Well, I found yet another way to turn something into speck. In this case coppa/neck. Going through all my literature, I came across this. It is officially listed as nackenspeck in the South Tyrol and speck di coppa as it's secondary name. Always up for something new(especially from South Tyrol) and an extra coppa lying around, it was a no brainer. Aside from typical spices used for speck, this was no different than every other coppa I've cured. You can look back at my other
speck posts to see about the spicing. Smoking was the same protocol as in previous speck projects. I've been using beech wood dust exclusively to cold smoke all my speck recently. One thing of note I failed to mention was pressing during curing. The speck di coppa/nackenspeck I've seen from South Tyrol have been pressed and uncased. Seeing as I don't care for uncased whole muscles that are skinless and/or unprotected by a thick fat layer, casing it was automatic. Cured 3 weeks, rinsed, cased, smoked 5 days, hung to dry. Roughly 8-10 weeks later(I can't recall exactly and I didn't write it down), 33% weight loss and it got cut down. That's exactly what you're looking at. That dark edge around the circumference of the coppa has given me cause for concern in the past, as it appears to be case hardening. However, pictures I've seen of almost all speck varieties from South Tyrol have this. Since it's not dry, it can logically be described as a smoke ring. This thing is great, think luscious coppa meets smoky, delicious speck.
