This cure started with the gift of some cider from Mark at Rockingham Forest Cider. To do this craft product justice I felt that a brine immersion cure was called for – none of your injection cured shortcuts for this ham!
Continue reading Cider Ham
With more and more people air-drying meat, there seems to be a very lax attitude sneaking in regarding the production of air-dried sausage and meats.
The, “well they’ve been doing it for centuries in Italy/Spain etc without sophisticated equipment” brigade, and the, “well they have them hanging in bars in Italy/Spain, so they must be safe” camp.
What they say may be true, but we do not have the same conditions as those people, nor do we have the accumulated knowledge of generations of forebears on our side, so we need to be cautious in what we do for reasons that I hope will become clear.
Continue reading Safely Drying Meat and Sausage
Original post made in 2007.
An article called ‘Leftovers are a cheaper, greener option’ at the Daily Telegraph reminded me of a snack/starter I hadn’t made for some time. Croquetas – croquettes or croquets in English, are a tasty way of using up small amounts of leftovers.
Continue reading CroquetasThis site has suffered recently due to my health – even posts that were on the older version of the site haven’t made it across to this one as they need higher resolution photos making of the processes.
However, my very good friend and fellow moderator on the (now defunct) Sausagemaking.org forum, Paul Weipert, has just retired and has volunteered to help out.
Paul has a scientific background and knows all the terms that I refer to as thingies and other vague words – he knows all the posh names.
He knows his haemoglobin from his myoglobin!
His first couple of posts are chicken-based for all you health-conscious people out there.
Welcome aboard, Paul.
When I look at Facebook barbecue groups I’m amazed at the number of people that buy ready-made BBQ rubs.
Why not? I hear you ask.
Well, if that’s the way you want to do it, far be it from me to stop you but with prices often topping £40/kg for what is primarily salt and sugar it seems to me to make sense to make your own!
My recipe for soft bread rolls became a bit of a cause-célèbre back in the days when the sausagemaking.org forum was active. I’m quite proud of it. But, I never thought it was that good for burgers – it fell apart too easily. I toyed with the idea of using a pretzel roll or even a pseudo-brioche, one that’s a lot less sweet – using butter instead of oil in my soft bread roll for example. However, I’ve settled on a roll made with potatoes, and not only potatoes but instant potato flakes. The idea for these buns comes from a post on the sausage forum that referred to a recipe on the cookistry website. My recipe is a slight adaption of that one using information learned from their site.
It’s great for burgers, pulled pork and things of that nature. My original soft roll is still best for a cheese and onion roll though!
To overseas readers, I apologise that the links to suppliers are all UK based, however, the information is relevant regardless of that.
Many governments have rules about the production of commercial salami products even if it’s only the level of curing salts that are allowed in them. The USA and Canadian authorities also have rules governing the time drying and time allowed for fermentation – it’s to those rules I’ve looked for good practice in those areas. It makes sense for home producers to follow those rules or at least make informed decisions about choosing not to.
Continue reading The Salami Making ProcessThe US and Canadian governments have rules limiting the amount of time that a salami can be held above 15.6°C (60°f) for fermentation of cultures. They are very similar other than one uses Fahrenheit and the other centigrade. It’s the Canadian rules (centigrade) that I’ll use for this explanation.
The rules use a calculation based on what is termed degree hours. The salami must reach a pH of 5.3 within a set number of degree hours. This is the number of hours that the salami is above 15.6°C multiplied by the amount that the temperature exceeds 15.6°C:
Degree hours = hours x temperature in excess of 15.6° C (60° F)
This number of degree hours is limited depending on the temperature being used:
Continue reading Calculating Maximum Fermenting Times4th October 2021 The first stage – curing:
Forgive the long title; I was going to title this ‘Fennel Lonzino’ and had actually typed that when I thought that it’s a bit of a liberty to do so when I’ve not got a clue as to whether the Italians use fennel in their lonzino.
I’d got in mind to make a more classic product with the simple flavours of pepper and garlic, which I understand to be a traditional lonzino. However, given that this is a piece of industrially produced meat and is likely to have less flavour than the meat I would usually use, I decided to go with the stronger flavour of fennel.
