The Cure

I learned to enjoy cured meats like prosciutto and hard salami during trips to Europe, specifically France, Germany, and Spain. Dry cured meats there are harder and chewier (salami) and have a velvetier texture and stronger flavor (prosciutto), are more rustic, than the American cured meats I knew at the time, and it wasn’t unusual for an afternoon snack during those travels to be baguette, cheese, and cured meat. Maybe some butter. But no lettuce. No adulteration with mayo or tomato or mustard.

The trip we took to Barcelona, Spain was particularly memorable in this regard because of the dizzying number of small meat shops as you explored the neighborhoods. Without exaggeration, there seemed to be one on every street corner. Shops and even restaurants would have dozens, sometimes hundreds, of curing ham legs hanging from the ceiling. It was quite an awesome display and one I never forgot.

These are prosciutto hams hanging at a meat vendor at the famous La Boqueria market in Barcelona. If you do the conversion, it's about $100 per pound. They are all about acorn-fed hogs there, and truly, the meat does have a buttery, nutty quality to it that is divine. Worth every penny.

Once back in the States, I started buying these items, but if you also have developed a taste for and indulged yourself with these fine, artisanal meats, you know how exorbitantly expensive they can be. I looked online the other day to see how much a whole prosciutto ham would cost – just to see – and it was in the $800 range. Mama mia.

My first time dry curing was, again, inspired by my cousin Bill. I don’t recall which came first for him, the recipe for carbonara (a classic pasta dish that includes guanciale, or dry cured hog jowl) or the recipe for the guanciale itself, but he mentioned he had a guanciale hanging in his basement, sent me some pictures of it, told me how he did it, and I was instantly intrigued. I did some research and found Salumi: The Craft of Italian Dry Curing by Michael Ruhlman.

Salumi by Michael Ruhlman

With the help of the book and this guy’s dry-curing blog, I was able to put together a room in my basement where I could give this curing thing a shot. There are a few ways to put together a curing room or “box” but the main ingredients are temperature control (50-60 °F), humidity control (65-75%), and air circulation. Finding a room in your house where you can do this, one that is already cool (likely in your basement) and free of any pests like mice and bugs, is the path of least resistance. The other option is converting a refrigerator for this purpose, which Matt also describes very well in his blog.

Matt Wright, spunky Brit and author of the blog Wright Food

Even though our basement is finished, we do have a small room that is not hooked up to our heating system, which means it is already in the temperature range we needed for curing. It was probably intended for use as a storm shelter or wine cellar. So all it needed was humidity control and a fan to move the air around. Normally, humidity in that room sits around 40%. So I bought an ultrasonic humidifier and then a humidity-control device that turns the humidifier on and off automatically to keep the humidity in the range that I set.

Dayton humidity controller -- plug the humidifier into this and it will automatically turn it on and off to stay within a certain range of humidity set by you. 

Ultrasonic humidifier

 Following Bill’s lead, I also chose hog jowl as my first dry curing project. Pretty easy and exciting. Basically all you do is dredge your meat in salt that’s been mixed with pepper and herbs/spices, press the salt into the cut of meat, shake off the excess, and put it in a ziplock baggie. Let it sit in the fridge for a few days, flipping it and massaging the juices around about midway through. After refrigeration, rinse the meat well, weigh it, put a string through it, and hang it in your curing room or box. Weighing is important because doneness is determined by weight, i.e. when it loses 30 percent of its weight, it’s usually done. People who want their meat chewier can go a little more than that.

The cuts from a pig. What they are referring to as the "butt" is called the coppa when used for dry curing.

There are a couple other cuts (besides jowl) that really are this easy (e.g. the coppa (neck), and the pancetta (belly)). Apparently, you could just hang them in your kitchen and be alright. But the big boys, namely the bone-in prosciutto (back leg) and spalda (arm), are a lot more challenging. This is because the piece of meat is bigger, and the drying process must be gradual in order to allow the moisture deep in the meat time to come out. Otherwise, the meat will rot. Bleck.

My first guanciale (hog jowl)

It can be eaten raw at this point, but we rendered it like bacon. Some people liked it, some didn't. The people who grew up in the country kept calling it "side pork." I personally thought it was too salty to be rendered and eaten simply as bacon. It is probably best in a pot of beans or in carbonara. One is dark on the outside and the other is light I think because the light one was given a final rinse with a dry white wine before hanging.

So far the experiment is has been successful. We waited about five weeks to try the first jowl. The second wave of meats we cured was a few flat pancettas (usually it is rolled but that would have required the use of nitrates) and some unidentified piece of meat that I got from my hog butchering class. In the third round of curing, which are all from the pig we butchered here at home, I have many more meaty cuts like the loin and the neck. These have a much lower fat content than the other cuts I have cured so I am really excited to see how these have turned out. I do intend to dry cure at least one piece of each animal we butcher. That includes some of the deer meat we just got, the cow we have coming in March (beef that has been dry cured this way is called “bresaola”), and hoping for a wild goose breast to make some gnarly goose prosciutto.

Cuts that I currently have hanging in my curing room. The tags indicate the weight. It usually only takes a few weeks for smaller, bone-out pieces to lose about 30 percent of its weight.