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

[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?