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.

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.

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!

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.

‘Nduja

August 24, 2017 by AOG 5 Comments

‘Nduja (en-DOO-yah) wanna do something fun today? Make ‘nduja! If you’re looking for something that is the opposite of subtle, that will kick you in the face and leave you smiling, look no further. ‘Ndjua is a fatty, fiery hot, smoked, spreadable salami that is perfect on some crusty Italian bread or as base for pasta sauce. The combination of spice, smoke, and fat will leave you constantly craving more.

Planning Phase:

The process of making ‘nduja may seem odd to you if you’re used to making traditional salami. The ratios you need to use may seem completely ridiculous. Don’t worry. If it seems excessive, it is. That’s the point. You’re going to want 70% meat and 30% pepper.

In the 70% meat fraction, you want 85% fat and 15% lean meat. No, that’s not a typo. This salami is mostly fat. There are a number of ways to get to this. You can use straight belly or jowls, which tend to have this ratio naturally. Or, you can use backfat and mix it with lean meat.

In the 30% pepper fraction, you can vary the ratios based on tastes. I used 50% sweet pepper and 50% hot pepper. (Just a note: There are a number of ways to make the pepper fraction for ‘nduja. Some people use dried whole peppers, others use dry pepper powder, and still others use paste. If you are using dried whole peppers, you will need to put them through your grinder first. Once they are ground, you can reconstitute them into a paste.) For mine, I used a combination of dry pepper powder and pepper paste to get to my 30% total pepper.

Cubing and Mixing Phase:

Once you have weighed all of your ingredients, you can put them aside while you deal with the meat. First, you want to cube the meat into smaller chunks that will fit in your grinder. I par-freeze my meat, and keep it in the freezer while I am working to ensure that it stays cold and therefore grinds more easily. After the meat is cut, I mix it with the spice cure that I previously had measured out. Some people wait until the meat is ground to mix in the spices, which is also an option, but I feel as though I get a better mixing process achieved by mixing them before grinding (however, it makes my grinder a lot messier this way).

Grinding and Stuffing Phase:

After the meat and spices are mixed, I ran it through the grinder on a fine grind. After the meat was ground, I mixed it in a stand mixer on a low speed to promote adhesion. Then I added the mixture to my vertical stuffer and stuffed the meat into hog middles, a traditional casing for ‘nduja.

Fermentation Phase:

~70F/80-90%RH (starter culture dependent)

After stuffing, I allowed the meat to ferment for 48 hours in my fermentation chamber (aka my oven with the light on, a pan of water at the bottom, and the occasional water spray bottle service).

Cold Smoking Phase:

After the fermentation stage was done (and boy was I glad when this time was up, hog middles stink like no other casing I have worked with before), I put the meat into my cold smoking set up, and cold smoked them with beech wood for 4+ hours.

Drying Phase:

~55F/70%RH

After cold smoking, I tied and weighed each of them.

Then I hung them up in the curing chamber to dry.

‘Nduja has such a high fat content that it’s not expected to lose much weight in the drying phase (10-20%), but importantly it experiences a maturation of flavor in this time. Most people hang their ‘nduja by time instead of weight loss for this reason, and I picked a time point of 2 months.

Tasting Phase:

After 2 months, my ‘nduja had each lost about 20% of their initial weight, more than I expected.

I cut it open and was excited by how beautiful it looked. So, I dove right in. I took a knife and spread some onto a nice piece of toasted sourdough.

WOW. I was blown away; an instant favorite. I knew that I had better start a second batch immediately, because I was going to find a way to sneak this into every dish I made, as well as eat it as a snack as often as possible.

It’s a great way to start a sauce for pasta.

Really, just great all around.

Pancetta Arrotolata

August 24, 2017 by AOG 4 Comments

Previously, I have discussed the different types of pancetta that are commonly made. You can read more about it in my post here. The take away points are that pancetta can either be semi-dried or fully-dried, made either flat (Tesa) or rolled (arrotolata). I prefer the fully dried version of pancetta, so here I made the fully-dried version of pancetta arrotolata.

Pancetta arrotolata is what many people traditionally think of when they think of pancetta. Beautiful streaks of meat and fat, winding in and out, creating a circle of perfection.

Planning Phase:

In order to make pancetta arrotolata, you will need to start with a flat pork belly. You can either use a pork belly that has skin on or skin off. Skin on is traditional, and ensures that you will have a slower, steadier weight loss. The downsides are that it can take a lot of time to lose the weight you need and it is a bit trickier to manipulate. I used skin on for mine, but if I were to do it again, I might choose to do skin off and save the skin for another purpose.

First, weigh the pork belly, and put the weight of the meat into your spice cure spreadsheet to get the values that you need to use for your spice cure mixture. Pancetta is generally made with aromatic spices, so that is what I did here.

Curing Phase (3+ weeks):

After the spice cure is weighed, mix it, and add it to the meat, making sure cover the meat thoroughly.

Add it to a vacuum sealed or ziplock bag, and leave it to penetrate the meat for 3+ weeks in the fridge.

Casing and Tying Phase:

After the meat has cured, it’s rinsed and dried. Now, pancetta arrotolata has a few extra steps that pancetta tesa does not have. Anytime you introduce an exterior into the interior of a meat that will be cured, you increase the possibility of things going awry. When rolling the pancetta, you want to make sure that you roll it as tight as possible, so that you don’t introduce air pockets into the cured where undesirables can thrive. Toasted black peppercorns can be added to the meat to help protect against the growth of bad bacteria, as well as for flavor.

There are a few ways to roll pancetta arrotolata, but I chose to use a traditional method. For this method, a flap of skin is removed from the underlying belly, but remains attached to the test of the skin. With the meat side of the belly facing upwards, a cut is made in the center, and half of the belly is cut into two thinner pieces, still attached to the rest of the meat. The exposed meat is covered with black peppercorns, and rolled up from the thin side to the thick side. My butchering left a bit to be desired, but take a look at the pictures to get an idea of what I mean. If this sounds too complicated for you, you can just roll the belly up tightly, making sure to cut off the skin on the areas that will be rolled into the interior.

After the belly is rolled up tightly, you want to make sure it stays that way. Traditionally this is done by tying string around the meat and making sure it’s as tight as possible. Another way to do this is to use zip ties. Zip ties are less aesthetically pleasing, but I wanted to make sure that I didn’t get a ruined piece of meat at the end with a lot of air pockets and interior mold growth, so I used them.

The skin acts as a natural casing for this meat, so you don’t need to case it if you are doing it skin on. If you are doing it skin off, I would suggest using a natural casing to slow the weight loss and to maintain more even drying. After its all tied up tightly and cased, I added string to hang it.

Drying Phase (3+ months)

55F/70%RH

It was allowed to hang in the curing chamber at 55F/70%RH. My target weight loss was 30%, but I was happy to pull it when it reached 20% due to its high fat content.

After 3-4 months, I pulled the pancetta arrotolata at ~20% weight loss.

The outside looked gnarly.

But the inside looked beautiful.

Decadent and delicious.

Guanciale

March 9, 2017 by AOG 4 Comments

Sometimes, you need to undertake a multi-month process in order to make a great dish of pasta for dinner. In this case, that process starts with a pig jowl and ends in a delicious plate of pasta all’amatriciana. Yup, I’m talking about making guanciale, or a dry cured pig jowl.

Planning Phase:

This process starts with a nice piece of pig jowl, or pig cheek. In my case, I picked up a pig jowl from a local farmer’s market. I did some research into traditional cures that would give it good flavor without being too overpowering.

Curing Phase (2 weeks+):

I weighed the meat and the spices first.

Then, I vacuum sealed them and allowed it to cure in the fridge.

It should stay in the cure for a minimum of 2 weeks, although I left mine in for 4 months because I got distracted. That’s one of the major benefits of using an equilibrium cure, the meat can stay in it for while while life happens.

Drying Phase (2 months+):

After 4 months (whoops) I took the meat out of cure, rinsed it in cold water, patted it dry, and coated it with black pepper. I used a needle and thread to sew a hole through the meat in order to hang it up in the curing chamber.

The meat was hung in the curing chamber for 2 months, until its weight loss plateaued at 20%.

Tasting Phase:

I sliced this up thin to taste it, and boy does it have some good flavor.

Without being overpowering, this cure brought out the best of the flavor of the pork jowl.

Sliced thin, this is perfect for tasting.

I cut thicker stripes to use as a base for pasta sauce.

Pasta all’amatriciana and carbonara here I come!

…without a curing chamber.

Name: Duck Prosciutto

The meat:

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

Casing:

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

Tasting:

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