Adventures in Making Salami

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.

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.

Fat Cap cut into strips

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.

A nice hunk of shoulder, notice the marbling in the middle of the muscle.

Then slice it up - I use a butcher's cimeter (or scimitar)
to cut about 1" slices

And then cube it 

 8 pounds of cubed shoulder (with some scrap in the corner)

Shoulder Grinding

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.

After a week, it weighs about 4 lb

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.

Canadian Bacon in a Hurry

I was going to make a batch of Canadian Bacon (really, back bacon; it got the Canadian Bacon name during WW2) and I forgot to get it in the cure earlier in the week. So here's a try at doing it faster. This could also be Kassler Rippchen - there's not a huge difference between a pork loin and pork chops - a bit different place on the pig. 

In any event, it's a basic cured pork loin (with some aromatics) that is then smoked to cook it at the end (so you can eat it cold, although it's awfully good warmed up).  Normally, it's a 3-4 day curing process to let the brine diffuse into the center of the meat.  I did it in slices so that the time to cure would be shorter. Cure time is all about the distance from brine to meat and sliced, the longest distance from "brine" to "meat" is more like 1/2" instead of "inches".

 

Trim and slice

Untrimmed Loin

I started with a 2 1/4 lb pork loin from the supermarket. They typically come with a layer of fat (and connective tissue) on one side which I trim off.  The fat just gets in the way of the curing, and nobody really likes eating sinew.
After the trim, I sliced it into 6 chunks a bit more than an inch thick.  One doesn't want to mix up more of the curing brine than you have to, so I did a quick check of the volume of the slices and decided that 2 quarts would be about right. 

Trimmed Loin

Fit Check

Sliced

Brine Mix

 

Into the brine

The standard recipe in Ruhlman's book makes a gallon, so I cut it in half:

• 1.5 cups kosher salt
• 1 cup sugar
• 4 Tablespoons pink salt

This is a really useful basic ratio for things - you can cure anything with this mix. There's nothing special about the sugar - you could replace it with molasses or brown sugar or maple syrup if you want a different flavor.


Then all the seasonings - which is where it gets interesting.  Traditional Canadian Bacon is basically thyme and garlic and that's about it.  I like a more pancetta-like flavor and I decided to go a bit tropical this time - so I used (clockwise around the picture: garlic,  juniper berries, black pepper, thyme, bay leaves, nutmeg, and allspice. (That's a huge piece of nutmeg there, I grated a tiny bit off for this).

Seasoning for the Cure

Ice to chill the brine

I boiled 2 quarts of water in the electric kettle and dissolved the brine components, but I made a mistake - usually, I boil about 1/2 to 3/4 of what I need, dissolve the salt and sugar, and then dump ice in to cool it down.  You don't want to dump boiling hot brine on your meat or it will cook the meat.  You can let it cool, but since I was in a hurry, the ice bath seemed to be the way to fix this particular problem.

Then, spices in the bottom of the container (I smashed the allspice, garlic, pepper, and juniper up before), dump the pork in, then the brine.   I had some leftover pork shoulder from earlier this week, so I just threw it in (cured pork, how can you go wrong?). Something on top to push the floating meat down below the surface, and it's into the refrigerator for a day or so.

 

 

Now we wait

Now we wait....

How Gary Hepler changed my life (for the better)

How Gary Hepler Changed My Life

Today is the memorial for Gary Hepler, one of my high school science teachers.  Unfortunately, I was unable to attend, so here's the comments I would have made, had I been there.

If I were asked “who were your most influential teachers?”, there is no question that Gary Hepler is right up there at the top of the list.  I see by reading the comments of others that I’m not the only one who feels that way. And I’m glad for my daughters that they had science teachers in the same mold, because in these times of populist anti-science, teachers like Gary make the difference – science is fun and useful, even if you’re not going to have a career in science, here’s just a few recollections of how Gary Hepler was an inspiring teacher, and things that he did affect me to this day.

Geology Class

My summer school class before 9^th grade was Gary’s geology class at Poway High.  I think anyone who took those classes can fairly say they were life changing, and probably never to be repeated.  The geology was fun (a lifetime of camping in Yosemite helps create that interest), the field trips were memorable, especially that week long odyssey up to Yosemite and back. And an odyssey it truly was, because we went back and forth along our path never directly to our eventual destination – oh, we need to make a side trip to see this, or, we need to go back here to camp, or, I think this road is a shortcut (on the map, not in real life). 

To this day, I wind up using the knowledge I gained in that class and subsequently in his other classes.  I remember going down to a lecture at San Diego State to hear about this new “plate tectonics” theory that was revolutionizing the science. I’ve commented to my kids (when they would tolerate it) about how the oil rigs in the Santa Barbara channel follow the Ventura anticline.  When I’ve traveled around the world, I’m always paying attention to the geology, and the fascinating history behind the development of the science. This was all inspired by Gary’s class – sure I had a casual interest in geology before, but the idea of going somewhere just because it was geologically interesting is something that has stuck with me through the years.

I stare out the window on plane flights, looking at the geology below, and when I got my pilots license, I used to fly out over the desert and see the geological features, just like in Shelton’s Geology Illustrated, which Gary showed us in class.

Climbing

Gary was probably the reason I started rock climbing.  On the (in)famous geology field trips and in slide shows in class, he showed what fun it was.  That copy of Galen Rowell’s The Vertical World of Yosemite (out of print now) was inspirational: who would have known that eventually I’d take climbing lessons from someone whose picture is in that book. I was already into camping and backpacking – our family made regular trips to Tuolumne Meadows, Boy Scout Troop 680 was hardcore into backpacking, but climbing was something different. 

I never got that good (5.7 on a good day) – it takes serious time and pain to get good, and other things seemed to get in the way. I viewed climbing as a way to get to places you couldn’t otherwise get to, and I think that was part of Gary’s motivation too: we sure saw lots of pictures of mountain top registers and Gary and climbing partners standing on peaks.  I think he secretly longed to outdo Norman Clyde – who is probably the ultimate peak bagger.

I still have a fondness for climbing – particularly trad climbing. Seeing the pictures of Gary using goldline really takes me back. I still have all my gear from 40 years ago. It probably hasn’t been used in 10 years and I doubt the EBs still fit, but when my kids were born, they got rope slings to teeth on, web slings with hexcentrics and stoppers to play with, and I built a climbing wall in the back yard.

Physics & Science classes

I had Gary for Physics in 9^th grade and Chemistry in 10th (I think.. that was long ago, and I'm not going to hunt for my HS transcript).  There’s a lot of lessons learned in class beyond the obvious F=ma. One that sticks in my mind is the lab with the paper tape falling through the modified doorbell which makes dots at regular intervals.  You measure the spacing of the dots (pentaticks, actually), turn that into velocity and, in theory, calculate the acceleration due to gravity.   We did the lab, but the data seemed a bit wonky, so using my math skills, I built a mathematical model of the data to “correct the errors” – but when my data was a little too good, compared to everyone else’s, I got the public lecture on the evils of dry labbing.  Of course, today I make my living, in part, building computer models of physical phenomena, so maybe that experience wasn’t all to the bad – I do make sure, though, that the model outputs are labeled as such.

All through high school, Gary always had extra projects for us science oriented students to do: Whether helping prep for labs, building projects, or otherwise, it was always fun – and what we did at school was almost certainly safer than the experiments we did at home.  I was already interesting in science and engineering, but Gary (and the rest of the science department as well) kept that interest alive, to the point where it’s what I’ve done for pretty much my entire life.

Jim Lux, Gary’s student from 1973-1977

More Charcuterie

Preparing for the holidays

I got a pork belly and some shoulder from Costco.  The belly is for bacon, the shoulder for sausage.  Three kinds of sausage this time: Andouille, a citrus italian (Actually a sicilian recipe called salsicicca greca: Greek Sausage..) and a porcini-red wine sausage from a Jacque Pepin recipe.  Finally, I did another rosemary-garlic "city ham" - that's with a nice shank end from Ventura Meat Company

Bacon

The bacon was done in my usual brown sugar, juniper berry, thyme sort of cure - much like what you'd use for pancetta
. Last time I experimented with the maple or molasses flavors, and I'm just not as wild about it. After a week in the refrigerator curing, it comes out and goes into the smoker - I used apple wood this time - it's a mild smoke flavor. 

Then get it good and cold, and go to town with the slicer. 

Finally, vacuum pack it in shingles.

 

Sausage

 Out of a 8-9 pound shoulder, you lose about a pound to the shoulder bone and some of the fat.  You want the nice firm fat on the outside, but that sort of mushy stuff you want to get rid of.  This is the bone.


Here's the trimmed shoulder.  I've not cut the soft fat off that you can see in the left center, and right side. The stuff that looks like marbling is good, and the surface fat is best.   When you cut it into 1" cubes, it's easy to tell what fat to keep (the stuff that's stiff when cutting) and what fat to get rid of (the stuff that's like marshmallow).

I find that if I freeze the pork before grinding, then let it slightly thaw, I get the best results.  If the pork gets too hot in the grinder, the fat melts and gets greasy, and that's bad.  So here's 8 pounds of cut up shoulder in the freezer.

It takes about an hour to grind all that meat using the trusty KitchenAid grinder attachment.  It's shown here with the medium plate.   I added a bit of fatback to get the fat content up. In theory, you want about 20% fat, but I don't know how you would measure it, so I go by appearance.  If your fat content is too low, your sausage will be grainy and poor texture. If your fat content is too high, the fat all cooks out.  Fat content management is where it's at for sausage making.


Some sausage needs to dry a bit before further processing.  This is Andouille, spending a couple hours drying before going into the smoker.

Ham

Ham is pretty simple, assuming you have a good chunk of meat to start with. Last time, I did it with a boned out shank, which winds up in chunks.  This time, I did it with the whole thing.  You mix up the cure - a standard brown sugar, sald, curing salt mix, and add a bunch of garlic and rosemary.   This was about a whole supermarket bunch of rosemary for the gallon of cure.   That's a bit much, as it happens. 










 When it comes out of the cure, this is what it looks like.  If you didn't trim off the fat, it gets kind of loose and flabby, and is easily trimmed.

Last time, I did half the ham in Sous Vide and half in the smoker.  The smoky flavor kind of overpowered the rosemary/garlic flavor, so this time, it was all done Sous Vide.  Put it in a bag, suck out the air, put it in a cooler with the heater/circulator, and wait a day. I went to 65C, which is about 150F.



And then, it's all about slicing and eating.  Unlike a storebought ham, your home cured ham is going to have a lot of weird shaped pieces.  So I trim those into "roughly cubes" about 3/8" 1/2" on a side and save them for putting in things like soup or beans.

Making ham (and bacon)

Making (city) ham

City ham is wet cured in a brine for about a week, then heated for final processing (either sous vide or smoking). It's different than country ham, which is salted and then hung for months while it gradually loses weight.   The spiral cut honey ham or the ham on your ham and cheese sandwich is a city ham.  Proscuitto or Jamon Serrano are country hams.  Sally and I had a great rosemary ham at Industrial Eats in Buellton when we took a charcuterie class from Jake at Valley Piggery.

That's a nice piece of meat

Ham starts with the hind leg of a pig. A whole shank is 15-20 lbs, so I got just the shank end (that's the end closer to the foot, or trotter), about 8-9 lbs, conveniently boned out by the butcher.  The butt or sirloin end (closer to the hip) is more complex muscle wise, and harder to make a nice carveable piece of meat out of.
So here's my shank end, ready for the curing mix

I got my ham from Michael at Ventura Meat Company.  They have good pork from humanely raised pigs.

Starting the cure

City ham is cured in brine, and to make the curing more even, you inject the brine into the middle of the meat with a large syringe. Otherwise, the outer part of the ham would be very salty, and the middle not so salty.  The brine in this case was a mixture of brown sugar, salt, curing salt, rosemary and garlic.

The ham sits in the brine for a week. I put it in the refrigerator door, and every time you open or close the refrigerator, the brine swirls around so it stays nicely mixed.

It comes out of the cure

Just came out of the brine

After a week, you pull it out of the brine and rinse it a couple of times to reduce the saltiness of the surface.  If you've done it right, it has an even pinkish color from the curing salts. Yes, nitrites are your friend here, and so-called "uncured" bacon and ham uses celery juice which has a lot of nitrites in it.  With modern chemistry, we can control the amount of nitrite to just what's needed to prevent bacteria growth, but to minimize the formation of nitrosamines (if you fry or grill the ham).

You then need to let it sit for at least a day in the refrigerator to dry out. At this point, you have a decision - you can just heat it and use it, you can sous vide it, or you can smoke it. You could probably eat it at this point: the curing kills any bacteria, but it's kind of gelatinous and squishy (like raw meat, but tougher).  I decided to do the latter two, so I cut my cured ham in half.

After sitting for a week - check out that nice color and texture

Final steps

The first half, I vacuum packed, and put into the sous vide cooker at 65C.

Bagged and ready

Cooking at 65C

And this is the final product

 Smoking

The second half, I smoked at 180F to an internal temp of 145F.  I think it could have gone slightly higher.. the fat is still kind of gelatinous.  Maybe 150F would be better - it's not like the temperature calibration on the probes is all that good, so maybe it was lower than the sous vide, which is the perfect texture.

Smoked city ham

And, bacon too!

Bacon out of the smoker

I also got 5lbs of pork belly to make bacon out of.  I tried two different cures: a straight up maple sugar style, and a more complex molasses, juniper berry, and other seasonings.  Those sat in plastic bags in the refrigerator for a week, then got a few hours of apple wood smoke to 150F, and are ready to cook and eat.

Ready to eat!

Shortened dipole for 40 meters

The question comes up on the tower talk mailing list about using a single 30m dipole (actually 15m long) for 40 meters with a matching network. Is the gain significantly less? Is the matching network a problem.  4nec2 answers these questions.  The models were lossless (for the antenna, not for the matching network), and modeled as 10 meter and 7.5 meter long dipoles fed in the center, with the element radius of 1 cm.

Full size is 2.08 dBi, Shorty is 1.75 dBi, mostly because of the slightly wider main lobe for the shortened antenna.


Here's the gains of the full size dipole vs the 75% length dipole (with the matching network):

Gain of 75% sized dipole for 40m

Gain of full size dipole for 40m

Now let's look at the impedance of the short antenna and the required matching network

Impedance of 75% dipole around 7 MHz:
Capacitive, about 30 ohms and -350j to -250j ohms

Impedance with the low pass T feed, tuned for 7.15MHz

4nec2 has a neat feature where it will calculate the values for a matching network.  I picked the low pass T, since I knew I'd need some significant series L to compensate the antenna's overall capacitive reactance.  An L network would also work, as would a tapped inductor.

So the series L (about 7.5 uH) compensates for the capacitive reactance (-300j) and brings the resonance to 7.15 MHz.  Here's the VSWR plot for the matched antenna.  Not too bad, the 2:1 bandwidth is about 350 kHz, the 1.5:1 BW is about 180 kHz.

Let's compare that to the VSWR of the original 40m antenna. which has a wider 2:1 bandwidth, 460 kHz, but a narrower 1.5: 1 BW of abotu 150 kHz (because the best match is only 1.4:1 due to the original antenna being a 72 ohm impedance)