agnello

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!

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.

Lamb Salami

Lamb Culatello