Wednesday, March 24 2010

Go Hang a Salami: I'm a Lasagna Hog

Sure, but think of the size of the grill!

Last time around it was pickles. Well, it still is: I've got a batch of carrots and brown mushrooms on the go, the better to garnish burritos (the carrots) and summer salads (the mushrooms). But like any junkie needing his fix, I keep looking for stronger pickle-kicks. In this case, I went all the way and made salami (titular palindrome aside, no lasagnas were harmed in my quest for meaty goodness).

Salami is a cured meat, different from plain sausage in that it is salted and dried, a little like beef jerky, but a lot more like a pickle. The intent of the salting is partly to pull water out of the meat and reduce the rate of decay, and partly to lower the pH so lactic acid bacteria can ferment, develop flavours, tenderise meat, and lower the pH even further.

I was spurred on by an article I read in the Guardian newspaper's delightfully named blog, Word of Mouth (oh, how I wish I'd thought that one up). The author most cavalierly talked about curing his own meat in the middle of London town. Every other site I've ever read about making cured sausage at home was filled with insanely dire warnings about the need for nitrates/nitrites, bacterial cultures, surface-mould cultures, and apocalyptic warnings about botulism, to the point where I wanted nothing to do with it, fearing the collapse of Western Civilisation if I as much as tried to cut up a single piece of pork. However, Tim Hayward's explanations made perfect sense (everyone named Tim is a great explainer) and I recalled that my ancestors made cured sausage with nothing more than salt and swine and a few herbs.

It was time, I decided, for a radical reassessment of my relationship with preserved pork. Step one was to purchase a quantity of meat stuffs. I settled on some pork shoulder meat and some fatback from a friendly butcher, who had previously sold me sausage casings for uncured wienerage. In a time of factory farming and large-scale production methods that can cause serious disruptions in the chain of sanitation, I take comfort in knowing my butcher and trusting his stuff. I got about 3/4 lean pork to 1/4 fat. Good sausage needs fat to give it flavour, mouth-feel and deliciousness, so skimping on it makes for dry, tasteless stuff. Modern food dictators have tried to make us live in fear of lipids, but honestly, they're just another (important) source of calories, and carry lots of vitamins you don't get anywhere else. So there.

It was Porky's finest hour

The next step was to clean the meat, taking off tough connective tissue, outer skin, and bits of nasty gristle.

Mmm, pre-bacon, guhhhhhh

Then I chopped up all the fat and meat into successively smaller bits.

You can make sausage without fat, but I wouldn't eat it. Fat is delicious!

More slice and dice: note the razor-sharp boning knife and the diamond 'steel' in the background. Good tools make for fast work.

You need the lean as well

It's a matter or choice how fine you chop the meat. Once the salami is completely cured, it will be like a cross between fudge and hard taffy, with the muscle fibres nearly completely broken down. I chose to chop it fairly coarse, about 7-10 mm chunks.

Keep your thumbs out of the way: this is Salami, not long pig!

But wait, you say: what about all the skin? Isn't there something, anything we could do with the tough outer skin of a lovely little piggy, so it wouldn't go to waste? Ha ha ha, there's always something! My people would have ground the stuff fine, fried it in its own lard, and ate it on bread. I really can't guess the spelling (d'zeraiveh?), but it's an old-school low-German treat. I wasn't planning on dragging out my grinder, so I just cut it into strips, salted it and fried it up.

Chicharrones? Scruncheons? Oreilles de crisse? Cracklings by any other name would taste as salty

I have no idea where they disappeared to, but my wife says they were delicious, and the cats agreed. Hmmph, that'll teach me to turn my back on porcine snackage in this house. Finally I had it all chopped up fine and it was time to weigh it out a crucial step  in figuring out how much salt to use: you need a minimum of 25 grams of salt per kilogram (that's, uh, roughly 3/4 ounce per two pounds. Gosh, I love the metric system).

A kilo and a half, close enough.

That done I covered it and popped it into the freezer, in order to make handing easier (and buy some time while I prepped a few things). Warm meat and fat are floppy and greasy to handle. When well chilled they behave very nicely.

Next, for my 1.49 kg I measured out 50 grams of salt

Brittany sea-salt, coarse, not terribly clean, but with great taste. Much like me.

Why 50 grams instead of 37.5 like the math might suggest? Well, 25g/kilo is the minimum, and a bit more won't hurt. Plus, I was using Sel de Paloudre, which is damp and squishy, so I put in a little fudge-factor for moisture-weight. I really have to bake some of this stuff dry to find out just how much weight the liquid contributes, but for now fudge is fine.

Next it was time to spice it up. I was going for a dead-traditional salami recipe with a wee twist: garlic, fennel, and black pepper are the norms (fennel is fantastic in sausages) but I wanted more bang, so I added smoked paprika and dried chili flakes. I used two cloves of garlic, a teaspoon each of fennel, chili and pepper, and a one and a half teaspoons of really good Hungarian smoked paprika. If you've never had smoked paprika, let me caution you on using it: you'll never, ever be able to go back to the regular stuff--it's just too good.

Then I packed 'em all in my little mini food processor with the salt. Mortar and pestle work is for suckers.

Before

And after

The next step was to rehydrate my sausage skins. Traditionally you pack porky into his own guts, but fresh pork intestines are a) hard to get, and b) kind of gross and stinky. I chose to rehydrate some collagen-based casings. They're made out of pig and beef collagen, the precursor of gelatin, so they're not synthetic or plastic, but are very consistent and have the advantage of being edible or peel-offable.

Dried casings, inert

. . . and rehydrated

Once they were plumped up and ready to go I got my KitchenAid mixer, bolted up the meat grinder attachment with the stuffing head on--no grinder plates this time, as I had the consistency I wanted already.

A Kitchenaid with all the gadgets is the Rolls-Royce of appliances

I mixed the meat and spices, got some twine and got to stuffing. It's both easier and harder than you might think: the skins have a lot of friction against the neck of the stuffer, and if you use too much pressure you burst the casing. Too little and you get air bubbles and skinny spots. A little practice and it becomes much easier.

Get stuffed!

Once I had a section about 20 cm (eight inches) long I knotted the ends, cut 'em and tied a length of string to one end.

Pudgy looking, pale and flabby, like slovenly teenagers

The next step was to hang the salami. Key to this is getting enough humidity: too low and the outside would dry hard too quickly, locking moisture inside, allowing it to rot from the inside-out. Too much and it could mould and go off. Luck is on my side, as I live in the rainforest, right on a beach: not only do we have the best air on the planet, it's always nicely humid and mild. But I needed a way to hang them somewhere: not in my little kitchen, which is hot and often filled with steam and flames and the cries of the terrified. I quickly developed a work-around. I tied the salami-zygotes to a cooling rack and suspended it inside my lobster cooking pot.

Salami prison--my crustacean-cooker is no simple unitasker!

I stuck the pot on the pass-through next to the dining room for five days. The warmth encouraged the lactic acid fermentation to start, whereupon my wife banished them to the great outdoors. I think the smell of curing salami, the smell of raw meat slowing transforming with spices and garlic to be delightful, but apparently it's a bit strong for those less vested in the enterprise than me.

No matter: the entire apparatus went onto the front patio, with a 35 pound weight plate on top of it. I wasn't worried about it blowing away, even in the strong winds we get down on the beach. I was worried about the local raccoon who sometimes uses the rooftop garden of my building as an expressway between the beach and the woods up the hill. I figure if he can lift a 35 pound plate, I'm not going to fight him for the salami.

After a couple of weeks I noticed a lot of little mould spots on the outside of the casings. This isn't necessarily bad, but I was concerned that they might be blooming too fast, so I wiped them off with a cloth soaked in vinegar. After about another week they were replaced by a much lighter layer of dusty bloom, which actually looked quite appetising.

After another week I decided they were dry and firm enough to try out.

The deuce you say! They're beautiful!

Very firm, but not rock-hard, they smell exactly like really good salami: porky, savoury spicy and really mouth-watering. I couldn't wait.

Little slices of deliciousness. Note ceramic cleaver, left. Aichmophiliacs R me

My neighbours were out on the patio, so I quickly sliced up a whole salami and took it outside. How was it? Gone in thirty seconds, so I guess it turned out okay. I brought another one to work this week and it went similarly fast. I think it's one of the best preserved pork products I've ever had, and I can't wait to make more: smoky from the paprika, robust (but not stinky) from the garlic, sweet from the fennel, a little bit from the pepper and chili, and overall salty-meaty and rich. The fat tastes fantastic, all rich and soaked in flavour. I'm going to make a pizza next week with slices of my salami right on top, so it can render and run red grease into the cheese. Mmmmm . . . 

What would I do different next time? Well, first I'd use a larger diameter casing: this is what my butcher had, but a bigger case woudl make for a more traditional diameter of salami. Also, I might boost the fennel, and add a little rough red wine to fancy it up.

One more thing: I'm going to quintuple the batch. This stuff is dynamite on the hoof, and it's going to be gone in no time.

Posted by Butcher Tim AT 1:33PM

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