Duck Prosciutto

February 10, 2023 by AOG Leave a Comment

…without a curing chamber.

Name: Duck Prosciutto

This post will detail how you can get started making your very own duck prosciutto without using a curing chamber. This is a good entry level project, since in most places you can easily buy a duck breast from the grocery store and its relatively small size means it will be done sooner than most other projects. In order to do this, we are going to be using UMAI dry bags and the regular fridge. If you haven’t read the Beginner’s Guide yet, now would be a good time to do that. Let’s get started!

The meat:

To make duck prosciutto, all you need is a single duck breast. You can usually find this at a larger grocery store or at your local butcher shop.

Curing (4C/40F, 2+ weeks):

Once you have the duck breast, it’s time to weigh it. I almost always use an equilibrium cure, which allows me some flexibility with the timing of my projects. I suggest using it, to avoid projects that end up under/over salted. For more information on equilibrium curing vs excess curing, refer back to the Beginner’s Guide.

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.

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

Weigh all the spices and mix all them together.

Then, cover the meat with them.

Vacuum seal it all together.

Casing:

After the meat has been cured for 2+ weeks, it’s time to take it out, rinse it, and pat it dry.

Grab an UMAI dry bag and VacMouse channel vacuum adapter.

Place the duck breast in the bag. Vacuum seal it with the VacMouse adapter at the mouth of the bag to help it seal. The company says that it doesn’t need to fully seal to work, but the only time I had a bad result was when the bag wasn’t fully sealed, so I would do my best to achieve as tight a vacuum seal as possible.

**Drying (4C/40F, any RH*, 1-2 months)**:

The nice thing about using the UMAI dry bags, is that you no longer need to control the humidity of the atmosphere where it will be drying. This means you don’t need a special curing chamber, and can use the regular fridge. That being said, I’ve had a few projects dry out too fast and get some case hardening. Now, when I do an UMAI dry bag project in the regular fridge, I save one of the vegetable drawers for it. I put a drying rack in the drawer to allow for air movement around the piece of meat, and I turn the tab to “high” humidity. Using this method I’ve had great results using these bags in the regular fridge.

So, once you’ve sealed the duck breast in the UMAI dry bag, place it on a rack in the fridge. As mentioned above, if you can spare a vegetable drawer for it, that would be best.

Once it has lost 30-45% of its original weight, according to your tastes, remove it from the fridge. This should take 1-2 months depending on your conditions.

Tasting:

Finally! When the right amount of time has passed, remove the duck breast from the fridge.

I like to do a red wine rinse at the end for any mold that may have accumulated, which can happen even in the regular fridge, but is less common than in the curing chamber where you usually have inoculated it with mold. After the red wine rinse, pat dry, slice, and enjoy!

The perfect addition to a charcuterie plate!

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.

Duck Salami

March 14, 2016 by AOG 13 Comments

Duck salami, or salami d’anatra, is a project that I had been wanting to tackle for a while. Duck salami itself isn’t easy to find commercially, and even the duck salami that is found in stores and restaurants tends to use pork fat. I was looking to create a pork free product, for those who keep kosher or halal, so I debated a number of different sources for fat, before deciding to do a 100% duck salami.

I love duck fat, so the taste of it was a huge pro for me. I also like the way that duck fat melts in your mouth, another pro. My main concern about using duck fat in duck salami was working with the duck fat at room temperature. I have seen a few different values given for the slip melting point of duck fat, but the most consistent value seems to be around 77F/25C. I made sure to do all of my processes at around 70F/21C, worked fast, and I utilized the freezer to make sure everything stayed cold.

Planning Phase:

I bought 4 duck breasts to use for this project. Before I started, I put them in the freezer for an hour or so to get them nice and cold. I cut the fat away from the meat, and I weighed the meat and the fat separately. Ideally there would be a 70% meat to 30% fat ratio, mine was close enough to that, so I just worked with what I had. I decided to try two different cures, one spicy using calabrese peperconcini and one in the style of duck l’orange.

Below are the cure ratios I used:

I weighed everything necessary for the cure, and mixed it altogether (with the exception of the starter culture).

Meat Cubing Phase:

After I weighed all of the meat, fat, and cure spices, I was ready to move on. I cubed both the fat and the meat and kept them separate.

In this case, I mixed the cure with the cubed meat. I don’t always do this; sometimes I wait to mix the cure with the ground meat. I haven’t assessed which method is best yet, and both have worked for me.

Meat Grinding Phase:

After I cubed the meat, I put it back in the freezer to let it get colder again. After an hour or so, I was ready to grind the meat. I had decided to use a course ground on the duck meat, and hand cut the duck fat in order to avoid smearing.

I ran the meat through the meat grinder, and collected it into a bowl at the end. At this point, I had course ground duck meat and hand cut fat.

I mixed this with the fat that was hand cut. I also dissolved the starter culture in a minimal amount of water and mixed it with the ground meat, hand cut fat, and spice cure.

If you are in need of a break, this is a good point to stop. You can freeze the mixture overnight, and get started again if the morning if need be.

Meat Stuffing Phase:

Once you have your ground meat/fat/cure/spice mixture it is time to stuff it into casings. I used to use the grinder to stuff my salami, but I have since moved to a dedicated stuffer and it is awesome.

I only had one wide diameter casing left, and a bunch of small ones. I decided to make the duck l’orange into a larger duck salame, and the spicy calabrese duck salami into numerous smaller duck salami. I soaked the casings to get them ready to use.

I made sure to mix the ingredients together thoroughly. I put the mixture into the stuffer, and got out as much air as possible.

At this point, I picked the casing, tied off one end, and gathered the rest of the casing, pushing it down around the stuffing horn.

I used one hand to steady the casing around the stuffing horn, and another to crank the stuffer. When the salami reached my desired size, I twisted the casing and used butcher string to keep the separation.

I continued this process until I finished stuffing all of the duck salami mixture. I used a toothpick, to puncture any air holes in the salami at this point.

Fermentation Phase:

Temperature: 75ᵒF/23-24C

Humidity: 80-90% RH (strain dependent)

Time: 48-72 hours (until pH drops to at least 5.3)

Once all the salami was stuffed into casings, it was time to allow the meat to ferment. This is the stage I was most worried about when thinking about using duck fat. Luckily, the starter culture I was using had a relatively low fermentation temperature, and I made sure the temperature didn’t rise about 75 F/23-24C in the fermentation chamber.

At this point, I sprayed the salami with Bactoferm 600, a commercially available form of penicillium nalgiovense.

I have attempted to track the fermentation stage using pH monitoring before, but I don’t always do that. This time, I tracked the fermentation stage just by time. After 3 days, I moved on to the drying phase.

Drying Phase:

Temperature: 54F/12C

Humidity: 70% RH

For the drying phase, I set the chamber to its usual settings (55F/70-80% RH). The salami was allowed to dry over time. Usually I allow my salami to go to 40% weight loss, but these plateaued at around 35% weight loss. I attribute this to the higher fat content of these salami. Regardless, they were pulled at around 35% weight loss.

Initial Tasting Phase:

After the duck salami weight loss plateaued, I pulled them from the chamber.

After I pulled the duck salami, I removed the casing, and wiped them down with white vinegar. I patted them dry after this.

I sliced them open. Wow.

The spicy calabrese duck salami was a kick in the mouth. Flavorful and spicy. They were slightly over powering due to the strong heat from the calabrese pepperoncini, but if it’s not spicy, you’re not doing your job right?

The salame duck l’orange was amazing. The complex flavors really lent themselves well to the flavor of the duck.

After one last look…

I took the salami and vacuum sealed them, before putting them in the fridge for long term storage.

Duck Prosciutto

January 24, 2016 by AOG 8 Comments

While I have previously written about making whole muscle cures, I have learned a lot since my initial attempts which I chronicled at the time. As I am constantly learning and adapting methods, my next few posts will discuss some of the whole muscle cures that I have made more recently, and the specific protocols or recipes that I have used. If you are looking for an overview of meat curing, please refer back to my charcuterie page introduction.

Duck Prosciutto, or prosciutto d’anatra, is a delicious cured meat product made by curing duck breasts. It can be made a few different ways, two of which I will detail here.

Duck Prosciutto is a cured meat product that many suggest as an entry level cured meat. While that may be the case due to its small size and short curing time, the layer of fat on the breast as well as traditional casing methods can complicate things. In fact, my first duck prosciutto attempt was actually my first cured meat failure. I had uneven drying, and instead if using a method to even it out, I considered it a failure and threw it out.

(I now know better, and if any of my products have uneven drying or case hardening, I make sure that I vacuum seal them and leave them in a traditional refrigerator for an unspecified period of time until they have evened out. At this point, they can be rehung until they reach the desired water weight loss point.)

A traditional duck breast is part meat, with a thick layer of fat on one side.

Because of the makeup of fat compared to protein, the fatty portion of the duck breast has less water to lose than the meat portion of the duck breast. This is important to know when deciding when a duck prosciutto is ready, since the target of 30% water weight loss might take longer than expected to reach (and in fact, may not be necessary depending on how much fat the cut really has!)

Method #1: Equilibrium Curing

Deciding on a spice cure for a duck prosciutto is 100% personal preference after the necessary additional of salt, and in my opinion, nitrates or cure #2 as I will refer to it from here on out. While some people use excess curing for duck prosciutto, I have switched over to using equilibrium curing completely. For more information on this, see the charcuterie introduction. This winter I decided to make two different duck prosciutto, one using more traditional bresaola spices and one that was a play on the French dish of duck l’orange.

Curing (2 weeks):

The duck breasts were mixed with the spice cure and vacuum sealed in a bag and allowed to equilibrate in a traditional refrigerator for the period of two weeks.

Casing (1 hour):

After the two weeks of curing was up, the duck breasts were washed off of all spices and patted dry.

They were cased in beef bungs, and wrapped in butchers netting.

If you refer to older posts, at this point, I used to do a fermentation stage for whole muscle cures. I have come to the conclusion that that is only really necessary for salami, and have stopped doing a fermentation stage for whole muscle cures.

Drying (1 month+, until 30% of weight is lost):

Temperature: 54F/12C, Humidity: 70-80% RH

After casing, the duck prosciutto was hung in the curing chamber at around 55F/12C and around 80% RH.

I have been keeping my humidity higher than I have in the past to allow to slower and more even weight loss, as well as to accommodate the cheeses that I have been keeping in the curing chamber. In this case, the traditional bresaola spiced duck breast reached 30% weight loss first and was pulled. The duck prosciutto l’orange style plateaued at a weight loss of ~25%, most likely due to its high fat content. It was pulled after it plateaued.

Tasting:

The taste test may be the best part of the whole project. The beef bung casing and netting is removed and the meat is rinsed with red wine or white vinegar (personal preference) to remove any mold that may have gotten through the casing on to the meat before being patted dry. The meat can be sliced with a deli slicer or by hand. Hopefully, the results will be heavenly.

The duck prosciutto was hand sliced with my new jamon knife, resulting in thicker slices than the deli slicer produces. Perfect for some late night duck prosciutto snacking.

Tasting of the traditional spiced duck prosciutto:

Tasting of the l’orange style duck prosciutto:

The duck prosciutto was stored in a vacuum sealed bag for snacking at a later date.

Method #2: Excess Curing

Previously, in order to make duck prosciutto I followed the method that is in a lot of the traditional literature. Excess curing is a method where the meat is packed into excess salt and spices, and allowed to cure for anywhere from 24-72 hours.

Curing: First, I did an excess salt/cure #2 and spice cure for 3 days.

Casing: Then, I wiped off then cure, and hung it in a cheesecloth casing for drying.

Drying (2 weeks+): Temperature: 54F/12C, Humidity: 70% RH

The duck breast was weighed in order to track the weight loss over time.

I tracked the weight loss over time and found that it stagnated at about 20% weight loss with some case hardening.

In order to even it out, I placed it under vacuum seal.

Tasting: After it spent some time under vacuum seal, it evened out and ended up absolutely delicious.

These are the two most common methods used to make duck prosciutto. Everyone finds methods that they prefer, and as discussed previously, I have switched to equilibrium curing and beef bungs for more even and replicable drying in the future. However, that is not to say that the excess curing method won’t work for you. Feel free to play around with your curing and create products that make you happy.