cooked the cotechino in a vacuum bag, and it was just a little salty. Since this year I would be doing the same, I decreased the salt a touch.

I read somewhere that someone recommended cutting the meat into strips when grinding instead of in chunks. This makes it easier for the grinder to "pull" the meat through the auger. It also makes for less work cutting the meat, so hey, i'll try it!

Belly and shoulder cut into strips.

Closeup of belly and meat. Why? Because everyone loves pork belly!

The meat and belly were ground through the large die on the Kitchenaid grinder, 1/4".

The skin was cleaned of fat and cut into strips as well. This year i only boiled it for about 5-8 minutes, versus the 20 last year, and it was plenty soft for the grinder.

I ground the skin alone through the small Kitchenaid die, which is 3/16".

Here you can see the skin ground through the 3/16" die, and the belly and meat through the 1/4" die.

The spice mixture.

The spice mixture was mixed with the ground meats and skin. I did this by hand as the mixture didn't it in my Kitchenaid bowl. If you do this, make sure not to overmix and cause the fat to smear. Mix it enough to be sure you have good spice distribution.
I put this mixture in the freezer to re-chill it for about 30 minutes.
I then reground the mixture through the 1/4" die.

Closeup of the reground mixture. I wanted to see if I would get a nicer texture by grinding twice, with better dispersion of the fat, less chunky, so to speak.

I ran out of casings, so instead i used plastic wrap, shaped it like a log, and wrapped it tightly. Seemed to work fine, especially because it was cooked in a vacuum bag.

Cotechino, served with lentils, New Year's Eve. Very tasty. I didn't cook it long enough though. I cooked it for 2 hours at 200 degrees, it needed at least another 1 hour to properly melt all the skin into gelatin. I think it needed more time because it was a much larger diameter than my regular cased ones.
Still, very tasty though. Flavors and salt were right on.

Pancetta - Again!

2009-12-20T20:34:00.020-05:00

I don't know if this is even worth posting, as i've discussed pancetta previously,but since I'm trying a new formula, and I haven't posted in a while, i might as well detail it.

Pancetta
Ingredient	Quantity(g)	% of Meat
Pork Belly	1555	n/a
Salt	39	2.5
Cure #2	3.8	0.25
Demerara Sugar	27	1.75
Black Pepper	28	1.8
Myrtle Berries	15	0.96
Garlic powder	3.1	0.2
Bay Leaf	2.1	0.14
Red Pepper	7	0.45
Thyme	5	0.32

I had in my freezer a beautiful piece of pork belly from an Ossabaw pig raised by Emile DeFelice at Caw Caw Creek, which is basically the best pork I've ever eaten. I just read something that upsets me, apparently Emile will no longer be raising Ossabaws for slaughter. What a shame.

Ossabaw pigs are basically feral pigs, and are much fattier than their commercial cousins. They're tremendously flavorful.

Here are the cure ingredients. The stuff that's already powder is in the bowl on the left. In the middle top is the black pepper corns, and on the right top, the bay leaves. On the bottom row are the myrtle berries. These are the berries of an evergreen shrub that grows around the Mediterranean. I'm not sure if they're available here in the US, i brought them back from Italy. They taste quite similar to juniper berries, and you can substitute that for them.

Everything gets ground, pretty coarse, and mixed well.

All the rub gets applied to the piece of meat, and massaged into it well. Make sure you get some on all sides. It's important to use all the curing salts, since the percentages of salt and curing salts are based on the weight of the meat. Just massage it all into the meat, and put it in a non-reactive container.

Looks tasty already!

It'll stay like this for 10-15 days in the refrigerator. I'll massage it a few times, and then off to the curing chamber!
I'll let you know how it turns out. I'm pretty sure it'll be excellent.

My ultrasonic humidifier is broken!

2009-12-09T20:31:00.001-05:00

Well, it lasted a good 2-3 years, so i can't complain, but it seems that the humidifier just crapped out. I'd love to hear what everyone here is using for humidification.

Let me know guys (and girls?)!
Thanks

Sorry folks, i'm on a mini hiatus

2009-06-14T11:19:00.003-04:00

As you can see, the last post was quite a while ago. Sorry about that. I also wanted to let readers know that for at least another couple of months I most likely won't be doing much of any curing.

Certain events have taken over all my weekend time, and let's face it, cured meats are pretty low on the priority list of life events.

thanks, and i hope you keep an eye on the blog. Hope to be back to posting soon enough.

Critical Ingredient - Cure #1 and #2

2009-04-24T21:34:00.004-04:00

All my recipes I've posted thus far have called for "cure #2". I've been asked a number of times by email what exactly this ingredient is. I figured I'd write a short post about it to clarify.

Cure #2, also called "Prague Powder #2", is a mixture of salt, sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite. Cure #2 is used on items that are dry cured over an extended period of time, like salumi or cured meats. The sodium nitrate in the cure breaks down over time to sodium nitrite and that is then broken down to nitric oxide, which acts as an oxidizing agent keeping the meat safe from our most evil of enemies, botulism. It's therefore CRITICAL to making safe cured meats. At least in my mind it is.

Cure #1 consists of salt and sodium nitrite only. The nitrite keeps the meat safe for a short period of time, and keeps the meat a nice red color as well as give it that "cured" taste. This is used in products that are made and then cooked and eaten quickly like fresh sausages. Don't confuse cure #1 with cure #2 they are NOT interchangeable.

You can buy both of these items very cheaply ($4 for 16 oz, which is enough for many years of sausage making) from many online sources. Just google the name of the cure you're looking for, you should find it very easily.

I don't feel like writing a scientific explanation, suffice to say that if you're not a risk taker and value your life, you should use cure #2 in your cured meats. Can you do without, maybe. I guess you could. Would I? Hell no.

Please don't email me telling me nitrates are bad for you. I don't feel like arguing, and it'll just prove you haven't done your research because there are more nitrates in a bowl of spinach than in a WHOLE salame.

Hope this helps.

Salame di Brianza - Production and Tasting Notes

2009-04-08T21:50:00.011-04:00

Salame di Brianza is a salame produced in the region of Milan, Lecco and Como. It is actually a DOP product which means in order to use the name it has to follow certain strict guidelines and come from a specific area. Clearly mine wouldn't meet the DOP requirements. It's a very simple salame with just salt, pepper, garlic and wine for flavoring. This is by far the biggest cased product I've made. I made it to use for sandwiches, so I wanted it large to be able to slice it thin and use in a nice ciabatta bread.

Salame di Brianza
Ingredient	Quantity(g)	% of Meat+Fat
Pork ham meat	1270	70
Pork belly (70/30 fat/lean)	544	30
Salt	49	2.7
Cure #2	4.54	0.25
Dextrose	9	0.50
White pepper (whole)	5.45	0.3
White pepper (ground)	0.6	0.03
Garlic powder	1	0.06
F-LC starter culture	1	0.06

I basically forgot to take pictures of each step, so you should refer back to any of the other salami, such as the latest one : Salame di Sant'Olcese.

I ground the meat using the large kitchenaid grinder plate, which is 3/16". I used the same method as the other salami I've previously made: cube meat, cube belly, mix with spices, chill way down, grind, then add starter culture diluted in distilled water, and mix until a good bind is formed.

This is the spice mix I used in the salame. Nothing too exciting, just looking for a nice porky, tasty salame.

This is the mixture cased. It's a 100mm collagen casing. It's huge, and this "chub" held all of the mixture; 4 lbs of meat! Packed it in as tightly as possible, but I could tell this was going to be a challenge to get in there without air pockets.

Just like for other salami such as the Chorizo, this one was sprayed with M-EK-4 mold. It was incubated for 72 hours at 70 deg. F. I incubated about 24 hrs longer than other salami because of it's size.

This picture shows the salame after 24hrs in the fermentation box.

Nice mold!

It was then put into the curing chamber at 54 deg. F and 70-75% RH.
It was at 70% at the beginning, then I raised it to about 75% to try and slow the drying.

Here is the salame, cured and ready to eat. It cured just about 2 months, and lost 38.7% of it's weight. It could easily have gone longer, but I wanted a salame that's pretty soft, it makes for better sandwiches since it feels moister.

Here is the salame sliced. It's got a great texture, and fat distribution, but you can see exactly what I was concerned about above regarding the pockets of air. You can see them in the picture pretty clearly. This is a concern because it can cause problems in the aging, oxidation on the inside and potentially spoilage.
Fortunately there was no spoilage, just some oxidation flavor, so i'm still going to eat it. The oxidation is, luckily, limited and the flavor isn't impacted much at all, especially if you eat this with a nice piece of bread.

Just another picture from a little further away. I figured you can't have too many pictures of cured meats.

Overall i really like this. It's REALLY convenient for sandwiches, the taste is great, just porky and meaty. It has a nice flavor without it being tangy. I'm really liking this lower temperature, slower fermentation. It could probably use more pepper, and a little more garlic, and I also realized i forgot to add wine. Oops!

As far as the air pockets, I think next time i'll grind the meat finer. It seems that the larger cased salami always have a finer texture. I'll also mix it more and try to get a better bind. Other than that, i'm not sure what else I could do. I tried to be careful when casing it, and packed it in as I went, but i guess I didn't do a very good job at it!

So, overall this salame is a winner. Good flavor, good texture, needs a little more pepper, a solid B.

Natural or Artificial Casings?

2009-03-12T20:16:00.009-04:00

I've often wondered if using natural casings when making salami really makes a difference. Let's face it, artificial casings have numerous advantages: they're clean, they're evenly shaped and sized, they are shelf stable, they come in just about any size, and I'm sure I could think of a few other good reasons why artificial collagen casings are advantageous. The disadvantages are that they are more expensive, and they aren't "traditional".

Since I'm a very practical person (well, as practical as anyone who cures his own meats in his basement can be!), unless there is good, documented evidence for using something (natural casings) over an easier substitute (collagen casings), I won't use more difficult product. I like to explore these things myself; see my Farmer Vs. Commercial Pork Battle 1, and Battle 2 . So during the last batch of salame I made, which was the Sant'Olcese, I decided to take the opportunity to do a head to head of salame cased in natural beef middles and 60mm diameter collagen casings.

So, the product came out a few weeks ago from the curing chamber. What was interesting was that the product in the collagen casings took about 5 or 6 days longer to lose the same amount of weight by %. The 2 salami stared off pretty close in weight, but for whatever reason the collagen casing took a little bit longer. This may be cause by a couple of things:

The salami were in different places in the curing chamber, and therefore their exposure to air and humidity currents was different. Possible but unlikely. They were pretty close to each other.
The collagen casing slows the moisture loss of the meat mixture more than the natural casing.

I don't see this difference as a huge deal, but I do see if as a slight advantage for the collagen casing. The slower curing/drying theoretically would allow more flavors to develop.

In cutting the 2 products they looked identical (I would post a picture but i've vacuum packed the collagen salame already). They were indistinguishable visually, both cut, and uncut. Both had a nice mold bloom.

More importantly...how did they taste? They were indistinguishable. The same, delicious, and equivalent.

So, as far as using beef middles, well, i'll use up what I have, which is about 56 miles of casings, and then i'll move to using 60mm collagen casings. I do have 1 more test of collagen vs. natural casings and that's with a hog bung. Since the hog bung is a very fatty, thick casing, this may slow the drying to be even slower than the collagen one, so it may in fact be better. Only a trial will tell. I will note that the hog bung casings are MUCH more expensive than a collagen one; about 10 times the cost!

So this time, modernity has beat out tradition I'm afraid.

Sorry traditionalists.

Chorizo - Tasting Notes

2009-02-22T22:25:00.007-05:00

The chorizo is ready! Well, it was ready last week, but I'm just getting around to writing about it now. This is the 1st one I've taken out. It's the one that was cased in an artificial round, 43mm casing. It lost about 43% of it's weight. I've left the others in the curing chamber to lose more weight. I think chorizo needs to be pretty hard. This one was a touch too soft really.

As you can see, the fat is nice and distinct. There is the correct amount of it, and it is well dispersed.

The flavor is good, but not great. It is a bit too strong on one or more of the flavorings. I'm still trying to work out which. I think it might be too much garlic, and possibly too much smoked paprika.

The black pepper is right. A friend of mine, who knows Spanish chorizo better than I do, says the black pepper is too prominent, and the garlic is correct. Maybe I'm just used to more Italian salami. Either way, I do like it, and would make it again, but reducing the garlic by about 20%, and maybe reducing the smoked paprika by about 15%, and replace that with a hot paprika. It does need some more heat, the cayenne wasn't enough.

The salt is correct, it's nice and
savory.

I'm looking forward to trying the ones that i've left in the curing chamber. I think they'll be nicer with some "heavier" chew to them, and with the added time in the chamber, maybe the overly strong notes will mellow out.

The mold as you can see did its job. The salame is nicely covered.

I would grade this a C+ for my tastes. Good, but needs work. Not that it's surprising. I've never made this before, and just took a number of recipes that sounded good, and mashed them together:)

Salame di Sant'Olcese - Tasting Notes

2009-02-11T21:27:00.009-05:00

It may not seem like long enough has passed from the posting of the recipe for the salame di Sant'Olcese for it to be ready, but that's only because i've been sitting on the recipe for a couple of weeks! Anyhow...it's ready. Or at least, i've taken one of the 3 that I made out of the curing chamber out.

I took one out pretty early, as I wanted to keep this salame pretty soft. By weight, it "claims" to have lost about 43% of it's weight, over 20 days. I say "claims", because it feels rather soft, and i'm wondering if I mis-weighed them when i put them into the curing chamber...all other salami that i've made before felt considerably harder, at less water weight loss. Either way, I felt like eating one.

As i've said, it is quite soft. Maybe a tiny bit too soft, it probably could have used another 4-7 days, good thing I have 2 or 3 more in the curing chamber. If i were to compare it to something in softness, the first thing that comes to mind is a marshmallow, maybe a little bit harder.

As far as the tasting goes, it's excellent. Really is. The pepper is quite pronounced, it's nicely salty, and the garlic is there in the background. It is not sour at all, which is nice, as I don't care for the San Francisco style of cured meats that are prounouncedly sour. I think it's because of the starter culture i used, and becuase i ferment at a low temperature (70F).

The fat is distinct, and is in perfect proportion to the meat. The salame so far does not present any air pockets. Overall I'm really pleased.

Of course, there are some improvements that can be made, there always are. In slicing the salame, one can see, and feel while chewing, about a 1/8" ring on the outer edge which is slightly drier. I attribute this to my humidity not being high enough in the chamber. As such, for the stuff that's still in there, i bumped up the humitiy from about 70% to about 75%. This should also slow down the curing/drying time, which I believe will lead to better flavor as well.

I'd give this salame a solid B+. It's a touch soft, and the dry ring around the edge keeps it from an A :).

Salame di Sant'Olcese

2009-02-09T21:17:00.015-05:00

I didn't know much about the salame from Sant'Olcese until i read about it in an Italian cured meats blog. Sant'Olcese is a small town outside Genova. This salame is characterized by a 50/50 mix of beef and pork for the lean portion, and pork fat. It is also traditionally very lightly smoked. Unfortunately I don't have the ability to smoke the salame, so mine will be a Sant'Olcese style salame. This is true for all my salami. None of them can be the real thing, since that requires me to actually be there. They are all "in the style of" the place or region. Anyhow, let's get to the recipe and method.

Salame Sant'Olcese
Ingredient	Quantity(g)	% of Meat+Fat
Pork ham meat	908	37.75
Beef chuck meat	908	37.75
Pork belly (70/30 fat/lean)	590	24.5
Salt	65	2.7
Cure #2	6	0.25
Dextrose	12	0.50
Black pepper (whole)	6	0.25
Black pepper (ground)	2.4	0.1
Garlic powder	2.4	0.1
F-LC starter culture	1	0.042

You'll recognize a number of the pictures from the chorizo post. I didn't see a point of taking different pictures for the exact same step. I'm reposting them in case people end up in this post through a link from somewhere, so they can see the whole process.

The usual suspect. A ham steak. This is cubed up nicely.

Pork belly strips waiting to be cubed up as the fat component of the salame. Hmmmm pork belly.......

This shows the beef chuck, which was also cubed, the ham meat, and the pork belly. I forgot to take a picture of the piece of beef chuck, but i think you might have seen one before at a grocery! Buy one, remove fat and sinew and cube it up.
This is mixed with the cure and spices shown below, and put in a freezer to get nice and firm for 45 minutes or so.

This is the spice mixtures and cure that went into the salame. It's very simple. Not a lot of flavors to get in the way of porky beefyness.

The meat was ground on the large kitchen aid plate. Which i think is 1/4"...i don't recall, and i keep forgetting to measure it. I don't know what is wrong with this picture, i couldn't get the white balance on the camera right, and the picture looks blue...anyhow...the meats and fat are ground.

The starter culture was diluted with about 30g of distilled water, and the poured over the ground meat mixture.

The mixture is then mixed for about 2 minutes with the Kitchen Aid or about 3-4 minutes by hand until a nice bind is achieved. I forgot to take a picture of the mixed product. Sorry.

The salame was cased into 3 natural casings, and 1 collagen 60mm casing. I figured I'd take the opportunity to to a scientific taste test of salame cured in natural casings and one cured in artificial. Will it make a difference? I don't know! We'll see. I must admit, using the artificial ones is MUCH more convenient. They are shelf stable, even, don't smell, don't require washing, but they do lose the natural appeal and old world look.

The M-EK4 mold mold is mixed with 30 or so grams of distilled water and allowed to bloom for a couple of hours.

The mold "concentrate" is then diluted with about 300g of distilled water in a spray bottle.

The salami were placed in the fermentation box at 70 deg. F. for 48 hours. I was actually able to keep my basement room right around 70 or 71 F, no need to run the lightbulb in the fermentation box.

After the 48 hours, the salami had a nice coating of mold already.

The salami were fermented for 48 hours, and then put into the curing chamber at 54 deg. F and about 70% RH.

Looking forward to trying them in about a month or so.

Spanish Chorizo

2009-01-29T21:34:00.017-05:00

I'm an equal opportunity cured meat eater. The product doesn't have to be Italian, it just has to taste GOOD. Case in point, Spanish Chorizo. Chorizo is a salame like cured product redolent of smoked paprika, garlic and oregano. This is the 1st time I've made it, and since it isn't ready yet, I won't know if this formula is any good until I try it. Try at your own risk!

Spanish Chorizo
Ingredient	Quantity(g)	% of Meat+Fat
Pork ham meat	998	69.8
Pork belly (about 75/25 fat/lean)	431	30.1
Salt	40	2.8
Cure #2	3.43	0.24
Dextrose	2.86	0.2
Sugar	2.86	0.2
Black pepper (ground)	8.58	0.6
Smoked paprika (sweet)	28.6	2
Oregano (dry)	2.86	0.2
F-LC starter culture	0.5	0.035
Cayenne pepper	1.4	0.1
Garlic (fresh)	12	0.9

I started with my usual ham steak. As I've said previously, I prefer the ham steak to the shoulder/boston butt because there is less sinew and intramuscular fat that has to be trimmed out.

The ham steak was cubed up into about 1" cubes

For the fat component I used pork belly. I tried to choose pieces that were particularly fatty. I'd say they were about 70-80:20 fat to lean.

The belly is cubed up and combined with the ham cubes.

The spice mixture is carefully mixed to get good distribution of everything, and the garlic cloves are mashed through a garlic pressed, in preparation to be put into the meat.

I mixed the spice mixture and the crushed garlic into the meat and fat cubes and massaged it for a while to make sure everything was nice and evenly mixed together.

The mixture then goes to the freezer to get really cold before grinding. I let the meat get to at least 33 or 34 deg. F, before grinding.

I ground the meat and fat through the large Kitchenaid plate, which if i remember correctly is 1/4". Since i kept everything cold, the fat and meat are nice and distinct.

The starter culture was mixed with a pinch of dextrose and a splash of distilled water, and let stand for 15 or so minutes to allow the bacteria to wake up, and then poured over the meat.

I mixed the meat with the Kitchenaid paddle attachment for about 1.5 minutes on low speed. This is done to make sure everything is mixed together, the starter culture is dispersed, and to allow the proteins to form a good bind.

Don't mix too much or you'll smear the fat...not good...not good at all. You want the fat to stay in distinct blobs.

I stuffed the chorizo into 1 43mm collagen round casing, and 2 60mm natural beef middle casings. As usual, I tried to avoid any air pockets in the meat mixture by massaging it meat once it was cased, and popping and pricking the casing where there were air pockets on the surface.

Earlier that afternoon i had mixed up about 1.5g of M-EK-4 mold with about 30g of distilled water.

This was left for about 3-4 hours to "bloom".

I then diluted that mold mixture with an additional 300g of distilled water in a spray bottle. Shook it up real well, and let it sit another 15-30 minutes. (Really i don't know if these sitting periods are necessary..but i guess they can't really hurt).

The salami were sprayed and put into the fermentation box at 70 deg F. for 48 hours.

They were sprayed again with the mold 12 hours after being put into the box. The lid on the box was closed for the whole 48 hours to keep it nice and humid. As you can see on the left, the mold after 48 hours was already developing very nicely.

Here are the chorizos and a few other salami i made that day (write up coming soon) in the curing chamber.
The chamber is set at 54 deg F. and 70% RH.

I expect the 43mm chorizo to be ready in about 2 weeks, and the larger ones in about a month. Looking forward to trying something new!

Cotechino - Results

2009-01-08T21:18:00.004-05:00

Last week when my brother was in town I cooked up one of the cotechini. I left it in it's vacuum bag, put it in a large pot of water, and slowly brought the temperature of the water up to 190-195 deg.

I then put the pot in the oven set at about 225, so that the heat would be even from all sides. The water stayed right around 200 deg. I let it cook about 2 hours, took the pot out of the oven, and then let it sit another 20-30 minutes.

The bag had blown up like a baloon, i assume from the air in the sausage expanding. It had quite of bit of fat in it that was released from the cotechino. I opened the bag, got rid of the fat, and removed the casing. The cotechino was served over lentils.

It was AWESOME. It was slightly salty, and slightly too cinnamony. I think this is likely because the salt and spices weren't diluted by direct contact with the water. Next time i'll reduce the salt by about 10-15%, and the cinnamon by about 10%.

The flavor was really good. The spices in it were pretty distinct and very tasty. The texture was great, with nice gelatin from the cooked skin, and a good quantity of fat.

Next year I may also try grinding the meat using the fine plate instead of the KA coarse one. I'm worried it might make it too much of a fine ground sausage paste, but i guess it's worth a try!

So..i'm sold. I'll be cooking my cotechini in vac bags from now on!

Cotechino - That which started my adventure!

2008-12-23T19:50:00.014-05:00

This is the salume that started my adventure into curing meats.

These are available from a few Italian butchers in New York, but I haven't seen them anywhere else. They're pretty uncommon here in the US. Cotechino is a traditional, cooked, New Year's sausage that was created in the town of Modena. It's a MUST at every New Year's party in Italy and is eaten with lentils, polenta or mashed potatoes. Alternately, a Zampone is eaten which is the same recipe, except the the mixture is stuffed into a deboned front pig leg, instead of casings. These sausages are supposed to bring fortune in the new year (with the lentils bringing money). The name "Cotechino" derives from the Italian word for pig skin; cotiche, and as you might imagine, it contains a fair amount of them.

The pig skin that's ground in with the meat and fat gives the cotechino a very sticky unctuous mouthfeel after it's been cooked for a few hours very gently in water. The sausage is pretty heavily spiced and has a delicious assertive flavor of traditional Christmas spices and herbs, as well as porky goodness. It's most definitely my favorite cooked sausage.

I've varied my recipe every year I've made this (about 5 or 6 years), and I'm still searching for a recipe that gets me the results I remember eating in Italy, which were made by a small town butcher in Modena. Mine are great, but those were fantastic. This year i decided to use pork belly instead of the usual fatback I use. I'll be cooking mine next week, so I'll see if it was a good decision.

Cotechino
Ingredient	Quantity(g)	% of Meat+Fat+Skin
Pork shoulder meat	1645	35
Pork belly (about 60/40 fat/lean)	1645	35
Pork Skin (fatless)	1362	29
Salt	82	1.7
Cure #1	7	0.15
Dextrose	18.4	0.4
Coriander powder	1.7	0.037
Nutmeg	0.5g	0.011
Clove	1	0.022
Mace	0.5	0.011
Cinnamon	1	0.022
Cayenne	1.4	0.03
Black pepper (cracked large)	6	0.129
White pepper (ground fine)	6	0.129

Since i haven't blogged in a while, I forgot to take pictures for everything, but I think I got all the important stages. Remember to keep everything you're grinding COLD COLD COLD. After i cubed up my meat and fat i put them in the freezer for about 1.5 hours to cool way down. It will grind better and won't smear the fat as much.

Pig skin is incredibly tough, so much so that if I were to try grinding it my grinder would likely explode. It has to be boiled first. I don't know if butchers in Italy do this, or if their grinders are strong enough to grind the skin raw, but somehow I can't imagine they are able to. So the pig skin is boiled until it is fork tender. This takes about 30 minutes. Once this is done remove as much excess fat attached to the skin as possible. This can be done before boiling, but i think it's a little easier to do it after. This picture shows what the skin looks like after boiling and cooling a little.
The pork skin gets cut up into chunks so it can fit into the grinder throat.

The pig skin is ground alone first. I used a 3/16" plate (the small kitchenaid plate that comes with the grinder)

Here is a picture of the pork belly. You can see that it's about 60/40 or 50/50 fat to lean. It was nice looking pork belly.

The skin is removed and the cut up into chunks.

Cut up pork belly. Not very exciting...but delicious!

This is the pork shoulder i used. It was trimmed a little, but I didn't spent a whole lot of time trimming it.

I forgot to get a picture of the ground skin alone. Anyhow, it looked like a big pile of sticky beads:)
Mix the ground pork skin with the chunked meat and pork belly.

Closeup of the belly, meat and skin mixture. You can see the skin looks like little pellets.

This is the spice mixtures i used. The spices were all (except the large cracked black pepper) ground in a coffee grinder, and mixed with the salt.

The spice mixture is mixed into the meats and skin and well massaged to distribute everything.

The mixture is passed through a 1/4" grinder plate (the large kitchenaid standard plate).
Note how the meat and fat chunks are pretty distinct. That's because the mixture was nice and cold before grinding.

The ground mixture is mixed well by hand and sort of gently kneaded to develop the bind. You'll know it's ready to stuff when you get a white film of protein building up on the sides of the bowl.

You can sort of see that in this picture.

This batch made 6 750g cotechini. I think 750g is a good size as it'll feed about 4 or 5 people as a main dinner with lentils or some other side dish. Cotechino is a VERY heavy dish, it sits in your stomach like a brick, so i don't advise eating this and then going out partying:)

I used a pretty large artificial casing. It's about 80mm in diameter. I like the cotechino to be quite thick.

To store, they can be vacuum packed and frozen. I've kept it this way for a year, and then eaten it. It's still great.

Some people dry their cotechini as if it were a salame for 5 or 6 days. I've never done that, but i imagine it would be pretty good!.

To cook it, the casing is punctured with a skewer (a large toothpick) in multiple places (i punctured these about 40 times) to allow some of the fat to come out while it's cooking. It is then wrapped VERY tightly in aluminum foil, closing off the ends like a giant candy, and put into cold water. Bring the water to a GENTLE (190 deg. F) simmer, and simmer for about 2-3 hours (or put the pot of water/cotechino in the oven at about 200 deg. F . After 2-3 hours turn off the heat and let it sit in the water for about 20 minutes. Carefully remove it from the water, remove the casing (which may have burst), and slice into slices about 1/2" thick. Serve HOT over polenta or lentils or mashed potatoes. It has to be eaten hot, otherwise the gelatinous skin hardens and you miss what makes it so good.

This year i think i'm going to try cooking one in one of the vacuum bags. My theory is that there will be less flavor loss to the water it's cooking in. There may also be less fat loss, which may or may not be good! We'll see. When i cook it next week i'll put another post up to report back.

I'm still here, and a glimpse into the next project!

2008-12-10T14:09:00.001-05:00

Hey everybody just wanted to let you know i'm still around, even if not posting right now. I just moved and as you might imagine, my wife thinks unpacking boxes, hanging pictures and painting stuff should take precedence over curing meats! Sounds crazy to me too!

Anyhow, i'm planning my next post. It'll be cotechino, which is a cooked italian new years sausage. It's the salume that started it all!

Stay tuned please!

Long absence

2008-10-31T17:39:00.003-04:00

I haven't posted anything in quite a while. I'm running short on salame, and i need to make some stuff. Unfortunately I'm in the process of moving which is keeping my weekends completed busy.
So....sorry for the few posts..i wish i could post more, but i'm not home long enough!

Pancetta - Ready to use

2008-09-16T18:30:00.007-04:00

Sorry for the long delay on posts. I've been really busy at work, and with life, and i've been left with little to no time on weekends for cured meats. It makes me sad. Hopefully i'll post more often after my move in a couple of months. Until then, accept my apologies for the lack of posts.

So, the pancetta is finally ready, actually, it was ready about a week ago. I left it in the curing chamber for 3 weeks, at 55 deg. F and 65% RH. The picture on the left is what it looked like after that period of time. It's lost about 30% of its weight. At this point the pancetta is pretty hard, it's pretty dry and smells great.

The pancetta can be used right away, but i've found that it is better if you wrap it in a damp paper towel and put it in a sealed bag for about a week. This will soften it just a little bit, and make it easier to cut.

After a few days wrapped in a damp paper towel, and then cut this is what the pancetta looks like.
It smells great. Peppery, bayleaf-y, porky, yummy. I've only tasted one slice quickly, so i haven't really used it much, but i can tell it is very peppery, hopefully not too much so. The herbs are strong on it, probably because i caked it on for the drying phase! I'm happy with it, but will know a little more after a cook something with it.

Added 9/20/08 - I used some of this pancetta last night in a pasta..it was GREAT. It's peppery, and bay-leafy. It has the right amount of salt. The flavor is balanced, tending towards black pepper. It's one of the better pancettas i've made. MAKE IT!

Pancetta - Off to the curing chamber

2008-08-15T20:33:00.007-04:00

The pancetta has been curing with its spices and salt for about 10 days. It's become pretty firm and the flavors should have permeated the meat fully. Time to move it to the curing chamber.

This is what the pancetta looks like as it comes out of the bag.

The spices get rinsed under cold running water, and then the belly gets patted dry.

Here is the rinsed pancetta. Really pretty uneventful, or uninteresting.
The meat looks darker and definitely feels firmer than it was when raw.

A spice mixtures is made up. For this one I mixed 2 teaspoons of very coarse black pepper, 5 crushed bay leaves, and 1/2 teaspoon of red pepper.

Here is the cured pork belly rubbed with the spice mixture. Really press the pepper and spices into the meat. Put a string through it to hang and that's it. Easy.

Now, for people who don't have a curing fridge, the drying is also very easy. Put the pancetta on a cake rack, and then on a plate, and put it in the fridge for about 3-4 weeks. The cake rack on the plate will allow the air to circulate around it reaching all sides of the meat. If you just put it on a plate, the surface touching the plate will stay wet.

If you do have a curing fridge, put it in there. I put mine in, at about 54 deg. F and about 60% humidity.

Humidity for pancetta isn't super critical since it is quite thin and has a lot of surface area, which will allow it to dry pretty evenly even if the ambient is too dry for other cured meats (like in a fridge).

Pancetta - The easiest cured meat of all!

2008-08-02T16:12:00.008-04:00

If bacon makes everything better, then pancetta makes everything better still! It's similar to bacon, in that they are both made with pork belly, but that's where the similarities end. Pancetta is normally unsmoked and dry cured and can be made flat or rolled into a pinwheel, whereas bacon is smoked and not left to dry and always sold flat.
Pancetta is really very similar to guanciale, and the spices and herbs used could be used on either one. This particular pork product is probably the easiest and most accessible cured meat that can be made at home. So, why didn't I show this one first on this blog? Because I already had some in my fridge at the time! I still don't really need any, but I had a defrosted piece of Tamworth pork belly that had to be used, so I figured I'd make pancetta. After all, is it really possible to have too much cured pork belly? I think not!

The reason I say that it is the most accessible cured meat is that it can be made without a curing chamber. I've done it. It works. I even did a side by side comparison of 2 pieces of pork belly one cured in my chamber, and one in the fridge, and they were almost identical. So...if you're looking to get into cured meats, dive in with pancetta!

Pancetta
Ingredient	Quantity(g)	% of Meat+Fat
Pork belly	420	100
Salt	10	2.4%
Black Pepper	7.8	1.9%
Brown Sugar	4.8	1.1%
Cure #2	1.1	0.26%
Juniper	1.8	0.43%
Bay Leaves	0.3	0.07%
Nutmeg	0.8	0.19%
Dry Thyme	0.5	0.12%
Garlic	1 clove

I had a pretty small piece of pork belly, so that's what i used. It's preferable to have it skin on, but if you can only find it without skin...so be it.

All the spices, salts, sugar and herbs are mixed together. The small piece of pork didn't require much cure.

The cure is rubbed all over the pork belly and massaged into the meat. The meat is then put into a zip bag and into the fridge to cure. Allowing the salts and herbs to penetrate the meat.

In about 7-10 days the meat will be rinsed, and hung in the curing chamber for as long as one might choose to wait. 2 weeks minimum though.

Lonzino

2008-06-29T20:09:00.007-04:00

Lonzino is a pretty simple salume. It is a salted and then dry cured pork loin. I guess it could be the equivalent of a pork bresaola. It's lean, tasty and easy to make with easily available ingredients.

The first time I made it, I let it cure in the salt too long. If I remember (it was a number of years ago), I left it for about 20 days. I never re-made it because i thought it wasn't that great. Last month someone commented on this blog that I should make a lonzino, so here it is.

This post contains the formula as well as the outcome. I just didn't have a chance to post as it was curing.

Lonzino
Ingredient	Quantity(g)	% of Meat+Fat
Pork loin	965	100
Salt	32	3.3
White Pepper	9.3	1%
Clove	1 clove
Cure #2	2.4	0.25%
Juniper	2	0.2%
Fennel Seed	5	0.5%
Cinnamon	0.7	0.07%

Start by procuring yourself a nice pork loin. One with some fat attached wouldn't hurt. You can see mine here on the left. Pretty standard stuff. I got this one from Publix.

The spices are ground and mixed with the rest of the ingredients. Shake shake shake to combine well.

Cake the mixture onto the pork loin and rub it in nicely. Put it in a zip lock bag, making sure to put even the cure that fell onto the plate into the bag. You want to make sure you get all the curing salts in with the meat to maintain safety.

This is the pork loin after 10 days in the fridge with the cure, and a quick rinse. Looks about the same, just slightly darker and it feels firmer.

All I had was 100mm casings. 90mm would have worked better, but I made do. Tighten well with kitchen twine, and pop any air pockets in the casing with a clean toothpick or a sterile needle. Squeeze well to get the air out.

As an experiment I took about 3 sq. in. of moldy casing from a salame i had in the fridge from my last batch, mixed it with 133g of distilled water and 1g of dextrose, and used that as a mold spray.

The cased loin was hung at 68-70 deg. F for 38 hours.

It cured in the curing fridge at 54 deg. F and about 68% RH, until it lost about 35-36% of its weight. This took just about 1 month.

As you can see the moldy spray worked pretty well

Look how beautiful the lonzino is. It has just a little bit of fat on the outer area, and nice fat flecking in the meat. It is soft and tender.

Here is the lonzino sliced thinly. It is VERY tasty. The salt level is just right. It is pretty strong on a certain spice, i can't quite put my finger on, but i think it is the juniper. It's very nice.

Next time i might put just a little less juniper. The weight loss of 36% is just right. It's still tender and soft, but nicely cured.

Guanciale - Ready to eat

2008-06-03T20:47:00.003-04:00

The guanciale that was cured and put up to dry about a month and a half ago was ready to be eaten. How did I know it was ready, well, because I had a pasta I had to make with it!

I weighed it, but I forgot to write down what the finished weight was, oops. As you can see on the left, it doesn't look too different from what it looks like before drying, it is just firmer.

I used it for some pasta alla Gricia, and some amatriciana, and it was quite tasty. I think I prefer pancetta, as it seems more flavorful. I also noticed the fat on guanciale has a strange "soft/crunchy" texture if you don't render enough fat out of it...not really a texture I cared for much. The flavor was good, quite mild, porky and very very slightly herby.

If I were to remake this I would season more liberally with herbs and leave them on instead of rinsing them off before drying, like I did with this one.

Salame al Barolo

2008-05-21T20:49:00.008-04:00

While making the salame tipo varzi I also made a salame al Barolo. I actually didn't use Barolo, I used a Cote du Rhone. Basically it is a simple salame mixture to which a relatively large quantity of wine is added. The alcohol and excess water evaporate leaving behind the flavors of the wine used. Since I've never tried this before, I figured I'd give it a shot. Unfortunately things didn't turn out quite as rosy as one might hope.

I'm not going to go into the detail that i've given in the past since I don't think there is much point in repeating stuff. Just know that the method is the same; grind, add seasoning, mix, case, spray with mold, ferment, and then dry.

Salame al "Barolo"
Ingredient	Quantity(g)	% of Meat+Fat
Pork ham meat	750	75%
Fat back	250	25%
Salt	27	2.7%
Black Pepper (cracked)	2.5	0.25%
Cure #2	2.5	0.25%
Dextrose	5	0.5%
F-LC Starter	0.4	0.04%
Red wine (Cote du Rhone)	250	25%

Everything was ground and mixed, cased into natural beef middles, and sprayed with a solution (1.5g mold to 27g water) of M-EK-4 mold culture. It was fermented at 71-72 deg. F for 48 hours.
As you might immagine the mixture was quite wet after mixing in the wine which made for easy casing.

The salame was dried at about 54 deg. F / 70% RH for about 28 days, until it had lost 45% of its weight.

To the left here is a picture of the finished product, and where I can convey an important lesson.
You can clearly see a fairly sizable "air pocket" that somehow made it's way into the mix. Either there was an bubble in the mix that got pushed into the casing, or the wet mixture left air pockets upon evaporating. I'm not sure.
The problem with this is that it can allow bacteria to grow that could be dangerous. This is something that really needs to be avoided by making sure the mixture is properly compacted and massaged into the casings to force any air pockets out of the mix.

The flavor of the salame while first tasting it was OK. Too winey for my tastes, and just not very exciting. Interestingly, after about a month in the fridge, and retasting, it tasted not so great. It had a very oxidized flavor, which i think might have been caused by the air pockets..but I'm not sure. Either way, it was disposed of.

A month an no post?

2008-05-09T22:11:00.004-04:00

I know it's been a month with no posts. Unfortunately time has been very tight lately, even on the weekends. I'm also trying to think of something new that i haven't made before as my next post.

Hopefully it won't be too long, so hang tight!

Salame Saturday! - Faceoff: farmer vs. commercial - rematch. - Results

2008-04-09T20:41:00.007-04:00

I know, it's been a long time coming. I'm sure many of you have been wondering what the heck happened since the last farmer vs. commercial post a month and a half ago! Well, it took a good 30 days for the salami to lose about 40% of their weight, so that's where most of the time went. The rest was just my slowness in taking pictures to post!

You can see here on the left side of the picture is the farmer meat salame, on the right is the commercial meat one.

I made sure to remove them from the curing fridge after they had lost an equal amount of water weight. These were at about 43% loss. The farmer one took a good 7-10 longer to lose that weight than the commercial one. I attribute this to the difference in the intramuscular fat.

The commercial one has an obvious, common, defect. You can see that the meat paste wasn't properly bound before i put it into the casing, which has caused the small "cracks" in the salame, leaving small air pockets. This is a dangerous defect, since air inside the salame can cause problems. It doesn't seem to have affected this one though. I'll definitely mix the meat paste longer next time to get a better bind.

There is an obvious difference in color, i'm not really sure why. The textures are also a little difference. The commercial one is a little tougher and chewier.

What about the flavor? The verdict is in! Let me preface this by saying BOTH are FANTASTIC. By FAR the best i've ever made. I attribute this to the F-LC starter i used this time, as well as the lower (72 deg.F), and longer (48 hrs) fermentation. The flavor of both is just outstanding. It is as good as any available, including the best artisinal ones.

So, which is better. I guess i'd have to give the edge to the FARMER one. It is a little richer and deeper in flavor. The texture is a bit better, but I could probably achieve the same texture by drying the commercial a little less.

Would I keep paying 4 times the cost for farmer instead of commercial based on flavor alone? (ignore the whole animal welfare for now). No. Not for salame. For roasts and grilled meats, hell yes, but I think much of the deliciousness of the pork is lost over the drying and spicing and curing. If I could get farmer pork for a small cost increase, I'd use it, but at current prices which are 3-4 times higher than commercial, I don't think i'll use farmer pork.

On a side note, I sort of accidentally removed one of the farmer salami at about 35% weight loss. It is considerably softer than the 43% loss, and also very good. Which do I prefer? I guess if i were making a sandwich, the softer, moister one, if eating out of hand or as an appetizer; the harder one.
I have one more of each type still drying, i expect them to be at about 50-55% loss right now. I'll take them out in the next week or 10 days, and see what they're like.

Guanciale - Cured; off to dry

2008-04-09T20:31:00.003-04:00

Whoops! I meant to leave the guanciale in the salt cure for about 7-9 days, instead I left it 16. I hope it doesn't come out too salty... I just totally forgot about it!

Anyhow, today I took the 2 pieces out of the plastic bag, rinsed one off well, and the other not as well ( to see if it has an effect), and hung them.
Not much to this post. Now we wait. Will let one cure at least 30 days before using, the other at least 2-6 months.

Guanciale

2008-03-24T21:04:00.008-04:00

Guanciale is magic. Imagine bacon, only better; porkier, tastier, richer. Guanciale is the cured jowl of the pig. It is cured in similar fashion to pancetta, which is unsmoked cured pork belly, but the location on the animal gives it a very different taste and texture. Since the cheeks/jowls of the pig see a lot of exercise the hunk of pork derived from them is tougher than the belly, and has much more intramuscular fat instead of layering as is seen on the belly.

I used a very simple formula to not hide the quality of this pork which i got from Niman Ranch. Unfortunately this piece of meat is very difficult to find, even in ethnic butchers. You can sub a piece of pork belly and get good results as well.

Guanciale
Ingredient	Quantity(g)	% of Meat+Fat
Pork jowls	1257	100%
Salt - Kosher	44	3.5%
Black pepper crushed	9	0.7%
Sugar	22	1.75%
Cure #2	3.2	0.25%
Thyme (Dry)	1	0.08%

I mixed the cure well, trying to make certain the cure #2 was well dispersed in the sal

The cure mixture is rubbed onto the jowels, making sure to get into the "nooks and crannies".

The jowls are then put into a ziplock bag, and they'll be turned every few days.

Once cured, they'll be hung to dry for anywhere between 1 and 6 months.

Coppa V2 - Tasting notes

2008-03-02T13:46:00.006-05:00

Last week I took the plain coppa that was made a few posts ago. I let coppa A, the plain one almost exactly 1 month, at about 52 deg. F and 72% RH. It lost about 35% of its weight through drying. The 2nd coppa, which was a fennel one stayed about 1 week longer in the chamber and lost about 2.3% more water, for a total of 37.3% weight loss.

You can see in these picture that for whatever reason the mold i sprayed on it did not fully cover the surface like it did for the bresaola.

On the right is the plain one sliced. It is beautiful. The flavor is fantastic, just perfectly salty, the spices come through (maybe still a tiny bit too much clove!), and it is wonderfully tender and soft without being mushy.

I would say this one is definitely the best coppa I've made. Really really good.

The fennel one that was just a touch drier and the flavor was also fantastic. The fennel was very light in the flavoring, and I would probably use a little more next time so it is a little more pronounced.

I don't think i could be more pleased with both of these coppe!

Salame Saturday - Slightly updated

2008-02-19T21:04:00.002-05:00

Just a quick post to let people know that I added some more information about the fermentation and a picture of the fermented salame to the Salame Saturday post.

Salame Saturday! - Faceoff: farmer vs. commercial - rematch.

2008-02-17T18:46:00.027-05:00

You may remember a while back, I cured two identical salami, with the only difference being where the pork was purchased from. You may also remember that my results were unclear, but basically led to the conclusion that the flavor was essentially the same. Well, I wasn't satisfied with those results. Based on tasting pork chops, I knew the flavor of a farmer raised pig HAD to be better! I concluded that the quality of farmer pork I had used last time wasn't up to snuff, so I had to retry with pork I knew was good.

With that in mind, I participated in splitting a 1/2 of a Tamworth hog raised by a local farmer. Apart from the complete hackjob on the butchering, the pork is good, at least judging from the pork chop I grilled. So this weekend I decided to rerun my experiment. This time i made an even simpler salame, a Varzi style. I also changed the starter culture to see how it affects flavor. I used F-LC bioprotective culture.

So let's get to it! So far I've only made the salami, and put them into fermentation, so there are no pictures of the meat cured or tasting, there are only a few pictures of ground meat and salami.
As I said above, I made a Varzi style salame. Varzi is a small town south of Milan, and its salame is highly regarded as one of the top salami in Italy. True salame di Varzi has to follow the DOP disciplinary, which is why mine is only a Varzi "style".

Salame tipo Varzi
Ingredient	Quantity(g)	% of Meat+Fat
Pork ham meat	1190	70%
Fat (back for farmer belly for commercial)	510	30%
Salt	46	2.7%
Black Pepper (whole kernel)	1.7	0.1%
Cure #2	4.25	0.25%
Dextrose	8.5	0.5%
Garlic powder	0.5	0.029%
F-LC Starter	0.6	0.035%
Red wine (Cote du Rhone)	10	0.5%

I'm only going to show "1 side" of the operation. I don't think there is any need to show pictures of both types of meat and fat cubed, and both ground etc. So i'll just show the farmer meat pictures. Also note that for the commercial salame i used the fattiest pork belly i could find, whereas the farmer salame used fatback from the same hog that the meat came from.

Here is a picture of the two meats side by side. I used ham slices because it is a lot easier than trimming meat from the shoulder and removing the excess fat and sinew.
Just like on the last comparison you can see that the farmer pork is lighter in color, and seems to have the fat more finely distributed instead of having it in larger globs.

As usual, the meat is cubed up into 3/4 inch cubes, and put into the coldest part of the fridge. It's nice using the ham, as the meat is relatively sinew free, and doesn't have much fat in it, which makes adding the exact amount of fat easier than when using shoulder, and makes trimming and cubing much faster.

The fat is also cubed up and put into the fridge.

The fat and meat are mixed in cube form and then ground. In this case I used my custom made 11mm Kitchenaid grinder plate. I really liked the size of this plate. The fat and meat are very distinct, and quite large, but not huge. I'm looking forward to trying the salame to see how the mouth feel changes with the grain size.

I then added all the ingredients and mixed in the Kitchenaid mixer for about 30 seconds, then added the starter dissolved in about 20ml of distilled water, and mixed for another 30 seconds.

For reference, this is the maximum amount of meat I would try to mix in the KA bowl. It may even have been a touch too much...so i'm taking this note in case I forget!:) 1500g is really the maximum salame batch that can be be effectively mixed in the KA mixer bowl.

You can see in the picture of the mixed meat that the myosin in meat has come out and bound the mixture well. A good indicator of this is the whitish film that forms on the sides of the mixing bowl. You can also see that in the video in the Cacciatorino post.

I repeated the process with the commercial pork and pork belly, and then stuffed the salame mixture. I normally use collagen casings, but I bought some natural beef middled, and I figured now would be a good time to try them. I've read that some people think they make the salame taste better than when using collagen casings. In hindsight I should have made some of the salame with natural and some with collagen to see if there is a difference in flavor or mold growth. Oh well, that'll have to be for another post.

Casing the salame was quite easy. What WASN'T easy was being able to tie a knot at the end of the salame that would hold the slippery, slimy casing! When I hung them in the fermentation box 3 of them just slipped right out of the knot! There is a special kind of knot called a butterfly knot which is supposed to be used with natural casings, but I've never had the problem with collagen, so I figured it wouldn't really matter. WRONG! If you use natural casings make sure you really tie them tight!

So now the salami are in the fermentation box at 72 deg. F. They've been sprayed with a solution made from 1.5g of M-EK-4 mold culture which was bloomed in 27g of water for 3 hours and then added to 400g of additional water. The salami were sprayed when they were put into the box then 1.5 hours afterwards, and then 15 hours later the next morning. (I really want to make sure i get mold cultures on there!).

About 18 hours after I put the salami into the fermentation box, i could see that the ones closer to the bulb were drier than the ones in the back row, so I rotated them back row to front row. I'm planning on leaving them at 72F for 48 hours, then into the curing chamber.

After about 28 hours I noticed that the humidity in the fermentation box was really really high. I propped open the lid, on the side away from the bulb, about 1" with a book. The next morning, after about 8 hours, I closed the box back up.

After 48 hours I took the salami out of the fermentation box and put them into the curing chamber at 55 deg. F and ~70% RH.

You can already see the mold forming on the surface of the salame.

Hope they turn out well, and I hope there is a tasteable difference between farmer and commercial!

Coppa V0.5 - FAIL!

2008-01-31T21:21:00.000-05:00

FAILURE! Well, you have to imagine it happens! Trying new things, new methods or formulas will inevitable lead to some less than ideal results. Oh well.

A while back, in my 1st coppa post, I cured 2 pieces of meat using different curing methods. One,that worked, was my usual 9-15 day cure in salt and spices, the other was to soak the meat in a brine for 48 hours.

Now, at the time, I thought this was not nearly enough curing time, but I double checked with the gentleman who gave it to me, and he confirmed that it would work, and that he's done it.

Well, I tried. I soaked the meat for 48 hours, rubbed it in chili pepper and put it in the curing chamber. Lo and behold, the meat wasn't cured enough to dry properly. Even after 60 days the center stayed soft, like raw meat. I'm not sure of the chemistry behind it, but I believe this is due to the meat not being fully cured.

So there you have it. Pure, unadulterated FAILURE!

More humidification ideas

2008-01-29T08:03:00.000-05:00

I just received an email from another reader, Drew N., about another method for maintaining humidity in the curing chamber.

It would seem that a 50/50 mix of propylene glycol and distilled water will maintain somewhere around 70% RH. I'm told this would be considerably cheaper than using the beads or sheets I mentioned yesterday, since PG is about $8/pint. I'm not sure where you can buy it, but I can't imagine it being that difficult to source. Again, I have no idea how fast or slow this method changes the RH, but it might be worth a try.
PS: It does seem to be FDA approves, and food safe based on the Wikipedia entry.

A few thoughts on humidification

2008-01-28T22:02:00.000-05:00

A few people have emailed me asking about humidity control methods for a chamber, and some even gave me some really good ideas, which I thought I'd pass along. Mind you, i've never tried any of these products.

A gentleman, John D., emailed me about a humidifier that can be found on Amazon, which has a built in hygrostat. It is an ultrasonic humidifier, which is what we want. I don't know what the control limits are for the hygrostat (what is the max. humidity which can be set?), or how accurate or inaccurate it is. Accuracy isn't critical, as long as it can keep a relative humidity of 65-75%. This might be something worth looking into, at only $43 shipped.

Another fellow emailed me asking about another humidifier/fridge combo, and I thought about looking into "mechanical" means for maintaining humidity. I've already discussed using a tray of wet salt, but there are other chemical that work too. These methods are used in cigar humidors, so i assume they are food safe. These are just chemical beads, which maintain the environment at a 65% or 70% RH by absorbing, or releasing water into the environment.
There seem to be 2 types. Beads and sheets. I've only looked up one brand, which seems to be well regarded in the cigar world, Heartfelt Industries.

The sheets are available in 60% and 65% RH varieties. I think the sheets would work better for bigger chambers or fridges.

The beads come in 60%, 65% and 70%. I think for a full size fridge you would need a few pounds of them. Not very convenient.

I think both these methods would work well for smaller dorm fridge size curing chambers, or wine coolers being used as wine chambers. I have no idea how often one would have to "recharge" the beads or dry them out, so they may not be very useful.

If anyone tries any one of these, the humidifier, sheets or beads, I'd love to hear about it. If you have any other ideas, or any product which may be useful, don't hesitate to email me, so I can post it, it may help other people too.

Coppa V2

2008-01-25T20:25:00.000-05:00

I put up in cure another batch of 2 coppe a few days ago. I didn't take any pictures, because they'd be exactly the same as the other coppa pictures, so i'll just give you the formula I used.

The recipe I used is pretty similar to the last one, with a few minor changes. The 2 coppe I made were just slightly different from each other with one of them have some crushed fennel seeds. I lowered the salt a touch in both of them since the last batch was just a touch too salty.

The biggest change was the HUGE reduction in clove since the last batch was incredible over-clovey.

Coppa V2
Ingredient	Quantity(g)	% of Meat
Pork Coppa	1000	100%
Salt ( Kosher)	35	3.50%
White Pepper	10	1.00%
Cloves	1	0.1%
Cinnamon	0.75	0.075%
Cure #2	2.5	0.25%
Myrtle Berries	2.0	0.20%
Fennel (in 1)	3.5	0.35%

Myrtle berries are unavailable here in the US, they can be substituted for juniper berries, they're quite close. I have a feeling the fennel I put in one of them wasn't enough, it smelled great in the spice mix, but then after the cure the fennel smell was overwhelmed by everything else. We'll see, I guess that's the point of documenting recipes...so next time I can adjust as necessary.

I rubbed the cure and massaged it into the meat chunks, and then put in the fridge for 9 days. I flipped and massaged the meat in the bag every 4 or 5 days.

I made a mold solution of 0.5g (1/8 teaspoon) of M-EK-4 mold mixed in 20g water, and let it sit for 12 hours. I then mixed that solution with 200ml of water, and let it sit for 20-30 minutes.

I cased them in 100mm collagen casings, and then sprayed with the mold solution and put in the fermentation box which was set at 69 deg. F.

36 hours later I put them into my curing chamber at 52 deg. F 72-75% RH.

They look great so far, and I think they'll be delicious!

Bresaola - Tasting

2008-01-07T20:02:00.000-05:00

Well, almost exactly 30 days from when the bresaola went into the curing chamber, it's ready. The mold over the past 30 days beautifully coated the whole piece of meat, developing a nice white bloom. You can see what a nice lean piece of meat the eye of round is. There is just 1 fat vein in the middle, and this is pretty uncommon.

Here is a picture of the uncut bresaola, you can see how nice the mold looks. I have never been able to get this before, so I attribute it to the use of the mold solution I sprayed on them.

The bresaole lost 38-40% of their weight (each one was a little bit different, based on they location in the chamber, and their thickness), and only took about 30 days because they are rather lean. I maintained the chamber at about 54 deg. F, and 75% RH.

Here is a plate of thinly sliced bresaola. Look what a beautiful crimson color it has.

This is my favorite way to eat it. Dabbing it with a mixture of oil, lemon juice and black pepper. Wait about 5 minutes to let it soak in a little bit, and eat with crust bread. So good, so good.

As far as tasting notes, I think this bresaola is one of the best I've ever made. It is just a little bit too salty, but it may just be nit picking. The herbs are nicely balanced, with none of them being overly strong. It is beefy and herby. Really wonderful. Next time I'll leave it in the cure maybe 1 or 2 days less.
The texture is perfect in the thicker, central, sections. Soft, but not raw feeling. The ends are a little drier and harder, but that is impossible to avoid since they are smaller. I think the 38 or 39% water loss is just about right for eye of round bresaola.

Bresaola - Drying

2007-12-06T21:21:00.000-05:00

So, the bresaola cured in the salt and herb mix for 11 days, and it was time to put it into casings and hang to dry. I decided on 11 days because it felt cured. You could go a little longer, about 15-20 if you're unsure.
I'm trying something new here. Since I seem to be unable to develop mold on my salumi naturally, I resorted to spraying them (once cased) with a mold culture from Butcher Packer of Penecillium Nalgiovense. The mold on the casing slows the drying a little bit as well as impart flavor into the meat. We'll see if it makes any difference, more on that below.

I started by rinsing the meat off with cold running water, and drying it off well. Which is what is shown in the picture above.

I used 100mm collagen casings, and put the meat piece in there. You want to use a casing that is just about the same size as the meat, or as close as possible. I could have use a 90mm casing for a tighter fit, but I didn't have any, and this will be fine.

Twist the open end, and tie it off, trying to get out as much air as possible. There will still be a fair bit in there.

Using butcher knots tie off the bresaola every 2-3 inches. You want to make these nice and tight. The air will fill into pockets on the casing.

Using a clean toothpick or a sterilized needle prick the casing all over, concentrating on the pockets of air. Massage the meat to force the air out of the holes you just made. It may squirt some liquid, don't worry about it. Get all the air out of the casings. Weigh and label them.

12 hours prior I had made a solution of 1.5g of mold culture (M-EK-4) with 30g of water. I left it out at room temperature, and then added that to 400g of tap water in a spray bottle. Using this solution I sprayed the bresaole heavily until they were dripping, and put them in my fermentation box at 69 deg. for 36 hours. It is important that they hang without touching each other or the sides, as I noticed that the mold is not developing where they were touching each other.

After 36 hours, the bresaole get hung in the curing chamber at 54 deg. F and 70% RH.
At first it looked like nothing was happening that I would be getting no mold growth, but after 2 days, a nice bloom of mold was developing.

This picuture is after 5 days. The mold is developing beautifully.

I'll leave these in there until they've lost about 35% of their weight, I'm estimating about 50 days.

Tasting notes to come!

Bresaola - Curing

2007-11-26T18:09:00.000-05:00

If you've ever eaten in a high falootin' Italian restaurant you've no doubt seen "bresaola" served with Parmigiano shavings, maybe some rucola/rocket/arugola salad, some nice oil and lemon juice.

Bresaola is a great cured meat. It isn't made from pork, which is uncommon as far as salumi go; it is made from beef, or also, quite commonly in Italy, horse or donkey. Basically a very lean piece of meat (most commonly beef, especially if bought commercially) is salt cured with spices, then dried.

Sliced thin it makes a superb antipasto when drizzled with a mixture of oil, lemon juice and black pepper, it great in a sandwich, and is delicious just eaten out of hand. This is one salume people worried about cholesterol and fat don't have to feel guilty about eating.

So lets get to how it can be made at home. Now, given the preliminary results of the survey, I'm going to post this without having tasted the results. This means my spices could be entirely out of whack. This is unlikely as I've made this before, but it might happen!

Bresaola
Ingredient	Quantity(g)	% of Meat
Eye of round	1537	100%
Salt ( Kosher)	78	5%
Sugar	15	1%
Black pepper	7.6	0.5%
Fresh rosemary	3.5	0.25%
Juniper berries	1.7	0.1%
Dry thyme	1.5	0.1%
Cinnamon	0.8	0.05%
Clove	0.4	0.025%
Cure #2	5.15	0.33%

I started with 3 whole eye of round roasts (each one weighed about 1.5kg/3.5lbs). I made sure there was no surface fat or silver skin anywhere. You want the meat nice and clean, a solid block of meat. I like this cut because of the shape and size. It lends itself well to being put into casings.

Mix up the spice mixture after grinding the cinnamon, clove, and juniper berries, chopping up the rosemary and crushing the black peppercorns.Make sure you really mix everything up, especially if you're making a double or triple batch for 2 or 3 pieces of meat, as I did.

Take the mixture and really massage it into the meat. You really want to get the meat and salt nicely worked into it. This should take 1 or 2 minutes, don't do it for 15; this isn't a cow spa!

Take you piece of meat and put it into a ziplock bag, including all the salt and spices that fell off it while massaging it. Get out as much air as possible from the bag, and seal it up. Put it in the fridge for 15-21 days.
Massage the meat while it is in the bag every 2 or 3 days, flipping it to make sure it is getting even exposure to the liquid which will have formed in the bag.

This method can be used on many lean pieces of beef. My notes from 2005 tell me I used a rump roast once. As long as the piece is nice and large, somewhat regularly shaped and LEAN, you should be able to use it. Actually, now that I think about it, I'm not sure why it HAS to be lean. I imagine a nicely marbled piece of beef would taste pretty good cured! But, as I've said, i like the eye of round, as it is a good size and shape.
Normally I'd use 1/2 eye of round roasts which are commonly found at markets, but this time i found whole ones. Either way, just scale the formula as needed by weight.

I'll be back in about a week to detail the casing and hanging. I'll be using 100mm casings for this.