Lomo is made from the solid muscle that forms the eye of a pork loin. It starts by cutting the ‘eye’ from a loin of pork.
After removing the ‘tail’ of the pork loin, the loin was dry-cured in a vacuum bag with Spanish smoked paprika, black pepper and garlic for a couple of weeks:
The cured Lomo was rinsed and then dried overnight in the fridge…
…before being cased in a large collagen casing and tied:
It was dried at a temperature around 12 – 15°C with the humidity starting around 85% and dropping to 75% during the later stages of drying.
The resulting product is one of my wife’s favourites:
Case hardening
The dark areas around the edge of the meat are called case hardening – the outside has dried more that the inside which can be a problem if the inside is left raw. Fortunately this is not the case here.
Had I have vacuum-packed the meat after drying and kept it for a month or so, it would have all evened out.
The recipe’s a simple dry cure:
Lomo embuchado
For 1kg of pork or pro-rata
Salt 25gm
Demerara Sugar 2.5gm
Saltpetre 0.17gm
Cure #1 – 2.4gm
Ground Black Pepper 7.5gm
Spanish Smoked Paprika 7.5gm
Large fresh garlic clove 1
Many will choose to use Cure #2 in place of the Cure #1/Saltpetre combination – in which case use 2.4gm per kg of meat.
To simplify matters, there’s a calculator for the ingredients here:
Lomo Embuchado Calculator
You may like these other air-dried meats:
Recipe Index created by Visual Recipe Index