Daydreaming of a Curing Box

I've been a combination of busy and lazy. Haven't really started any projects, just daydreaming about them. Mr. Dave has been working on Frankenfridge (a curing chamber) and that has gotten me rethinking the curing box that has been rattling around in my head. I don't really have the space or the desire to jackass a fridge or vertical freezer into the basement. And the new super basement dehumidifier has rendered my old setup useless. The air temperature in the basement is pretty much in the curing wheelhouse year round. July and August might get a little hot for curing but not by much. Really all I need down there is a space where I could control the humidity.

Here's where the plan is currently: Get some cheep wood. Right now cheapest is pine shiplap from Home Depot. Thirty five bucks should buy enough shiplap to make a 2' by 2' by 4'high box. I'd find something cheap and clear for the top. The inside of the box gets covered with a few coats of this mineral oil. There are also a few racks that support dowels (for hanging salami and other projects) attached to the walls of the box. At the floor level, the box is held up with small shims to allow for airflow. Near the top of one wall of the box, there is a hole with a small fan. The fan will come on every so often to move the air around. The fan will also come on if the humidity gets too high. Finally, the humidity: I looked at this in a Pet Smart and liked it. The price is better here though.

Drill a small hole in the side and the hose from a fogger can get piped inside. It looked like you could upgrade the 1 liter bottle to a 2 liter bottle. I like this controller that handles the temperature and humidity by itself. With this particular setup, I wouldn't need the temperature control.

But the controller is $100. Humidity controllers without the temperature control run in the $80s.  I think with scrounging, stuff I have, stuff sitting in my father-in-laws barn, and a well-timed trip to Rochester to avoid shipping on the mineral oil...the combined cost of everything else is less than the controller. Probably close to it, but less. On the plus side, the controller would still work if I ever moved to a fridge or vertical freezer.

The cost of this system is just too damn close to the price of one that includes temperature control too. There are cheaper controllers, but the one I saw at Pet Smart looked like a piece of junk. I wonder how many lizards it has killed or at the very least made very uncomfortable for weeks at a time. If I'm going to throw $200 at a half assed curing chamber, why not throw $250 at it and do it right? And then if I'm going to throw $250 at it, why not throw a little more money in and get something with a glass door? It is a very slippery slope.

The answer to these"Why?" questions is because I'm too cheap to buy this toy. Somehow I rationalized the overpriced pressure cooker (which I use at least once a week including earlier tonight). A curing chamber...if I had the right plan, I think I would steal some of my brick oven savings from myself. I'm not there yet.

Casing the Tuscan Salami

This all happened Monday night. It was time to grind, stuff and hang this batch of Tuscan Salami. The grinding and stuffing is pretty easy. The hardest part of that is cleaning up. The difference between a pretty easy fresh sausage and the more difficult salami for me is the butcher's twine. I still can't tie a salami nicely. That being said, I am pleased with how this batch of slami went into the chamber. I hope it ends up tasting as good as it smell now. Here's how I spent my Monday evening....

First up, I got some casings soaking. The casings are salt packed so they need at least half an hour to soak. I also flush them out a few times. The beef middles were very different than the hog casing. Probably to be expected since the two animals are also very different. I had expected a difference in size, but not a difference in texture. Here are the two types of casing soaking. Hog casing on left, beef middle on right.

Next up, toasting some fennel to get added to the meat before the grind. This also smells good.

I tossed in the toasted fennel and started grinding. For the benefit of the camera, I only took a picture when I was done grinding.

I split this up and gave the meat a quick mix with the paddle attachment on the Kitchen Aid. No pictures of that. Then it was time to flush the casings and get stuffing. Well, after cleaning up all the grinding stuff and taking a quick break. I did the the beef middles first.

After stuffing two larger salami, I stopped using the beef middles and went onto the hog casings.

After stuffing six of the smaller diameter salami, I put the leftover beef middle back on and mad one more larger salami with the rest of the meat. Here's what I ended up with:

Now it was time to tie them up and weigh them. It took a little while. The first delay was finding the butcher's twine. I keep it on my spice shelf. It wasn't there. I looked all over the kitchen. It wasn't there. I asked my wife if she had seen it. "The girls have it, I thought you gave it to them." Not sure how or when they took it, but it was over by a craft table and I think they had been making necklaces with it. Once I had the string, the pace picked up a little bit. Not much though. About an hour later every thing was weighed, labeled and tied up. Once again, I give you salami in bondage:

These went into the chamber which got sent up slightly different than last time. Still the same piece of plastic hanging from the floor joists, but this time the humidifier isn't on the floor. Instead, it is on top of the winner cooler I bought off of Craigslist to cure salami in (it didn't work - wine fridges don't work like regular fridges and if you close the door you will have 100% humidity, no air circulation and you will be growing fuzzy, nasty looking mold).

I hung the salami fairly low. The idea was to have the humidity fall to the level of the salami and not be in the line of the humidifier fan.

The last thing I did was about 12 hours after the salami had been hanging. I bough another culture. This one is supposed to bloom a beneficial mold on the outside on the salami and prevent the case from drying out before the middle of the salami. I bloomed three grams of the culture in a little over a cup of water. Then I pour the cultured water into a lasagna pan and rolled the larger salami and 3 of the smaller salami in the water. Then I hung it up again. No signs of this culture bath doing anything yet.

The humidistat on the humidifier consistently reads 70%. The humidity readings I get on the indoor/outdoor gizmo (the little white box next to the salami in the picture above) are consistently 60%. My guess is that the truth is somewhere in between. The temperature in there seems to fluctuate between the high 50s and low 60s (Fahrenheit). The salami will hang until they have lost about 30-40 percent of their original weight. Hopefully, some will be ready for Thanksgiving.

Getting Ready

Had some leftover white wine, so we put it to use in a clam and pasta dinner or Monday. There is something about this meal that is very satisfying. It is quick an easy to make. Drop some pasta into boiling water. In another big pot, heat some good olive oil. Dump in the clams and cover for a few minutes. Stir in a few cloves of minced garlic and cover it again. A few minutes later, add some wine and slap the lid back on. Once the clams are open, drain and add the cooked pasta (I like spaghetti with this). Stir it up so the pasta is covered with the sauce and add some parsley. Be sure to have bread to sop up the sauce. Dinner is served.

The chamber is up and getting ready. I have the humidifier running with the goal of keeping the sopressata curing in the 65% to 70% relative humidity range. I might need to reposition the fin. It depends on how many links of sopressata I make. The fin (a throwback to kid-free parrothead days) blocks the salami from being in the direct breeze of the humidifier fan. Hanging on the string is a outdoor part of a wireless temperature/humidity weather station. I picked it up a Lowes. I keep the receiver on the kitchen counter so it is easy to keep an eye on the temperature and humidity in the area the meat is drying. It works pretty well. At the time of the picture, the temperature was 57 deg F and the RH was at 57%. Last time I looked the RH was up to 61%. The humidifier is set at 75%, that gave me close to 70% near the meat.

And last, but not least, the casings I recently order came this evening. I got some larger diameter natural casing a few types collagen casings. Starting from the top, 30mm diameter clear collagen casing, casing for a large summer sausage, 38 mm diameter collagen casing and 35 mm+ natural casing. I think I will use the natural casings and some of the 38 mm collagen casings for the sopressata.

More Tuscan Salami

The next step was to set up a curing area. I had a 12 foot length of poly and decided to with something close to a 3 foot square shape. Instead of the original plan to use staples, i bought small hooks that I screwed into the floor joists. Using a punch I put holes in the poly and hung it like a curtain. This way, the chamber can come down a lot easier. I have a humidifier with a humidistat set at 70%. I also added a shark fin I had in the basement (it is a throwback to my younger parrothead tailgating days). The fin acts as a wall between the humidifier and the salami. I thought the humidifier fan moved to much air and the fin keeps the salami out of the breeze. Using the uotdoor part of an indoor/outdoor temperature/humidity weather gadget, I found that the relative humidity closer to the floor was pretty constant at about 70%. Here is a shot of the chamber, ironically located next to a home made dehumidifier (the duct work in the lower right of the picture).


Now it was time to grind the salami. I Use the Kitchen Aid attachment. Fat was ground through the larger plate, meat through the smaller plate. Someday, I think I will upgrade to a dedicated grinder, but this attachment has been working for the amount of sausage I make.


Toasted fennel seeds were added and every was mixed well. Then, it was into the sausage stuffer to get pushed into casings.

The hardest part of the prpject was tying the salami for hanging. I usually make a fresh sausage and twist it into links. Here, I had to tie them in a way where the know could support the weight of the salami. Then I used more string so the salami would hang low enough in the chamber. I ended up using what I would describe as a "bizarro" surgeon's knot. So far they have all held up. Here's a shot of the salami starting to age.