Tuscan Salami

Those starter cultures I ordered came and and I had to get moving if the salami was going to be cured for Thanksgiving. I pretty much followed the same recipe as last time around with a few minor changes. I changed the starter culture, I am probably going to add a spray on culture and  I'm using a little less fat. I used a coarse grind on the fat last time. And these salami are too narrow (think a little thinner than commercial pepperoni sticks). So I will grind everything, eyeball the fat content and maybe mix in a little more. Here's where we are so far...

We start with a pork butt from Cardona's. This is weighing in at about 6.25 pounds. It has been frozen for awhile. This is to eliminate the trichinosis larvae that are 99.5% probably not there to begin with. But my kids really like this and I'm planning to serve it to guests. Not worth the risk.

The butt gets sliced into long strips. The strips are easy to feed into the grinder attachment on a Kitchen Aid mixer. I weighed out all the other ingredients and they are ready to go. There is salt, Cure#2, pepper, dextrose, garlic, Chianti, and culture dispersed in some distilled water.

The whole mess gets mixed together and put in the fridge. This is going to give the culture a little time to get going since I will not be incubating the salami (holding it at 80 degrees for 12-48 hours before going to regular curing temperature and humidity conditions).

On Monday night, I'll toast some fennel seeds, add it to the mix, grind it all, stuff casings and hang it. Might be a late night on Monday. I also got some beef middles with my culture order. They are a natural casing but with a bigger diameter than Italian sausage casings. I'll be making a least some of the batch a little bigger. It will take longer to cure, but I am curious to see how it comes out.

I set my curing chamber up tonight and started to raise the humidity inside it to get ready for the cure. And there is also 10 pounds of pork belly coming my way this week. Bacon and Pancetta are in my future.