After working toward this for a few years, I've finally started my first batch of Salami, the classic fermented sausage. I've got the cultures, I've got a place to hang it, I've improvised an incubator, we're ready to go. I'm using the recipe from Ruhlman's Charcuterie. The recipe starts with 4 lbs of pork shoulder and a pound of fat. The key aspect to salami is that there are distinct chunks of the fat in among the meat mix.
Preparing the mince
I've done the "get a pork shoulder and cut it up" a bunch of times, and this was no different: you go to the supermarket and ask for a whole
boston butt (that's what it's called in California, the names of cuts vary around the country) with the fat cap on. Typically, if you get the pretrimmed shoulder, it's had the fat removed, and you need that fat. This particular butt was just about 11 pounds, of which I got about 1 1/2 pounds of fat, 8 1/2 pounds of meat, 1/2 pound of bone (very tiny!), and less than a 1/2 pound of scraps (usually that "soft fat" that doesn't grind well). Soft fat is a sort of foamy, squishy fat that's found between muscles, often mixed with some connective tissue. Pork shoulder is a great meat - it's really cheap, it gets some exercise from the pig walking around, it has good flavor, and it's not too lean - even though modern commercial pork is "the other white meat" and generally too lean.
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| Trimmed Boston Butt |
You start by trimming the fat cap off, it's about 1/2-3/4" thick - a sharp thin knife works well - since we want chunks in the salami, we really want the cap in a solid chunk. If your butcher has it, you can just get back fat, which is even better - that's the thick layer of fat between the pig's muscles and the skin. The commercial boston butt has most of that trimmed off.
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| Fat Cap cut into strips |
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| That's a half pound bone there. |
Then it's just a matter of cutting the remainder into convenient sized chunks that can be fed into the grinder. In most shoulders there's a weird shaped bone you'll need to excavate - it's part of the pig's shoulder blade, and has curves and hollows in it, so a good boning knife helps to follow the bone and extract it. You're making sausage, you're going to grind the meat anyway, so pretty cutting isn't needed.
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| A nice hunk of shoulder, notice the marbling in the middle of the muscle. |
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Then slice it up - I use a butcher's cimeter (or scimitar)
to cut about 1" slices |
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| And then cube it |
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| 8 pounds of cubed shoulder (with some scrap in the corner) |
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| Shoulder Grinding |
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| Fat Grinding |
Now that we've got all our meat ready, we put it in the freezer. Frozen (or almost frozen) grinds much better. If the meat (or grinder) is too warm, the fat melts and smears which is bad for the texture. Normally, for most sausage, you grind the fat and meat together, but for salami, you want distinct chunks. I ground the fat through the coarse plate, but it still came out a bit fine - we'll see what it looks like when the sausage is done. I think next time, I'll just cut the fat into little cubes by hand.
Mix and Stuff
The next step is to mix the seasoning, curing materials, and bacteria culture, then stuff it into the casings. The Ruhlman recipe is:
- 4 lb of meat
- 1 lb of fat
- 2 ounces of Cure #2 (mixture of Salt, Sodium Nitrite, and Sodium Nitrate)
- 30 grams of dextrose
- 12 grams of ground pepper
- 6 grams of garlic
- 125 ml of red wine
- 60 ml of water with half a packet of Bactoferm F-RM-52 culture
All fermented sausages rely on a combination of bacteria to convert the sugar (in this recipe, the dextrose) to acid and lower the pH. The pathogens (bad bacteria) can't live in an acidic environment. They also convert the nitrate into nitrite gradually. Non-fermented curing uses just sodium nitrite, typically included as "
pink salt", which is NOT that Himalayan pink salt so popular these days. By the way, if you see sausage (or bacon) that advertises "uncured" or "no nitrites added", you'll usually see something like celery juice in the ingredients. Well, celery juice has lots of nitrites in it. The potential bad health effects from nitrites and nitrates are from having too much (and then cooking at high temperatures) - by using the commercial curing salt, we can accurately control the amount of nitrate and nitrite.
This particular recipe is a bit different from a traditional Italian recipe, mostly because of the use of of a fast acidification culture. The RM-52, which is a mix of Staphylococcus carnosus and Lactobacillus sakei that grows well at relatively high temperature (80-90F, 30C) so it gets to the acid state really quick. It might be a bit sour tasting (we'll find out), but it minimizes the time when pathogens can grow (particularly Listeria). There are other cultures (F-LC) which specifically work against Listeria.
The stuffing process is straightforward. I used the regular medium hog casings I use for other sausage. For a first try, a smaller diameter is better than the more traditional 2-3" size. The challenge in salami making is having it dehydrate at the right rate, while the bacteria and nitrate/nitrates do their work. If it dries fast, the outside will be dry, but the inside will be wet, and it will rot from the inside. If it dries too slow, you wind up with jerky. My 5 pounds of mix filled about 10 feet of casings.
Ferment and age
Last time I did fermented sausage, I made
Landjaeger, and it was summer, so the garage was warm enough to cure. Now in deep mid-winter here in Southern California, the garage is 50-60F, so I improvised an incubator with a reptile heating pad/controller and an ice chest. It kind of works, but I think I need a better container - it would be nice to have something with some racks to hang or lay the sausage on. For the
Landjaeger, you squash it between two boards (or jelly roll pans, in my case) to get that sort of flattened oval, and those would never fit in the ice chest.
After 2 days at 30C, the pH had dropped to about 4.9, which is far enough. Then it's time to hang it in the curing closet, nominally at 50-60F and 50% RH. My curing closet is an industrial shelving unit wrapped in insulating board, then standard fiberglass batts. A small airconditioner keeps the interior cool. I've not needed to add a humidifier yet, but that's next.
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| After a week, it weighs about 4 lb |
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| Freshly hung, about 4 3/4 lb. |
Both the salami and the interior of the chamber were inoculated with
Penicillium nalgiovense in the form of
MOLD-600 (inoculated is a fancy word for slathered using a paint brush). This is the white mold that you see on most fermented sausages - it suppresses the growth of other nastier molds. The whole fermentation business, whether making sauerkraut, salami, kimchee, beer, wine, etc. is all about having a good microbe keep bad microbes from growing.
How it turned out
Well, we don't know yet - check back in a couple weeks.
