Success!

This week has been spent digging into my dry cure stash to see if any of it has turned out as I had hoped. It has been a real delight. But first I’ll start with one of my disappointments of the week: learning that the whole wild boar prosciutto that I ordered from an online vendor named D’Artagnan  was out of stock. And they did not let me know this until two days after it was supposed to arrive. The guy at D’Artagnan said the producer told him the hams were not drying “as fast as they hoped they would.” Hmmm. OK. I admit it; this made me a little leary. If you’re making this product commercially, you should probably know what the drying time is. I was intrigued by the fact that these animals were trapped (you can hunt them in some states) and then certain cuts dry cured for a more…interesting flavor. But I guess this little experiment will have to wait.

Wild boar prosciutto that I'm trying to get my hands on

As for my own cured meats, the first cut I tried was the pork loin from the hog we butchered here at home. This was a young animal so the loin was kind of small but I have to say that the flavor was really nice. Very intense and porky. The salt was just right. When you pulled it apart, it was like gummy candy.  The kids have even eaten it, and I have given a few chunks away to a people who have given me instrumental advice along this dry-curing journey. No one has died. Yet.

Just by way of clarification, curing whole muscles is much more straightforward and simpler than doing sausage. Nitrates are required for sausage because the outside of the meat (where the bacteria live) is incorporated into the inside of the meat, usually by grinding, and not exposed to the air during the drying process. This is true for rolled pancetta also: While flat pancetta is OK to cure without nitrates (because you have a whole muscle that is exposed to the air), rolled pancetta means that bacteria from the outside are being rolled inside and not exposed to fresh air, meaning they can grow there and cause major food-borne illness.  I do have the nitrate salt mixture and will be trying the more complicated sausages, but have not gotten to it yet.

Homemade dry-cured pork loin (top). The shiny look is from the oil from the fat layer.

Homemade dry-cured pork loin (front)

On the topic of slicing, one guy whose blog I follow said a commercial slicer is absolutely essential, and the more I’m eating of our homemade stuff, the more I agree. I tried to slice it thin enough to present to company, and I mean paper thin, but even with my super duper sharp, ultra special, I’ll-commit-sobuku-before-I-surrender Japanese knife, I would get pieces that were chewy enough (usually along the edge) to not be very pleasing. My cousin Bill will be trying a mandolin on his. Hopefully he will report back and let us know if it worked.

My other comment on this is that I probably let it dry too long. It lost a little more than the recommended 30 percent of its weight. That might not matter for other cuts, but because this piece was smaller, it did get a little hard. Not a huge deal, but I’d like to get the velvety-ness that I really crave in these kinds of meats. It also partly had to do with the fact that I didn’t have my handy dandy automatic humidity controller until after the meat had been hanging for a while. The humidity values did vacillate quite a bit for a few weeks in the beginning. All I can say is thank goodness for technology. Having this aspect under control also is giving me more confidence to try more complicated dry-curing recipes, so I’m excited.

The other piece that we tried this week was the coppa. This cut on the pig is from the bundle of muscles that run along the neck. It is highly prized in Italy for curing because it has a wonderful fat-to-meat ratio.  In the taste test, because these pieces were a little bigger, they didn’t lose too much weight and as a result, were more moist and softer and more melty on the tongue. Really amazing flavor. And really pretty, too. I absolutely cannot wait to try this again, only next time with a big cut from a full-grown hog.

Homemade dry-cured coppa. The marbling is obvious. This really tasted awesome. Biggest success so far, in my opinion. We have eaten it straight, with cheese and fruit, and also in a grilled sandwich. We are discovering that there's no wrong way to eat it :)

This is a cycle, you know. It takes a month or two for pieces to be ready so my goal is to always have something going. I recently have started a few new pieces curing and will hang them after a few days soaking up the cure in the fridge. First is three breasts of wild goose given to me by a very generous hunter friend. He usually makes a gnarly taco meat with them. He has also used the meat to make chili. But he’s never had it cured. The cure I’m using should work for either a duck or goose prosciutto. Either way, the flavor is suppose to be very intense. We have been warned!

The second one (not pictured) is a piece of venison that I will be curing in the style of a bresaola (without the casing so I don't have to use nitrates). Bresaola is usually done with a very lean cut of beef. I have a very lean cut of deer that I will use instead. Fingers crossed!

Kyle weighing ingredients that will go in the cure.

One wild goose breast laying on the salt cure just before being coated. This is a massive piece of meat. Having never handled one of these before, I was really impressed at how very red it was. You'd think it was a piece of beef.

All three goose breasts after sitting in the cure over night. The cure pulls out a lot of juice, which is what it's supposed to do since the removal of liquid is the trick to preservation.