Snack sticks offer wonderful opportunities to experiment with new flavors.
This one uses five-spice powder, which is used extensively in Chinese cooking. Here it is used to flavor fermented snack sticks.
It is an original recipe.
Ingredients
1000 g Pork shoulder
The pork shoulder was about 90/101
It was par frozen, coarsely ground using a #5 plate2 and then mixed with :
23 g Salt
2.4 g Cure #1 (current EU regulations are 1.9 g)
4 g Dextrose3
4 g Five Spice Powder – see below
10 g Honey
Then add and mix in:
0.5 g SafePro F-LC4
Fill the mix into either 22mm/24mm (pre-soaked) sheep’s casings or collagen casings; 19 mm or 21mm would be fine. Save the sausage mix that’s left in the stuffer, wrap it tightly in a plastic bag or and put it into plastic food wrap (UK-cling film).
Weigh the sticks and make a note of the weight.
Ferment the sticks and the mix that’s wrapped up at 75°F (24°C). Check the pH using a pH meter or pH strips after about 24 hours and (approx.) 12 hourly thereafter. Use the bit of mix that you wrapped up to do the tests.
In this case, the neat meat5 was found to have a pH of 4.8 after 41 hrs.
The meat was put into the fridge to dry.
Its initial weight was: 880 g
Its weight after 190 hrs, approx. 8 days was: 509 g (42.2 % weight loss)
After 258 hrs, approx 10¾ days, it was 434 g (50.7 % weight loss)6
Ready to eat!
The spice level is perfect, not sure if the honey is detectable. With just pork shoulder the texture is best at this degree of moisture loss. The taste is haunting.
Five Spice Powder:
2 t Sichuan peppercorns
5-6 Star anise
1 T Fennel seeds
1/2 t Ground cloves
1 T Ground cinnamon
Grind peppercorns, anise and fennel, then blend all.
Notes:
1. Numbers after the meat such as 90/10 refer to the ratio of lean to fat 90% lean meat: 10% fat. It’s also sometimes listed as 90/10VL where the VL stands for visible lean. You may note that the stick in the picture appears to have far more than 10% fat – this is because the fat does not lose any weight during the drying process, whereas the lean meat does.
2. A #5 grinder or mincer plate is a plate that will produce a meat mince that’s about 5mm (3/16th inch). The holes in the plate may not be exactly the width of the grind.
3. Dextrose is another name for glucose.
4. SafePro F-LC is one of many cultures available that increase the acidity of meat (reduce the pH). It’s often advised to mix this with distilled water before use and to use more than the amount in this recipe. However, it works perfectly well without dilution in the amount specified as can be seen from the drop in pH above. It doesn’t like salt, so add it at the end of mixing.
5. pH is often tested by making a slurry of the meat – this has been tested ‘neat’ by pushing the pH probe into the meat that we saved. A pH below 5.3 is considered safe.
6. The level to which you let the sticks dry is, to an extent, a matter of personal taste. However, it is the combination of lowered pH, achieved by using a culture, and lowered water activity (Aw) in the meat, achieved by drying, that makes the product safe. Anything above 35% weight loss should be fine, but we suggest leaving it to 40% before tasting.