Salame Toscano

This is the second salame made with the remnants of cutting a speck from the leg. I only call this Salame Toscano because I used fennel pollen from Tuscany in it. I hadn't yet used fennel pollen in a salame and was eager to do so. This was my second salame made after my austerity pledge. So, all that went into this was salt, black, pepper, fennel pollen, cure #2, dextrose and F-LC starter. That's it, plain and simple. In my zealousness to use said fennel pollen, I may have gone just a bit overboard. It's a little strong of fennel. However, being a fennelphile, I'm delighted with it. If you're looking for subtlety, this formula isn't for you, more like a fennel freight train. Ha! It's really not as bad as I wrote, but, it sounds better that way. In all seriousness, there is a touch too much fennel pollen. Everything else was done status quo. Run twice through 1/2" plate of commercial grinder, mixed with pork backfat that I ground up while it was frozen solid(thank god for commercial grinders). Stuffed in beef middles, sprayed with mold solution and fermented at 70 degrees for about 72 hours. Hung in my overcrowded chamber at 52 degrees at about 77% humidity. These took about 5 weeks to really stiffen nicely. Next up, hoping my mangalitsa Salame di Felino, 'Nduja, lardo and guanciale are ready.

Cotechino Milanese

Yes, new year's is Cotechino time. To recap my journey into this meat insanity, this is the actual sausage that launched me. Several years ago, I received both the meat grinder and sausage stuffer attachments for the kitchen aid stand mixer as a Christmas gift. Several days later, I was looking high and low for Cotechino. I googled it and found a recipe for it. Only problem was, it was a recipe to actually MAKE it. The old light bulb went on and thought, "I can make that, I have the grinder AND the stuffer." and I went and bought the book in which the recipe was contained. So, cotechino was the first sausage of any kind I ever produced. It was not produced well, however, in fact, it was terrible. I was unaware there was such a thing as a cardboard sausage. Oh well, my first sausage.......mulligan. Last year, with a little more experience under my belt, I made Jason's Cotechino, and it was terrific. Well, this year, I got a real treat. I have been corresponding with my cousin in Milan. He told me he was able to procure a recipe from an old norcino and was nice enough to give it to me(really the only reason he got it was because I asked him to). Oh, and don't ask me any stupid questions, like, "Can I have the formula?"......not happening........forget it! Here they are. I used a combination of jowl, some shoulder, and raw skin. Had a bit of trouble getting the raw skin through the grinder. Even a commercial grinder didn't really want to play. My first effort to grind it just thrashed it up quite a bit, so, I had to go up in die size just to get it through. When it came time to spice it, I had a little surprise waiting for me. Typically, cinnamon is used in almost all cotechini. Surprise! Wifey decided to toss out my cinnamon and not tell me, sooooo bush league. Slightly irritated, I went with coriander, clove, ginger, allspice and mace, along with salt, black pepper and white pepper and some pink salt. Thankfully, the formula only called for various spices that differ from, "norcino a norcino," so, I can pull the old Norcino license card. They were stuffed in beef middles. Decided to get even more authentic and use some hemp twine, they look even better, cotton's out! I'll let you know how they taste when they are eaten on Saturday along with some obligatory lentils.

Salsiccia di Calabria

Salasiccia di Calabria is a DOP salame from Calabria. This is one I had eaten while in Calabria in between chasing and consuming 'nduja. In typical Calabrese fashion, it is laden with hot pepper that leaves quite an impact.......perfect. Having ample hot pepper powder and flakes from Calabria, seemed like a home run. I have also re-committed myself to austerity. No more random, silly ingredients and trying to reinvent the wheel. I think I should do a couple simple salame and do them well. This definitely qualifies as austere......Pork butt, backfat, salt, hot pepper powder, crushed red pepper flakes, cure and F-lc starter, that's it. All the literature I have read about this particular salame reads that it is cased in a small hog casing. I think next time I would opt for a hog casing a bit larger than this, which is your run of the mill sausage casing. I fermented for about 72 hours and hung them to dry. After about 3 weeks, I weighed them. They had the requisite weight loss, yet still seemed soft, which is very strange for these size casings. So, at 45%, I pulled one down. Still just a touch soft for my liking. Puzzled, I went to review my notes. I noticed I wrote f-lc, but not distilled water. I usually write distilled water as I write out the formula, so as not to forget to use it. That tiny little omission, combined with soft salame lead me to believe I used tap water to mix my starter, which most of you who do this at home will know, I murdered my starter. I had 4 of them, so, I ate 1 and vacu-sealed 3. The one I ate had wonderful flavor, super hot and tasty. A week after I vacu-sealed the other 3, I removed 2 to be served on my Christmas Eve salumi platter. When I peeled back the casing and cut into it, I was amazed. I had read about others employing this as a means of equilibrating moisture throughout the salame, but, I was under the impression it was more for case hardened items. The texture was perfect all the way through. Just how I like it. Needless to say, I was quite happy with this result. Point of this story is don't kill your starter. Keep reading, several more ready or almost ready, including salame di Mugnano made just yesterday with hog middles, AKA crespone.

Speck Projects

I finally committed myself to attempting a leg speck project. This was always a salume high on my list, but happen to be a bit ignorant in the butchering department. I should say incompetent and/or not confident as opposed to ignorant. I know what it is, just don't know how the hell to harvest it. Well, my oft-mentioned salumeria owning friend bought a couple hams on which to practice. After staring at an already completed speck from Alto Adige, he got to it. That would be the speck on top. The following week, I guess he got the bug again, he called to tell me he had yet another even larger speck, which is the big boy on the bottom. Little speck was cured with rosemary, fennel and juniper. After I cured little speck, I wanted to kick myself for being stupid. When I was in Ortisei, I went into a small supermarket. There was a rack of cookbooks. I flipped through the Italian cookbooks(Italian or German were the choices). One of the books had a chapter dedicated to speck. There was an entire page with a step by step speck walk through. I completely forgot about the book until after I put little speck in to cure. Lucky for me there was big speck. This was cured with garlic, juniper, bay, anise, fennel and caraway. They were both cured for 3 weeks. At that point, they were rinsed and left out for a couple hours to develop a nice pellicle before getting hit with a boatload of cold smoke. I gave the pro-q cold smoker a good workout, smoked every day for almost 3 weeks(only 2 of which were for the speck). I used some mixed harwood dust along with some ground up juniper berries. The juniper berries were a suggestion of Kristoph Wiesner passed along to me via Heath Putnam of Wooly Pigs. I had to settle on the berries after my desperate search for the actual juniper wood didn't pan out. But, I will state that the berries definitely worked. The smoke released by the berries were pungent, exactly what I was going for. 50 hours each of cold smoke and they were hung in the chamber. Look for me to crack these open some time around March-April.

Coppa di Cinghiale

AKA Wild boar coppa. This was an unplanned item. Initially, I was summoned by my friend at his salumeria to retrieve a couple wild boar shoulders to make salame di cinghiale. When I arrived, I found these shoulders to be perfectly cylindrical. So after brief deliberation, another experiment was hatched, we decided to make 2 coppe. I'd never seen it before and I was interested. I returned home and everything fell apart.....literally. Well, that's a slight overstatement, only 50% fell apart. What I mean is, I removed the netting around the first shoulder and it fell apart. Very poorly butchered, looks like maybe the first time this individual butchered anything of ANY kind. But, no biggie, I would give it a shot regardless, cure it and tie it tightly prior to casing should do the trick. The second shoulder was a dream. The picture above is, in fact, the latter. Coppa #1 was cured with juniper, rosemary and fennel seeds. Coppa #2 was cured with hot pepper powder, crushed red pepper flakes and fennel seeds. Man, now that I'm typing it out, and looking back in my notes, I think I have a small obsession with fennel seeds. They were both cured for 2 weeks. Due to their stoutness, I had to use a couple 100mm collagen casings to case them. I hung these right before I left for Italy on 9/15. I figured I would return and they would be perfect. Live and learn they say. I didn't pull these until about 10 days ago. Took 2 months for them to achieve the requisite 30% weight loss, and they're both still soft, a bit softer than I care for, but, 2 months is plenty. I brought them to the salumeria of record for tasting and they both passed muster. Coppa #1 is awesome. The crushed red pepper flakes made the difference in heat. I usually only add the hot pepper powder and that mellows with time. The flakes, however, did not. I made this to emulate the wretched "hot gab-a-gool" of anglicized Italian and "Sopranos" infamy. Well, I'm sure that more than one track suit clad gentleman would enjoy this and be completely ignorant to the fact that it is cinghiale. Coppa #2 is delightful as well. The transcendent flavor here is rosemary. But, I am as big a rosemary freak as I am fennel. Case in point, during our stay in Chianti, there was a large rosemary hedge right outside our apartment. Every time I passed by the hedge, I made sure I rubbed some part of my body on it, thus filling my car with rosemary perfume. I'm serious, EVERY time. Anyway, this coppa was very good as confirmed by my friend. This was the coppa that had to be tied up prior to being cased. As I cut through the end of it, it looked just fine. However, I cut into a little more to mete out my friend's portion and it was then that you could see the air pockets created by the poor butchering. Good thing is, no internal mold. Success all the way around, and everyone was happy. I will probably shoot out a bunch of new posts in rapid fire succession. I have 11 new projects since I've returned from Italy(inspired?), including 2 big speck projects(one cold smoking outside as I write), 2 lonzini(one cold smoked), a bresaola, Salame Toscano, and Salsiccia di Calabria. Just yesterday, I took a ride up to Mosefund Farm to visit Michael Clampffer who was nice enough to invite me to observe Kristoph Wiesner conducting the Mangalitsa class. He also gave me a bunch of meat to play with. So, I now have another Mangalitsa Lardo and guanciale curing. Today, with the scraps I made 10lbs. of 'nduja(which seems a bit extravagant with this pork) and 5lbs. of salame felino. Been a bit busy, it seems.

Mosefund Pancetta tasting

These are the other 3 quarters of the whole side of pig I acquired from Michael from Mosefund Farm back in August. The other quarter became that lovely slab of bacon about which I posted on August 23rd. From top to bottom are Pancetta tesa, Pancetta Calabrese and Pancetta affumicata(bauchspeck or speck belly). The Pancetta tesa on top was cured with juniper, thyme and bay. I didn't do anything out of the ordinary with it. Due to it's size, I left in to cure for about 12 days. It was removed, rinsed and hung to dry. The Pancetta Calabrese was cured with fennel seeds and hot pepper powder. What I did differently with this was in the rinsing process. This is a DOP item, so all the literature about it points to the fact that it is cured simply with peperoncino powder. I used a little Norcino license and added some fennel seeds. After the curing process, it was rinsed with water and red wine vinegar. It is then recovered with peperoncino powder. It is then dried for a minimum of 30 days. The pancetta affumicata was cured with juniper, thyme, bay and caraway seeds. Why the caraway? I was shooting for flavors typical of the Alto Adige, South Tyrol, in particular, and even more specifically Val Gardena. My wife visited Ortisei in the Val Gardena last year. She returned with a small cookbook from the area. Caraway was by far the most pervasive aromatic used in the cuisine. From bread to meat, it is used in just about everything. Knowing that I was to visit this very place a month after I made it, I wanted to return and try my own pancetta affumicata to see how it measured up. See my previous post for the whole dissertation on the speck vs. pancetta affumicata thing. I cured this for the same amount of time as the others, 12 days. After the curing process, I left this out at room temperature for 2 hours to develop a nice pellicle prior to cold smoking. This thing got about 25 hours of cold smoke on it over the course of 5 days. I used a mixture of apple and cherry woods. In the Dolomites they use juniper wood for the cold smoking, which I've been in the process of tracking down for months to no avail. The cold smoke was applied using a nifty little gadget called the pro-q cold smoke generator. It is an inexpensive, invaluable tool made in the UK for those without room for a gigantic Bradley smoker or something of that ilk. First time I used it, I forgot to remove the candle and came out to find the thing on fire, so, keep that in mind.......remove the candle! All three of these items were left to dry for about 60 days. As I had written previously in the bacon post, these were all cured in vacu-sealed bags, with inconclusive results, other than no leaks and no headaches from wifey giving me the business about said leaks. With regard to taste on these, this meat makes you look like a superstar. All you really have to do is not screw it up. It's very forgiving as you can make a ton of mistakes and will STILL taste good. The Calabrese has a terrific heat, of which I'm a huge fan. The affumicata is delightfully smoky, but, not overwhelmingly so, with hints of caraway and bay. I think I came pretty close on taste judging against what I ate while in the Dolomites. The smoke on theirs is so much more aromatic, I really need to find that juniper wood. The tesa is delicious as well, I use it as my "working" pancetta, for use in sautes, soups, etc. After working with this belly, I don't think I would go back to curing belly found in Asian or Latin markets, I feel like that would just be pissing in the wind. If you have the opportunity to use this meat, I recommend you give it a go.

Recap of my 3 week Salumi tour in Italy

Sorry for the lag in posts. Got married in September, then went eating my way through Italy for 3 weeks(started with a 3 crazy days in Munich for Oktoberfest). So, I'll get right to it. Took the train from Munich into Bolzano in the Alto Adige. Rented a car and went to the Val Gardena. We stayed in Ortisei for 3 days, which is absolutely stunning place and a must see for anyone travelling in Northern Italy. As far as salumi goes, this is probably the most diverse region in the country. I spent about 3 hours in 2 different salumerie, asking questions and buying almost everything. Really, really cool stuff. This first picture was from a restaurant called Tubladel. This was speck, kaminwurzen and cold smoked venison bresaola. First, a small lesson on speck and the Alto Adige. Alto Adige was part of Austria until after WW1 in 1919. They still hold strong their cultural heritage to Germany/Austria. In fact, German is the official language. So, while speck in Italy refers to the cold smoked outer shell of a pig's leg, in German, speck refers to bacon. There tends to be a little confusion about what's what. For example, I picked up something called cuore di speck, which was cured, cold smoked pork tenderloin. This is part of the reason I spent a couple hours in various salumerie. What I came to realize is that almost everything is cold smoked here. Pretty much all of which smoked with juniper wood. The next day, we took the cable car to hike the Swiss Alps(Dolomites). Since I'm unable to describe in words what it looks like, I'll put up a picture. After hiking for awhile, we came across a small cabin serving lunch. Again, I got some more salumi. Speck and Kaminwurzen this time. That purple stuff on the plate is a mostarda unique to the Alto Adige. It is small cranberries and horseradish. This is fabulous stuff. I was so blown away, I bought a bunch of jars home with me and contacted the company to try and import it myself. On the way back down, we stopped at a salumeria in the little town. I spoke to a very nice and accomodating female norcina. She was patient enough to walk me through almost all of the different salumi produced in the region. I found horse salami, camoscio(which is a chamois) bresaola, capriolo(which is a small deer I'm told) bresaola, cured pork tongue, carne salata(salted, uncured beef), pancetta affumicata, cold smoked pork tenderloin and, of course, kaminwurzen and speck.

From there, we drove to Tuscany. Chianti, to be more specific. Took a road trip to Siena, which is obligatory in my world due to my wife having lived there for 6 months. Found a really nice little salumeria. What I found is that although they do have the renowned Cinta Senese pig, a good portion of the salumi is made with cinghiale(wild boar). I believe they are everywhere, as I saw one trotting on the side of the road one night. This is probably my favorite as far as salame goes. Really big fan. The larger salame in the picture was made with Barolo wine. While still in Tuscany and relatively close to Panzano, we made a stop at Antica Macelleria Cecchini to see Dario. I learned when I arrived that he was married 2 days prior...........too bad. Made our way to Florence anyway. Bumped into another nice Norcineria, where I found some Ciauscolo. I know it's native to Marche and Umbria, but, since I wasn't going to either place, I jumped on it. Especially after the shopkeeper informed me that they DO make it in Tuscany as well, and theirs was the best ;). I also discovered Sopprassata Toscana, which is basically gigantic head cheese.

From Tuscany we travelled to Positano. While before I left Tuscany, I was all geared up to hit Antica Pizzeria Port'Alba in Naples(allegedly the oldest pizzeria in the world), possibly visit my grandmother's hometown of Casserta and maybe even see Pompeii. Plans changed. Those of you who have driven will understand. Once I got to the outskirts of Naples and onto the Amalfi drive, I tried to introduce road rage to Italy. Suffice to say, once I parked the car at our hotel in Positano, I made the executive decision to not move the car until absolutely necessary. I wasn't terribly disappointed, as I don't feel I missed much. Salumi wise, Campania doesn't have the resume of Alto Adige or Tuscany or Calabria. But, I did manage to get some decent Salami Napoli.

Speaking of Calabria, that was the next stop. All I could think about was hunting down 'nduja. I originally planned to stop in Spilinga. But, since my family is located in Santa Cristina and Reggio, we decided to stay in Scilla, as per a recommendation by Rosetta Costantino, the author of the soon to be released cookboook "My Calabria." Scilla is a really charming little fishing village on the Tyrrhenian Sea. Tough luck finding a salumeria here. No worries, I was also told that you could pretty much find 'nduja on any street corner. I was able to get in touch with some cousins whom I'd never met and they were able to steer me in the right direction for 'nduja. I bought this one from a butcher in Gioia Tauro. I'm pleased to report my own tastes pretty similar and is HOTTER. Aside from Alto Adige, I think Calabria maybe the next prolific region for salumi. Other than 'nduja, I found 5 different salumi with DOP status: Capocollo di Calabria, Pancetta di Calabria, Salsiccia di Calabria and Soppressata di Calabria. I tasted all except the pancetta. One thing they all had in common..............peperoncino, of course.

Hopped on the ferry over to Sicily to spend 3 days in Taormina. We stopped at Mount Etna on the way. Based on the fact that we did an inordinate amount of running around with various day trips and sooooo much driving. We decided that we would shut it down for a couple days. Again, with Taormina being on the sea, I was more interested in eating fresh fish than in finding a salumeria.

Dropped off the rental car in Catania and jumped on a flight to Rome for 2 days. Got out the Guanciale tractor beam. Locked it in at a super nice Norcineria in Campo dei Fiori. You can see the fat cheeks hanging in the middle of the picture. I spent 2 days in Rome eating Guanciale in any way you could imagine........carbonara, gricia, amatriciana. Also found the biggest mortadella I've ever seen. 2 days in Rome and time to go home. I can say that I really learned a lot. I found the salumieri much friendlier and willing to share information than I had been led to believe. So, in a nutshell, there is my 3 week salumi chase.