Quick Hit

[madbaker]

This week's Resolution Recipe: Saucisson Sec aux Herbes de Provence.

1000 g pork shoulder butt
250 g pork back fat
1 g Herbes de Provence (I don't have any, so I used fines herbes with a dash of crushed lavender.)
1 bay leaf, crumbled
1 g each black and white pepper
25 g salt
3.3 g curing salt #2
1 g fennel, crushed
11 g garlic, minced
33 ml white wine

Chop meat and fat, mix in spices and wine. Stuff into 32 mm hog casings or narrow lamb casings (I used hog casings). Hang to dry [no smoke!] for 2-6 weeks depending on diameter, until firm - 25-30% weight loss.

What worked: A nice picnic-style cured sausage. Quick to prepare. Not fabulous, but nice and easy. The lavender wasn't overwhelming (some years ago I had a traumatic experience with a pork sausage with so much lavender it was like eating soap).

What didn't: They were still mushy at 30% weight loss; I let them go about six weeks, which was closer to 40% loss. That was about right.

Will I make it again? Sure. Easy and the wife likes them.

Comments

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

When you make sausages or other dried meats and "hang to dry" -- what is the allowed temperature range of the room in which they are drying? We've been thinking of trying our hands at some simple meat curing, but the most natural place to do so is the basement of our building, which by dint of having all the hot water piping for the whole building running through it (we have city-supplied hot water) is nice and dry, but I'm wondering if it might be too warm?

[madbaker.livejournal.com]

The ideal is a constant 55-65 F with 70% humidity - and air circulation. Some give and take is fine, but too much variation will be more likely to have negative effects.

Where we live in San Francisco, I'm able to use our outdoors-under-the-stair-but-mostly-enclosed closet, which we call the oubliette. The curvy upstairs neighbor ages her cheese there as well.

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

Hmm, air circulation might be the problem. Nevertheless, I'll probably stick a thermometer down there soon to see what the temp. is, so as to at least get some ideas.

Thanks!

[madbaker.livejournal.com]

You want the same sort of environment you'd use to age wine. For many of the same reasons.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Do you actually have a scale that will measure 3.3g? Mine only works in 2g increments; I had one in the UK that would measure individual gs, but I don't think I've seen anything finer than that...

[madbaker.livejournal.com]

Mine measures in 1-gram increments. The recipe is decimaled because I scale to 1000g meat, so that it can be adjusted via a constant multiplier for different base amounts.
I know the common practice is to do percentages of a whole (e.g. 840g meat, 85g fat, 10g salt and so forth so that everything adds up to 1000g); but then you have to normalize anyway to get a multiplier, so why not start that way?