Equilibrium cure vs. Excess salt cure

I've gotten a number of questions regarding the application of salt during the curing phase of cured meats as it related to quantity and duration, so I thought a small post was in order to clarify various curing methodologies.

There are generally 2 methods to cure meat:

1. The older method (I believe) is what I would call "excess salt" curing. This basically involves applying a generous quantity of salt to the piece of meat, together with the spices, and waiting a certain amount of time for the meat to absorb the salt.
2. The other method is what I (and others) call "equilibrium curing" in which a calculated quantity of salt is added to the meat, with the spices, and allowing enough time for the meat to absorb all the salt.

While both methods will work, the excess salt method involves guessing, hopefully based on experience, how long the meat should be left in this salt mixture to cure. If it's not left long enough, not enough salt is absorbed to preserve the meat, if it's left too long the end product will be salty. This "guessing" will have to vary based on the percentage of meat to fat in the product (fat absorbs salt less readily), whether the product has skin on it (skin acts as a barrier), the thickness of the product, the temperature of the fridge, and probably many more variables. I've heard people say to leave items for 1 days per kilogram of meat, but that doesn't really make sense as it doesn't account for thickness or fat content.  Sounds to me like the old recipes where people were told to cook something in the oven for X number of minutes per pound. It'll work, but most likely you'll end up with overcooked/undercooked food because the variables are not accounted for! Honestly, this type of curing doesn't make much sense to me. I don't see an advantage, but I would be happy to hear from people who do this (and there are many!) to correct me.

I always cure using an equilibrium cure. I use between 2.5% and 3.5% of the meats weight in salt, rub it all over the meat, and put the meat in a sealed bag, flipping it every 3-5 days in the refrigerator to make sure the  chunk is always exposed to the brine that is formed by the salt pulling out water from the muscle. After a fairly arbitrary amount of time, but one which is long enough to make sure all the salt i've applied has been absorbed, I consider the meat cured and ready to move to the next phase, into the fermentation box or curing chamber. To me this is much easier than excess salt curing. By applying a known, wanted, quantity of salt, the product will not become over-salted, ever, no matter how long it's left in the fridge. The question is really what the minimum amount of time is for the meat to absorb the salt. I don't really have a good answer, other than "leave it long enough to be SURE it's absorbed the salt". I always leave my items in the fridge curing at least 2 weeks, and for very large things like a culatello, I give it 3. That's the beauty of this system..... you can't overcure! I guess if I'm in a analogy to cooking mood, this method would be the sous vide cooking of the curing world. By cooking a product at it's final temperature, you can't overcook it, and it won't be undercooked if you leave it long enough.

I hope that sheds some light on the different methods, and why I do things the way I do.

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Nice salame tying video

Thanks to blog reader Carl for pointing this video out to me. It's a great demonstration on how to tie larger caliber salami (for example in a beef bung).

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Let's talk curing chambers

I've received many many emails asking about specifics of my curing chamber, and more specifically about using different types of refrigerators to use as a curing chamber, so I wanted to post some quick information on choosing a fridge.

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New supplier of Italian goods!

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!

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Natural or Artificial Casings?

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

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Need an opinion about blog posts.

Need an opinion from my readers (anybody out there?)

As you know this is a slow hobby, and as you've seen posts are pretty infrequent (there really is only so much cured meat I can eat!). One way to speed up the posts very slightly would be to post the procedure for curing the meat separately from the tasting notes. Posting it all together makes it a little neater, and puts everything in 1 post, although the posts needs to wait for the meat to finish curing.

So, please vote in the poll on the sidebar to the right. One, longer post for each product, or separate each product into multiple posts to increase the frequency (slightly).

Thanks.

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This coppa has me confused!

In the last post I told you I'd have an update on the coppa. Well, I do. Sort of. The coppas I have curing right now were made using 2 different methods. One was done using a "wet cure" brine in which the pork was soaked, the other was the usual "dry cure" using salt and spices.

Well, the one that was wet cured reached its "weight loss" goal of about 40%, but upon cutting into it, it did not look cured enough, and was still soft. So...back into the curing chamber to see if it salvageable. We'll see in a few weeks I guess. I'm confused about this one because at this weight loss it should be considerably firmer. I'm think the curing brine didn't reach the center of the meat, so this coppa may never be edible.

The other "dry cured" coppa isn't quite ready, I'm estimating another week or 2, and that one should work out, as I've used this formula before. We'll see in a couple week i guess!

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Sometimes it's better to be safe than sorry

Today I decided I'd throw together a quick simple salame tomorrow to get back into the swing of things. So off I went to my local chain grocery to get a pork shoulder. They had no pork shoulders.


What they did have was pork picnics. A picnic is the bottom portion of the pig's front legs. It is the part below the shoulder. I figured this would be perfectly fine, which in theory it is. So I picked one up. This is where things started to go downhill.

Upon opening the cryovac bag, a strong sulfur "aroma" hit me. Sometimes pork in cryovac bags can have a bit of smell to it, so I didn't worry too much about it, but more on that later. I then started dissecting it, and that is really where things got ugly.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NEVER USE A PICNIC TO MAKE SAUSAGES OR SALAME!! The picnic (and I should have known this) is made up of dozens of really small muscles connected with connective tissue and fat strata. This is a real problem since meat for salame has to be nice chunks of muscle with as little fat or connective tissue as possible to allow for a clean grind. Getting any sort of nice clean chunks of meat out of the picnic is really a big pain. I will not make this mistake again, i'll stick to shoulder/butt or ham chunks.

So after having spent about 45 minutes trimming chunks of meat, the sulfur smell still had not gone away, and I started to get a bit worried. I took a small piece of the meat and cooked it up in a pan and ate it. It was kind of like eating pork steak with some egg...odd. So at this point, after having spent all that time cutting it, I don't think I'm going to use it for the salame. It may be fine to cook, I'm not sure, but I don't think I want to risk using it for something that doesn't get cooked like salame. Maybe the grocery didn't store it cold enough, or mishandled it, I'm not sure. Guess I should have fried up a piece before I had cut it all up and saved myself some time. Better safe than sorry, and I even learned a lesson. Don't use pork picnics for charcuterie.

Tomorrow I might go to a different market and get a couple of thick ham steaks and use those instead.

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I'm back and it's time to start experimenting

Back from my nice vacation back home in Italy, done with my MBA and actually have free time on weekends! Time to start experimenting and making some cured meats.
I need to stock up on some supplies from Butcher Packer, some starter cultures, and some casings. I already have a whole slew of experiments lined up to investigate the differences in a few variables when making salame.


First experiment will be the flavor differences for different starter cultures used in the salame making process. There are 4 or 5 different ones available, I have used 2. My plan is to get 2 more, and make a batch of very simple salame and cure them side by side, keeping everything the same other than the starter culture. Taste them and decide if there are flavor differences, and which I prefer.

The 2nd experiment I want to run is using some farmer raised pastured Berkshire pork versus a standard industrially raised pig, and see if there are flavor differences when the meat is cured as salame or as other cured meats. This one will be interesting.

So, hopefully over the next couple of week i'll be able get get my supplies in and start my experiments. Hope you'll follow along.

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Next post coming shortly

Sorry for the long delay. As I mentioned in my 1st post, life keeps me very busy. I hope to have something up tomorrow or Monday. My friend and I just finished making sanguinaccio, blood sausage/boudin noir. I know this isn't cured, but it also isn't a normal sausage you'd see everywhere, so I thought I'd post about it.

Stay tuned.

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Welcome to the world of cured meats.

Welcome to all. I’m starting this blog as a gift to the king of animals. The pig. This honorable animal, which is so often seen generically as “the other white meat”, and eaten as a tasteless grilled pork chop, has in past been so much more, and I want to resurrect that. My goal isn’t to write a blog about the various way to cook pig, there are 1000 blogs like that already, it is about my dedication to one particular form of working this creature - making salumi, charcuterie or cured meats. To my mind, this is his ultimate expression.

I have a two goals for this blog (for now, those goals may expand as I write, but let’s keep it simple):

1) To document my experiments in the craft of making cured meats : salumi or charcuterie.
2) To educate readers about making these items at home, and answer questions about issues I’ve come across myself.

I guess let’s start with a definition of what exactly salumi making or charcuterie is. Both words generally mean the same thing. It is the craft of working meat products, most often pork into various forms for various reasons: flavor, textural changes, and importantly, preservation. Today is is done less for preservation, and more for textural and flavor reasons. If you've ever eaten a salame, prosciutto, a pate' or even a sausage, you've had charcuterie.

While charcuterie can encompass cured and fresh products, my concentration will be on cured products such as prosciutto, salame and coppa, as this is what I prefer, and what what generally has little documentation on the web. Making sausages can be fun, and very tasty, but it isn’t particularly difficult, and I’ll therefore spend less time on that. And, while I said this blog is about the pig, some products will also use other animals, but pork will make up the great majority.

So, if you’ve ever been interested in how cured meats can be made at home, follow along. Posts may not come very often; this is an craft that requires patience as curing time for various products can be 6 months or longer. I’m also quite busy with life, so posts will come as I have a chance to write them.

In the next blog entries I’ll be introducing the various items and accessories which will be needed to produce salumi at home. For now,I’ve babbled enough.

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