Lamb Salami

January 15, 2022 by AOG Leave a Comment

For this project, I decided to make a 100% lamb salami using trim left over from butchering out the lamb culatello from a leg of lamb, discussed in a previous post. A lot of times, lamb salami uses pork fat due to its mild flavor and low slip melting point which helps it to “melt on your tongue”. However, there is no reason not to use the lamb fat itself, one just needs to be aware that when enjoying this salami, you want to let it warm to room temperature+ before eating it for the most enjoyable mouth feel experience.

The Meat

As mentioned, the meat for this salami came from the leg of lamb butchered for lamb culatello.

The meat/fat ratio for this was based on what I butchered from the leg, which was closer to 80/20 than my usual ratio of 70/30. I par-froze the meat at this point, to make sure it was cold for the next steps.

The Spices

Weigh the lean and fat separately if possible, shooting for 15-30% fat relative to lean, and insert them into the appropriate spaces below on the spreadsheet and it will calculate the necessary amounts of the cure ingredients. (If you have eyeballed the fat/lean ratio, then just insert the total weight into the Meat+Fat cell.)

*Please use common sense. Make sure the spreadsheet is working properly for you and double check any calculations that don’t seem right.

Grinding

Both the lean meat and the fat that were pre-mixed with the spices were ground on the medium-fine die.

Mixing

After you have ground the meat, keeping everything cold, you should have some next particle definition. Make sure to keep everything cold during mixing to maintain this.

Make sure to mix this all well.

Stuffing

After you are done, it’s time to stuff! Get the farce loaded into the stuffer, and pick a casing that you like. For this I used a sewn hog after end which is a nice and wide casing.

Tying

After the salami has been stuffed, you can tie it up to get it a nice shape and get it ready to hang in the curing chamber.

Fermentation

(Done in the oven (off) with the light on… using a spray bottle to add in humidity. Conditions are around 21C/70F and high relative humidity for 48 hours)

Drying

(Drying conditions in the curing chamber: 13C/55F and 70% RH, Drying conditions with UMAI bag 4C/40F and variable humidity)

At this point, you’re ready to move this into your chamber. I ran into some issues and wasn’t able to this as expected, so instead, I cased it in an UMAI bag.

Using a metal rack, I set up a nice micro-environment for it in the vegetable drawer in the fridge. It can stay here until it loses 30-45% of its initial weight, or I can move it to the curing chamber at any point.

Tasting

To be continued!

Lamb Culatello

January 15, 2022 by AOG Leave a Comment

In this post, I will go through the basic process of making lamb culatello. Similar to a pork culatello, this is made by taking the rear leg of the animal, carefully deboning it, and carving out the culatello cut. This is then dry cured and aged until it has lost at least 30% of its initial weight.

The Meat

Ideally you will buy a bone-in leg of lamb and cut out the culatello yourself. If all you can find is bone-out leg of lamb, you can still make it work as long as it wasn’t all hacked about in the de-boning process.

You want to cut the meat into the three pieces of the culatello (bottom), the fiocco (top), and the rumpetto (right). Make sure to do this with clean cuts, not slicing into the muscles. You want to avoid creating air pockets were bad bacteria can propagate.

You can also cure the rumpetto and fiocco as whole pieces if you’ve been able to butcher them well. Here, I bought a bone-out leg of lamb and it was already a bit hacked apart, so I decided to save them for some lamb salami.

Curing

(stored at 4C/40F for 3+ weeks)

Here, instead of a simple cure as is usually done for pork culatello, I decided to use a spice cure that would complement the flavor of the lamb. You can insert the weight of your butchered lamb culatello into the spreadsheet and it will calculate the weights for the spices for you.

*Please use common sense. Make sure the spreadsheet is working properly for you and double check any calculations that don’t seem right.

The spices measured out smell incredible…

After you have measured out all of the spices, mix it with the lamb culatello that you have butchered out.

Let it sit for 3+ weeks in the regular refrigerator curing, I like to do this under vacuum to get an even cure.

Casing

After dry curing for 3+ weeks, the lamb prosciutto will be rinsed off and cased in a large beef bung. This will be strung up and ready to hang in the curing chamber.

Drying

(dried in the curing chamber at 13C/55F and 70% RH for ~3 months)

After the lamb culatello is cased and tied, you can hang it in the curing chamber to dry. It needs to hit at least 30% loss of its original weight, at least. I will probably let it go closer to 40%

Tasting

After it’s done, comes the best part. Tasting! This is too be added when the process is complete for the most recent project.

American Breakfast Sausage

November 6, 2021 by AOG Leave a Comment

Is anything more American than starting a weekend morning with some breakfast sausage? This is just a simple straightforward “better than Jimmy Dean” American Breakfast Sausage recipe you can make for a breakfast on a crisp fall day.

First Step: Get yourself a nice piece of pork and cut it into cubes. I like to use the trimmings from pork shoulder or pork leg projects. Generally you want to use the 3rd tier trimmings for a project like this. First tier is for prized dry cured whole muscle like culatello or coppa. Second tier is for dry cured salami that will never touch heat. Third tier is for projects like this that will be cooked, and therefore the heat will help it break down. After you have the meat cubed, par freeze it to prepare for grinding.

Second Step: Grind the meat on a medium/fine die.

Third Step: Weight out the salt and spices that you will be using. Once you have the weight, you can enter it into the interactive spreadsheet below, just fill the weight of your meat in the appropriate white cell in the spreadsheet and hit enter. There is no need to make any other changes to the spreadsheet.

** Please use common sense and make sure the spreadsheet is working correctly for you.

Fourth Step: Mix the meat and the spices, taking care to keep the mixture cold to avoid fat smearing. Mix it well to create a tacky mixture.

Fifth Step: Create links or patties depending on your preference. Here we made patties.

Sixth Step: Cook and enjoy for breakfast!

Freeze any leftovers to enjoy in the future.

Ficazza

July 17, 2021 by AOG Leave a Comment

Name: Ficazza or Sazinella or Salame di Tonno

Region: Sicily, particularly the Trapani region, in places such as the island of Favignana

History:

Sicily has a long history of tuna fishing… particularly on the west coast by the city of Trapani. The city of Trapani, originally founded by the Phoenicians, has a long history as a port town where fishing and trading played an important role in the daily life of its people.

Said of the city in 1154 by Idrisi, an Arab geographer and traveler, Trapani was… “a city of ancient origins, situated on the sea and surrounded on each side….here fish is in abundance and more than needed; they fish large tuna with great nets and a high-quality coral: and a salt-pan is adjacent to the city’s port.”

Given the relative abundance of both tuna and salt, it’s no wonder that one of the results was the creation of a salame made with tuna… a perfect way to make sure nothing went to waste, and to preserve the haul over time.

How it’s made:

The meat:

Ficazza is traditionally made with the parts of the tuna that are less desirable, those that are not sold to customers to eat. Importantly, it is made with parts of the tuna that in dialect are referred to as “busunagghia”. They come from the parts of the tuna around the central bone, and tend to be dark red/brown due to their contact with blood. These give the distinctive color to the ficazza. In addition, other less desirable parts are used, including fatty parts from around the belly and internal organs that are not sold for other products.

The spices:

Only sea salt and black pepper are used in making this salame.

Processing:

The tuna is ground fine, and then mixed with only sea salt and black pepper. The mixture is stuffed into a pig intestine casing. The salame is then pressed using specific wood boards made for the process.

The ficazza undergoes a double salting, first during the mixing stage, and second during the pressing stage. After pressing, they are air dried for 20-40 days. Traditionally this was done using natural ventilation, the combination of relatively humid sea air and the strong winds of Trapani providing exactly what was needed to dry cure this unique salame.

After the ventilation stage, the ficazza is ready to be sold. These days, they are stored under vacuum and kept refrigerated to extend their shelf life.

Timing:

The ficazza is traditionally processed in the months of May and June, in accordance with the traditional tuna season in Trapani. For example, the tuna fishing nets were usually placed in April, allowing the fishing to start in May and go on until the end of June.

How it’s eaten:

Ficazza can be eaten a number of ways. It can be enjoyed thinly sliced, topped with olive oil and lemon, with bread on the side. It can also be used in pasta dishes, for example making carbonara di mare, using the ficazza to replace the guanciale.

How I learnt about it:

After a long weekend away in Trapani, I finally had the chance to try the real thing! After learning about it through my research and working on my own modern DIY version, I was excited to see the place where the traditional ficazza was born.

Seeing Trapani with my own eyes really highlighted how important the terroir was for this product to come to be. From the waters around the island of Favignana, (previously) replete with tuna…

To the salt flats of Trapani and Marsala, where sea salt was ingeniously extracted from sea water by early Phoenicians…

Not to mention, the winds of Trapani, which made the city an ideal port for the seafaring traders in the first place.

The DIY:

My version of ficazza is a modern adaptation of the traditional one. I don’t spend my days fishing for tuna, nor do I live in a place like Trapani where the fish market is a short walk away, and therefore I don’t have access to the parts of the tuna, such as the busunagghia, which give the ficazza its traditional color and flavor. While this is certainly on my to-do list, for now, I make my modern version of ficazza.

The meat:

To make the ficazza, because I know it will be dry cured and never cooked, I make sure to buy high quality sushi-grade tuna.

Planning:

While the traditional ficazza only uses sea salt and black pepper, for my version I added a few more things, listed in the table below. To make it more traditional, you would leave out everything except the sea salt and black pepper.

In addition to the tuna, I used pork fat for this as well for the fat content. This is not traditional, so you can skip this if you want. Once you have the weight of your tuna and pork fat, you can enter it into the interactive spreadsheet below, just fill the weight of your meat in the appropriate white cells in the spreadsheet and hit enter. If you don’t use pork fat, just insert “0” into the appropriate cell. There is no need to make any other changes to the spreadsheet.

Mix all the spices together.

*Please use common sense. Make sure the spreadsheet is working properly for you and double check any calculations that don’t seem right.

Grinding and mixing:

I par-froze the tuna and hand diced it.

I took half the tuna that was hand diced and ground it on a coarse grind in my grinder.

I left the other half just hand diced and not ground. If you wanted a more traditional product, you would use the fine grind for all of it.

Because I wanted to make mine as similar to other salami as possible, I decided to use hand diced pork fat to stud the ground tuna meat. Again, if you want to make it as traditional as possible, you would skip this step and only use tuna.

Next, I mixed the hand diced tuna, the ground tuna, and the pork fat with the spices.

The next step is to mix the ground meat and spices well, creating a tacky paste. Make sure to keep everything as cold as possible.

Casing:

For this, I decided to try two ways to dry cure the ficazza. The first was the more traditional way, in a beef middle casing. The second, in an UMAI bag, which would let me dry cure it in a regular fridge at 4C.

Drying:

(Curing Chamber Method: 13C/55F, 65-70-% RH, 1-3 months)

(UMAI Method: 4C/40F, 50-65% RH, 1-3 months)

I cured my Ficazza in two ways, in the curing chamber and also in the regular fridge, since I was worried about curing fish at the relatively higher temperatures of the curing chamber.

To cure it in the curing chamber, I placed it among the other meats I was curing at the time. I learned that the conditions of a traditional curing chamber should be fine for this product. If you have a fan in your chamber, you can turn it on for this process if you’d like, but it’s not 100% necessary.

Because I wasn’t sure this would be the case, I also decided to dry cure some using the UMAI method. These special vacuum bags let out moisture, while still protecting the meat from oxidation. I don’t love them for everything, but they do tend to work if you use them correctly. Using this method, I cured the ficazza on a rack (for air flow around the meat) in a vegetable drawer (to increase humidity) in the regular fridge, opening the drawer occasionally for ventilation.

However, in the end, I found that the ficazza cured in the curing chamber had more flavor than that cured in the regular fridge using the UMAI method. I would venture the guess that the curing chamber allows for flavor development that isn’t there in the regular fridge, while the dry curing process still keeps any spoilage or overly fishy flavor at bay.

Tasting

Overall, this was one of my favorite things I’ve made. A unique cured product, with a delicate flavor profile. Not at all overwhelming fishy or salty, just a well-balanced and complex product.

There are pros and cons to each method. I still plan to make the traditional Ficazza one of these days (which is an important example of how charcuterie can be utilized to make sure nothing goes to waste), but this more modern one uses the basis of tradition for inspiration, while relying on modern methods to experiment. By using less salt, by playing with flavors, we can create something unique from the ancient traditions.

References:

1- https://www.fondazioneslowfood.com/en/ark-of-taste-slow-food/favignana-tuna-bottarga/ 2- https://www.selectsicilyvillas.com/places-in-sicily/trapani 3- https://blog.giallozafferano.it/toniaincucina/tradizione-tonnara-di-nino-castiglione/ 4- https://www.agrodolce.it/2020/02/10/ficazza-di-tonno/ 5-https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzzonaglia 6- https://www.braciamiancora.com/ficazza-di-trapani-e-salumi-mare-siciliani/

Coppa Calabrese

June 13, 2021 by AOG 2 Comments

Name: Coppa Calabrese

This is going to be a simple post, detailing how to make what is probably my favorite cured meat, coppa, in the calabrese style.

The meat:

To make a coppa, you need to either purchase or butcher the collar roast for a pig. Some butchers/farms can sell you the “collar roast” that you can use as is. Otherwise, you can buy either a full pork shoulder (shown below) or a “Boston Butt” shoulder cut.

From the whole shoulder, follow the seams outlined here to cut out the coppa.

Salting (4C/40F, 3 weeks+)

Once you have the meat butchered and ready, it’s time to weigh it.

Once you have the weight, you can enter it into the interactive spreadsheet below, just fill the weight of your meat in the appropriate white cell in the spreadsheet and hit enter. There is no need to make any other changes to the spreadsheet.

Weigh all the spices and mix all the spices together.

Then, cover the meat with them.

Vacuum seal it all together.

* Note: Please use common sense. Make sure the spreadsheet is working properly for you and double check any calculations that don’t seem right.

Casing

After the meat has been cured for 3+ weeks, it’s time to take it out, rinse it, and pat it dry.

Soak a large beef bung in water for as long as it takes to become relaxed and expanded (anywhere from 30 minutes to overnight).

Stuff the meat into the beef bung and tie it up, to prepare for the drying stage.

Drying (13C/55F, 70-%RH, 3-6 months)

Once your coppa is ready, hang it in the curing chamber where it should stay for 3-6 months.

Once it has lost 30-45% of its original weight, according to your tastes, remove it from the chamber

Tasting

The last is the best part of the whole process. When the right amount of time has passed, pull the coppa from the chamber, and enjoy!

Strolghino

November 21, 2019 by AOG Leave a Comment

As Halloween has come and passed, the most witchy of all the salami has been on my mind. Strolghino is usually a thin salami that is made using trimmings from the culatello, and eaten after only a few weeks of aging. Its name is thought to derive from the dialect word “strolga” which translates to a word like “witch”. The strolghino is named so for its power of prediction – it is the first indication of how the prized culatello will turn out a year later.

Planning

For this salami, to make it right, you really want to be doing it alongside of making a culatello and fiocco (as discussed here).

Ideally, you will take the trim left over from the leg in the culatello butchering process and use it to make the strolghino. Separate out the trim into pork 1, pork 2, and fat. For the stronghino, you will use the pork 1 (best quality lean meat with no tendons or fascia) and fat. The pork 2 can be used in any saucisson or sausage that will be cooked.

The flavor of meat from this part of the leg can be incredible, so the salami itself doesn’t need much more. Depending on the breed/age/diet of the pig, the leg you are using may have more or less fat. Generally, strolghino is a more lean salami, so you can aim for 15-30% fat for this salami, which is generally achievable just from the trim you will have.

*Please use common sense. Make sure the spreadsheet is working properly for you and double check any calculations that don’t seem right.

Cubing

After you have planned the ratios for your meat, it’s time to get started. If you’re breaking down a leg, you may have already done this part. If not, it’s time to prepare the meat to be ground. Making sure you keep everything cold (I par freeze my meat beforehand and return it to the freezer when I am done working with it), cube the meat and fat into 1 inch pieces that will fit into your grinder. You can also hand cut your fat if you prefer, if so aim for ¼ inch pieces.

Grinding and Mixing

After grinding the meat, making sure to keep it cold throughout the entire process, mix the meat, fat, and spices together to get a nice bind. I used a stand mixer on the slowest setting for this, although you can also do this step by hand. You want to mix it enough to get a good bind, but not so much that it becomes mush.

Grind your meat (and your fat if you are not choosing to hand cut it) while it is still partially frozen to make the process go as smoothly as possible. I ground the meat using a coarse die here, and hand cut the fat. You can mix the spice cure with the cubed meat before you grind it, or with the ground meat afterwards. I generally mix it before hand to get better spice cure distribution.

Stuffing

After the meat has been mixed together, it’s time to stuff it. Strolghino generally uses small diameter casings, since those were the ones that were traditionally ready first, and will result in the quickest drying. Here, I used wider diameter casings because I had them on hand. Feel free to use what you have available, but the smaller diameter casings will be more authentic for this.

After stuffing the salami, you can either tie it up by hand, or use netting to secure it.

Fermentation
Temperature: 70ᵒF/21C (strain dependent)
Humidity: 80-90% RH
Time: 48-72 hours (until pH drops to at least 5.3)

After you have stuffed the strolghino into the casings, it’s time for fermentation. The conditions you use for fermentation will depend upon the starter culture strain that you have used. Look it up on the packaging or the website if you’re not sure.

I use B-LC-007, which is a starter culture that requires temperatures of ~70F and a relative humidity ~80-90%. I let the strolghino ferment for ~48 hours, which is about the time it should take to allow the pH to drop into the ideal range. My fermentation chamber is my oven, off, with the light on. This generally gives me the conditions I need.

I don’t currently use a pH meter (they’re relatively expensive), but if you have one, now is the time to use it. Ideally, you want to see the pH drop to around 5.3. In this step, you need to balance the safety concerns (ideally a fast pH drop with American style fast acidifying starter culture) and flavor concerns (ideally a gradual pH drop with European style starter culture). I find the traditional European methods work well for me, but everyone should take into consideration their own concerns when doing this.

Drying
Temperature: 54F/12C
Humidity: 70% RH

After the meat has undergone fermentation, it’s time to let it dry. The strolghino is traditionally only dried around 20 days when in is cased in the traditional small diameter casings. Because I used wider diameter casings, I knew it would not achieve the same level of water loss in that time. So, I hung it in my curing chamber in the usual conditions, ~55F/70%RH, until it lost ~25-30% if its initial weight, which took ~2 months.

Tasting

Ahh. The best part. The tasting. The key to a good strolghino is to use good quality meat and let the quality of the meat shine through by using a simple spice cure. I made this with trimmings from a sow leg from Ham Sweet Farm, and the quality pork flavor shines through. One of my all-time favorites.

Served well on bread.

Disclaimer: Meat curing is a hobby that comes with inherent risks. We can all do things to limit this risk by educating ourselves about the process and the utilizing the safest known methods to create our products. This website is for educational purposes only, and all experimentation should be done at each individuals own risk.

Culatello

December 30, 2018 by AOG 2 Comments

“And if you don’t know, now you know.” -The Notorious B.I.G.

Culatello and Fiocco di Prosciutto (…plus the Rumpetto)

While most people like prosciutto, only those who really know, know of and enjoy culatello. Culatello is often referred to as the heart of the Prosciutto. It is created when you take the freshly cut rear leg of a pig and you remove the leg bones from it. In doing this, you create two whole muscle bundles of meat. The larger of these is the prized culatello di prosciutto while the smaller of the two is the fiocco di prosciutto, often passed off as the ugly step sibling of the culatello, but quite wrongly so. The culatello, while made from the same part of the pig as the prosciutto, has a much different flavor; earthy and sweet, a delicate balance of fat and meat that dissolves on your tongue.

The Meat

In order to butcher out the culatello and fiocco, you are going to need to understand a bit of the anatomy of the rear leg. Usually, you will receive a leg primal with part of the hip bone still attached. At the face of the meat, the hip bone articulates with the proximal end of the femur. The femur bone runs through the upper portion of the pig rear leg, the distal end of which articulates with the tibia and the patella to form the knee joint. Then, the tibia and the fibula run through the lower portion of the leg. It’s important to understand how these bones lie in the meat, in order to understand how we will need to remove them to get at the culatello and fiocco cleanly.

Once you have situated yourself, the first step is to skin the leg. You can either do this now, or wait until you have removed the aitch bone. Either way is fine. Do this carefully, making sure to leave on as much fat as possible. I’m still working on my skinning skills, so it takes me some time and effort to do this, but experts can do this in a few quick knife strokes.

Next, you want to remove the portion of the hip bone that articulates with the proximal end of the femur, commonly referred to as the aitch bone. You want to gently remove the aitch bone from the head of the femur, cutting any connective tissue between the two that you come across. This will become easier with practice, as you familiarize yourself with the shape of the bone and the way it protrudes into the meat. It is important to do this carefully, and not cut unnecessarily into the meat. Feel free to use your hands to feel around the bone and inform your cuts. Free the aitch bone entirely, and remove it from the leg.

When the aitch bone is removed from the leg, it should have as little meat on it as possible, meaning that your cuts were clean and efficient. Mine is not quite there, but with practice, makes perfect.

After you have removed the aitch bone, you should have what looks like an Italian style prosciutto leg, with the exposed ball joint at the face of the meat.

Similarly to making a prosciutto, what you want to do at this point is start to milk the femoral vein. After death, blood can pool in the venous system, even if the blood was drained during the slaughtering process. We want to eliminate all the blood from this piece of meat before we start curing, or it could negatively impact our end results. There are a number of videos and descriptions online of how to do this, but briefly, I attempt to trace the femoral vein through its course in the leg, starting at the distal end and working my way to the proximal face. I apply as much pressure as possible, and attempt to force blood out of the vein in this manner. It’s also important to note, this isn’t a process you can do only once. If you receive a leg that has been frozen, sometimes the blood will be frozen as well, and won’t drain on the day you are cutting. Its important to do this multiple times throughout the process, to make sure all the blood is really drained.

Finally, it’s time to do the thing that, if you’re experienced making prosciutto, seems sacrilegious; cutting into the leg. There are traditional ways to do this, but I’ve found a method that I prefer and that works for me. I prefer to cut straight down on top of the bone, and carefully extract it. As someone with less experience, this method helps me to make sure that I don’t commit any grievous errors. If you are more experienced, you can simply “know” where the bone runs, and cut the culatello off by feel.

Once I have exposed the bone and freed it from its attachments to the bundles of meat that are the culatello and fiocco, you have a few options for how you want to cut them out. I like this method, because by leaving both the culatello and fiocco attached, you gain a triangular shaped whole muscle at the face of the prosciutto.

I like to make the first cut across the leg, to trim up the faces of the culatello and fiocco, while simultaneously freeing this meat that I call the rumpetto. I like to cure this with spices and cold smoke it, in a modified version of speck. If you don’t save this muscle whole, you can use this extra meat for salami.

Once the face of the meat is trimmed, you can cut out the entire culatello and fiocco.

You want to trim the culatello into its characteristic teardrop shape. Once you have trimmed it up, you want to tie it using tight slip knots, to help it maintain its shape and make sure there are no air pockets created during the butchering process. And that’s it! You’ve shaped your culatello and fiocco.

Salting (4C/40F, 3 weeks+)

For the salting of culatello, I like to keep it simple. I do an equilibrium cure with salt, black pepper, and cure #2. Some people don’t use cure #2 for whole muscles like this, but I do. I generally cure both the culatello and fiocco in this simple cure, although sometimes I will experiment a bit with the fiocco. I keep them curing in a vacuum sealed bag in the fridge. You can use the following interactive spreadsheets to calculate the cure you will need for your own project; just fill in the weight of your meat in the appropriate white cell in the spreadsheet and hit enter. There is no need to make any other changes to the spreadsheet.

For the rumpetto, I used an alpine spice mix generally used for making speck.

*Notes:

1- Please use common sense. Make sure the spreadsheet is working properly for you and double check any calculations that don’t seem right.

2- I like to use equilibrium curing. It allows me some flexibility in when I process the meat after curing, since the time left in the cure doesn’t matter, it is the percentages that are used that do. However, some people don’t do this type of curing and use excess curing instead. In excess curing, it is the time that the meat is left in the cure that matters. If you would rather do excess curing for culatello, cure the culatello in excess sea salt for 1 day per kg of meat. (For example, for a prosciutto that weights 14 kg, this means it would stay in excess sea salt for 14 days).

Casing

Once the culatello and fiocco have been allowed to cure for the appropriate amount of time, you need to rinse them and case them. The culatello is traditionally cased in a hog bladder, since it is one of the few things that will expand to the necessary size. Depending on where you live, you may be able to find hog bladders for sale online. I like the ones that have been packed in salt, not the ones that have been pre-dried that you need to rehydrate. However, it’s really whatever works for you.

You will need to soak the bladder first, to allow it to relax and expand.

When you’re ready to go, you cut open the mouth of the bladder, and stuff the rinsed and dried culatello inside. It may seem like it won’t fit, but chances are it will. Once its in, you need to sew the bladder back to together. You can do this using any type of needle and thread that works, or even surgical sutures! I treat the fiocco the same way as the culatello, so by the end I have two pieces of meat encased in bladders.

Once the meat is cased in the bladder, it’s time to tie it. Experts can do this process in the matter of 10 minutes or less. The rest of us can be happy just to have it done. It’s hard to explain the tying of the culatello, because you really need to watch it being done. There are a number of videos online for it, so I suggest searching google for videos on how to do the tying. The traditional culatello di Zibello type of tying is what we’re going for here. Of course, at this point the tying is mostly aesthetic, but it’s nice to learn the tradition and can actually be quite fun.

On the other hand, the rumpetto was easily cased in a beef bung, and was hand tied more simply. After tying, it was cold smoked for 4 hours using beechwood.

Drying (13C/55F, 70%RH, 9-12 months):

After you have tied your culatello, fiocco, and rumpetto, you are ready to let them hang.

Here, the hard part is the waiting. You are shooting for ~30% loss, but you also want to allow it to hang for enough time to develop a good flavor. I try to leave my fiocco hanging for at least 6 months and the culatello for at least 9 months, a year if I can handle it.

First, I pulled the rumpetto, or baby speck.

After the rumpetto, I pulled the fiocco.

Finally, it was time to pull the culatello.

Tasting

The nice part about curing the all 3 cuts (the rumpetto, the fiocco, and the culatello), is that the rumpetto is done after a short 3 months and the fiocco is done after 6 months, which allows you to satisfy your taste bud curiously about how the process went.

The rumpetto was cut into first.

The smoky fat combined really well with the alpine spices in this baby speck.

The first time I cut into the fiocco I was shocked.

After hearing about how it was the poor step sibling of the culatello, I wasn’t expecting too much. It was great. A nice strong flavor, and well balanced meat to fat ratio.

Cut forward 6 months to the culatello. When I cut open the culatello I think my jaw dropped. Jaw dropping beauty and flavor to match.

It was only then when I realized why the fiocco was called the ugly step sibling of the culatello. Not because the fiocco isn’t great, but because the culatello is SO fantastic. It’s hard to describe the flavor, but the balance of earthy sweetness with salty funk and smooth fat is the ultimate experience.

It’s great served by itself, with some crusty bread, or with some melon. Just make sure you have another one in the making, because it won’t last long!

Prosciutto

September 16, 2018 by AOG 12 Comments

“This is it. The big one. The one we’ve all been waiting for.” -Oliver Wood

When I was a kid, I begged my parents to buy me lunchables; instead, they stocked my brown paper bag with prosciutto, mortadella, and crackers. In high school, prosciutto and arugula sandwiches became my daily lunch and pre-sports snack. When I studied abroad in Pisa, I alternated between caprese sandwiches and the wide range of salumi available to me, always finding a way back to the prosciutto. When I traveled to Spain and discovered the Spanish sister of prosciutto, jamón, I made my sister eat so much of it with me that she became a vegetarian for a bit when we came back home. So, it seemed only natural to me when I started along my meat curing journey, that making prosciutto would be on the list.

It took me a while. Making prosciutto, or jamón, is an intimidating undertaking. I read and read and read. I found books, blogs, online groups, and research articles. Finally, I traveled to Emilia-Romagna with my sister, and we visited two different prosciuttifici, one in Parma and one in Modena. It was these visits that finally gave me the confidence to go forward with curing my own prosciutto. (NOTE: All of this preparation was probably overkill, if you’re considering taking the plunge, go for it!)

Finally, I made contact with a farm in Michigan I found through online meat curing groups, Ham Sweet Farm. They raise great quality animals in a very conscientious manner, and their meat has been among the best I’ve used, if not the best. I got a rear leg from them to use for prosciutto, and the process was started.

The meat:

In Europe, animals are usually processed using seam butchery, meaning that individual muscles are kept intact. This is an intensive process that requires significant time and effort, so in America most animals are butchered by making cuts across the muscles, using technology such as the band saw. Both methods have their own pros and cons, but it’s important to know that if you receive the meat as a primal from an American processor, you will generally receive it with the ball and socket hip bone intact, and part of the hip bone just sawed through to create the cut of meat.

In order to cure prosciutto in the Italian way, as opposed to the Spanish way, you need to do some butchering to the leg primal. You will need to remove what is left of the hip bone, called the aitch bone in this context, and expose the ball part of the ball and socket hip joint. You can then clean up the surface, and this will give you the characteristic shape of the Italian prosciutto. If you prefer to cure the prosciutto the Spanish way, you can leave the aitch bone in place and simply clean up the surface of the meat as needed.

After the aitch bone is removed, the next important step is to milk the femoral vein. After death, blood can pool in the venous system. The processor will usually do their best to flush the system of all blood, but often they don’t get it all. You want to “milk” the vein by pressing firmly on the distal end of the vein and tracing its path through the leg until you get to the proximal, open end at the face of the leg. Blood should pour out of the open end. Repeat this until it doesn’t. If the meat you are using is still semi frozen (like mine was), you may not have a lot of luck with this process. You can try again after the “first salting”.

First Salting (4C/40F, 1 week):

For prosciutto, we add in a step we don’t usually use for other cured meats called the “first salting”. I learned about this method when visiting the prosciutto factories in Parma. It was explained to me that this is done to draw out excess blood and to limit bacteria growth early in the process.

To do the first salting, you take an excess of sea salt, and pack it onto the open face of the prosciutto, paying particular attention to the femoral head and the places where the veins are exposed. Use an extra-large ziplock bag in a plastic container (in case of leakage) and allow this process to take place in your regular fridge at 4C. After a week, you want to wash away the excess salt. Don’t be surprised if you see a bloody and salty liquid in the bottom of the bag… that just means the salt is doing its job of pulling out any excess blood. Try again to milk the femoral vein to get out any blood that may be left, and then move on to the second salting.

Second Salting (4C/40F, 3 weeks+):

For the second salting, we do an equilibrium cure. The Italian method just uses sea salt, while the Spanish method also uses nitrates. Because I am a fan of using nitrates for safety reasons, I added them into my cure.

*Note: I like to use equilibrium curing. It allows me some flexibility in when I process the meat after curing, since the time left in the cure doesn’t matter, it is the percentages that are used that do. However, some people don’t do this type of curing and use excess curing instead. In excess curing, it is the time that the meat is left in the cure that matters. If you would rather do excess curing for prosciutto, cure the prosciutto in excess sea salt for 1 day per kg of meat. (For example, for a prosciutto that weights 14 kg, this means it would stay in excess sea salt for 14 days).

Drying (13C/55F, 65%RH, 12 months):

After the meat as been cured, it is time to move it to the curing chamber. Brush off any remaining cure and hang it in the chamber set around 55F and 65% RH.

Allow the prosciutto to hang for 12 months, tracking the weight loss over this time if possible. By the end of the year, it should have lost around 30% of its initial weight.

Applying a Sugna:

Following in the Italian tradition, a sugna is applied after the meat has reached its approximate final weight loss, to allow for continued aging for flavor development without drying out the meat.

Before applying the sugna, make sure to use white vinegar to clean off the surface of the prosciutto, removing any mold that has accumulated on the surface.

The sugna is made of lard, rice flour, and black pepper. For my sugna, I rendered leaf lard that I had from Ham Sweet Farm. However, you can use lard that is purchased from the store as well.

After the sugna is applied, the meat is either put back in the curing chamber, or more ideally in a wine cellar or aging room at a slighter higher temperature to allow for better flavor development. Not everyone uses this method, so if you’d prefer to skip it, that’s alright too. Instead of continuing to age the prosciutto after 12 months and around 30% weight loss, you can move straight to harvesting and tasting your prosciutto.

Aging (17C/62F, 50%RH, 6 months+):

The prosciutto with the sugna is allowed to age for another 6 months to a year to develop a more complex flavor profile.

Tasting:

That’s it! When the prosciutto has been aged for at least 18 months, it’s ready! You can either hand cut the prosciutto or remove the bone and slice it on a deli slicer. To hand slice it, place the prosciutto on its side and cut away the skin and outer fat first. Then, carefully cut slices off the prosciutto using a thin, long knife. When you reach the bone, cut around it as much as possible. Then, flip the prosciutto over and cut from the other side. You can keep hand slicing around the bones until all the meat is gone!

Perfect Nova Lox

January 11, 2018 by AOG 8 Comments

Okay. Here it is. The simplest, best way to make real nova lox at home. I’ve made lox a number of different ways throughout the years, many of which have been chronicled here (3-step Lox, Quick Lox, etc…). But I have finally perfected the simple 2 step, equilibrium cured nova lox, and I think it’s a real winner. Try it if you don’t believe me.

This method uses equilibrium curing (which if you don’t know what I’m saying, read up on it here). This method uses 2.5% salt and 1.5% brown sugar, time, and smoke to create some of the most delectable cured fish you’ve ever tasted. Let’s dive in.

The Fish

First, you want to find a nice piece of salmon fillet. I get sushi grade salmon from my local Asian food stores, but any good quality salmon should work. You can pick it based on the size you want to cure; if I’m making it for myself I will pick up just a small fillet, whereas if I’m making it for a group of people, I will pick up a whole side of salmon. You can also pick your piece based on whether you prefer the center of the cut or the belly. I prefer the salmon belly meat, so I pick my salmon fillets to maximize the lovely fat streaks found there.

Step #1: Dry Cure (24-48 hours)

Once you return home with your piece of salmon, rinse it and pat it dry. Weigh the meat and record the weight. This is a simple equilibrium cure with just two ingredients, salt and brown sugar. Weigh out 2.5% salt, and 1.5% brown sugar. Add this to the salmon fillet, ensuring that the entire visible surface is covered. You can do this in any container that fits the salmon, and allows for the cure to stay in contact with the salmon, but I prefer to use vacuum sealed bag to maximize the surface area contact. After you have sealed your container, put it in your fridge and allow it to cure for 24-48 hours. The beauty of the equilibrium cure is that you cannot over salt your project, so you have a bit more flexibility with time.

Step #2: Cold Smoking (4 hours)

I took my fillet out of the cure after ~24 hours. You want to rinse it off, pat it dry, and move it to a rack for cold smoking. As I’ve mentioned before in my lox posts, if you want to stop at this point, you can. You will have salt cured salmon that is pretty good. But nova lox is cold smoked, so that is the next step in our project. There are a number of ways to create a cold smoking set up. I have used a bunch of different methods, from using a Smoking Gun and a Styrofoam cooler, to using a Little Chief Smoker, to the method I have finally arrived upon that I love, the A-Maze-N Smoker tube inside my Weber grill (although any enclosed space outside would work). The primary goal is to have a continuous source of smoking wood that never reaches more than 90-100 F.

Place the salmon inside your cold smoking set up on a rack to allow air flow. I like a subtle yet undeniably present taste of smoke in my lox, so I cold smoke for ~4 hours. You can adjust this time according to your tastes. I generally use applewood or hickory, but most recently I used beechwood because I had it around for other projects, and it was great, so don’t worry about experimenting with different words for this step.

Equalization (Overnight)

When the cold smoking is done, you want to allow the salmon time to equalize. Sprinkle with pepper and dill if you wish, and leave the salmon on a rack, uncovered in your fridge overnight or for ~8 hours.

Tasting

The next morning, you can start to slice up your freshly made nova lox!

If you find that you are making a lot of home cured lox, you might want to invest in a salmon knife. They’re relatively easy to get online, and making thin slicing of lox a whole lot easier.

Slice it as thin as you can and you are ready to go!

Storage

You can slice it all in one go, or you can keep it in a vacuum sealed bag and take slices out of it as you wish. I find that when stored like this, it lasts about a week or so.

Disclaimer: Curing fish is a hobby that comes with inherent risks. We can all do things to limit this risk by educating ourselves about the process and the utilizing the safest known methods to create our products. This website is for educational purposes only, and all experimentation should be done at each individuals own risk.

Spanish Style Chorizo

August 29, 2017 by AOG Leave a Comment

Chorizo! Chorizo! Chorizo! There are so many different kinds of chorizo that it can be hard to know where to begin when talking about chorizo. Some chorizo, such as Mexican style chorizo, is a fresh sausage that is great to crumble and cook with eggs for breakfast. Fresh sausage chorizo are great and can liven up any dish that they are added to. But for me, the real magic is in the Spanish style, dry cured chorizo. Spanish style chorizo is made using a combination of Spanish spices, prominently both dulce and picante pimentón de la Vera. Like any other dry cured salami, it is allowed to hang after it has been mixed and stuffed, until it loses ~30-40% of its initial weight, and is ready to eat at that point. Unlike the fresh style chorizo, the Spanish style chorizo does not need to be cooked to be eaten. The combination of spices in this Spanish style chorizo are fantastic, and it is one of my all time favorite salami. Packed full of flavor, its great however you want to eat it.

Planning

For this salami, you want to use pimentón de la Vera, not just any old paprika. Good quality flavor makes all the difference. Other than that, it’s a pretty simple recipe, so the other spices are ones you probably will have on hand. The ratio of meat/fat is the usual 70/30 percent. I tend to use meat from the shoulder for the meat and belly fat for the fat (because I love the flavor/texture of belly fat) but it is more traditional to use the more firm back fat for this. Whatever you choose to use, just make sure your fat is at least 30% of the total meat weight. Once you’ve weighed your meat, put the value into your spreadsheet, and calculate how much of each spice that you will need. I used a 50/50 sweet to spicy pimentón de la Vera, but if you prefer more spice, you can up the percentage (just make sure to keep the total percentage of the pimentón de la Vera at 2.5% of the weight of the meat). My ratios are below.

Cubing

After you have planned the ratios for your meat, it’s time to get started. Making sure you keep everything cold (I par freeze my meat before hand and return it to the freezer when I am done working with it), cube the meat into 1 inch pieces that will fit into your grinder. For this salami, I really prefer to have my fat hand diced, so I cut it into ¼ inch pieces. If you want to grind it, cut it into 1 inch pieces like the meat, and grind it through a coarse die.

Grinding and Mixing

Grind your meat (and your fat if you are not choosing to hand cut your fat) while it is still partially frozen to make the process go as smoothly as possible. I grind the meat on a medium grind, and the fat on a coarse grind (if I am grinding it). You can mix the spices with the cubed meat before you grind it, or with the ground meat afterwards. I generally mix it before hand to get better spice distribution.

After grinding the meat, making sure to keep it cold throughout the entire process, you want to mix the meat, fat, and spices together to get a nice bind. I used a stand mixer on the slowest setting for this, although you can also do this step by hand. You want to mix it enough to get a good bind, but not so much that it becomes mush.

Stuffing

After the meat has been mixed together, it’s time to stuff it. I used two different diameter casings for this, smaller diameter beef middles and larger diameter beef bungs. The smaller diameter ones are more traditional for Spanish style chorizo, but I like a larger diameter salami, so I made one for fun.

Fermentation
Temperature: 75ᵒF/23-24C (strain dependent)
Humidity: 80-90% RH
Time: 48-72 hours (until pH drops to at least 5.3)

After the chorizo has been stuffed, it’s time to allow it to ferment. The conditions for the fermentation will be strain dependent. I use B-LC-007, which is a starter culture that requires temperatures of ~70F and a relative humidity ~80-90%. I let the chorizo ferment for ~48 hours, which is about the time it should take to allow the pH to drop into the ideal range. I don’t currently use a pH meter (they’re relatively expensive), but if you have one, now is the time to use it. Ideally, you want to see the pH drop to around 5.3.

Cold Smoking

It is not traditional to cold smoke chorizo, but you can if you want to. For an experiment, I cold smoked one link of this chorizo that I made to compare it to the others during the tasting phase. Make sure you smoke with a complimentary wood (I used beech for this) and that you keep your temperatures in the actual cold smoking range (<90F).

Drying
Temperature: 54F/12C
Humidity: 70% RH

After the meat has undergone fermentation, it’s time to let it dry. I hang it in my curing chamber in the usual conditions, ~55F/70%RH, until its lost ~40% if its initial weight. If you want it to be more firm, you can let it go even longer than 40%, but I like mine to be a little on the softer side.

Tasting

The best part is always the tasting! After the meat has lost the appropriate amount of weight for your tastes, you can pull it from the curing chamber. For this, I pulled the smaller diameter chorizo first.

I compared the flavor of the smoked chorizo to the non-smoked chorizo.

I personally preferred the non-smoked, but others who tried it preferred the smoked. I think it’s one of those things that is up to personal tastes.

After the larger diameter salami lost the appropriate amount of weight, I pulled it as well. This one was great!

Nothing was different in this one except for the diameter of the casing, but I liked it a lot more. Maybe just because I could slice it thin and really taste it, but WOW; this is an all-time favorite.

This chorizo is great served in a platter with other meats, on bread, or with wine.