Category Archives: Advice and Tutorials – air dried

Advice and Tutorials - air dried

Safely Drying Meat and Sausage

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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.

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Advice and Tutorials - air dried, Processing calculator

Calculating Maximum Fermenting Times

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The 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:

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Advice and Tutorials - air dried, Cured Meat

Converting a Fridge for Drying

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On my old blog, I had a tutorial about converting a fridge into an air-drying chamber. There were pages on temperature control and humidity and a whole lot about wiring the different controllers.

Fortunately, time moves on and bespoke controllers are now available and are relatively cheap. No more sourcing relays, making control boxes and wiring it all up.

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