Olympia Provisions: Cured Meats and Tales from an American Charcuterie by Elias Cairo & Meredith Erickson

Author:Elias Cairo & Meredith Erickson [Elias Cairo, Meredith Erickson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781607747017
Publisher: Potter/TenSpeed/Harmony
Published: 2015-10-26T17:00:00+00:00

Cure in a Dry Box: To make fermented, dry-cured salami, you need to give the salami a chance to sweat—or rather, give the salt in the meat mixture time to pull moisture from the batch so it evaporates. For this to happen, you need to create the right conditions in a controlled environment—that is, a dry, sanitized container. These conditions are 58°F (14°C) and 83 percent humidity. I prefer to use a dry box that creates a cycle of airflow and stillness rather than a steady airflow, ideally 30 minutes of airflow (about the speed of walking, or 1½ miles an hour) followed by 15 minutes of very little to no airflow.

The end goal of the dry-curing period is evenly cured salami. But there are salami landmines along the way. If you see a dark line around the outside of your salami when you cut into it, or if you give it a gentle squeeze and it feels hollow, you most likely have what is called “casehardening.” This happens when the outside of the salami gets too dry (and hard) before the inside has a chance to dry enough. Most likely, the problem—assuming you kept your humidity at 83 percent the entire time the salami was in the box—was too much airflow.

Generally speaking, a 1½-inch (4 cm) casing should take about 3 weeks to cure. As a rule of thumb, with every ½ inch (1.3 cm) added to your casing width, you will need to increase drying time by 2 weeks. So if a 1½-inch (4 cm) casing takes 3 weeks to dry, a 2-inch (5 cm) sausage will take about 5 weeks to dry. The time increases if the humidity is too high or there is not enough airflow. Dry curing is really a process that takes patience and tinkering to get right. You are looking for the final product to be about half the weight (or less) of the raw lean meat that went into the sausage. This can be measured by weighing the salami and comparing it to the weight of the meat you started with. Better yet, use a water activity meter to measure the water weight—it should be 0.85.

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