Ground meats destined for fermentation and never intended for cooking are considered some of the most difficult preparations within the charcuterie realm, simply because they are the most susceptible to contamination. Think about it — if ground meat has the most surface area, and you’re going to put it through a series of processes right around room temperature, without ever intending to cook it, it seems like a ripe breeding ground for pathogens, no? Remember, though, that the good microorganisms are easier to encourage than the bad ones. Considering this, salt content must absolutely go up in the production of fermented dry sausages. Our aim is to create an environment that is salty enough to be inhospitable to harmful microorganisms without creating an overly salty food product. The ratio for achieving this balance is a salt content between 2.5–3.5% of the weight of the meat. Spices and liquids will mirror what you’ve learned in fresh sausage making or suspensions work, for the most part, although you may find that added liquid is rarer in fermented preparations.
As for meat-to-fat ratios, this varies considerably in the world of dry sausages. Pepperoni, for example, is traditionally a very lean product, and some recipes, including my own, call for no added fat whatsoever, just lean beef and lean pork in even quantities. Many salamis are set at an 80:20 lean to fat ratio, and some are 90:10. For nduja, which you will learn about on page 108, you’re looking at 60% fat, and only 40% lean! The point is, tradition and texture rule the day on lean:fat in fermented products. If you are setting out to create your own recipes, start with 80:20 and see what you like from there.
An important ingredient in dry sausages is sodium nitrate (Cure #2). This is a more complex form of nitrogen than Cure #1, and allows for a slow-release reaction of sodium nitrite, which will interact with microorganisms to inhibit botulism. Cure #2 is used for longer-curing items, while Cure #1 is used for cooked or quicker preparations. This is added according to regulated amounts, as discussed in Chapter 4.
In general, once you’ve tweaked these things within the ratio, you’ll mix and grind according to textural desires, just as you do for fresh sausages. Then, you may consider letting the ground mixture sit, refrigerated, for anywhere from 8 to 48 hours. This increases bind, and allows flavors to meld while the mix cures. After this step, you can go on to stuffing and pricking the salamis all over. And I mean all over. Use a sterilized tack or needle or a clean sausage pricker. This prevents air pockets from forming under the casing as water activity decreases and the meat mass shrinks. In all the charcuterie classes I’ve taught, this is the step most often missed or underper-formed by participants, and it can lead to case hardening (drying of the casing before the meat) and mold pockets.
Next, you’ll hang the salamis in your charcuterie chamber. You’ll notice that the humidity and temperature will naturally rise as fermentation happens, and then as drying and curing begins the cabinet will mellow to a temperature and humidity closer to the settings you have designated. This is because initially, the moisture in the raw meat is high, kicking up the humidity, and because the activity of the fermenting microbes creates heat and energy. As water activity decreases and fermenters die, the environment will change noticeably.
With the above in mind, the purest of salamis and fermented sausages can be made at home. While you’ll hear tales of extra acidifiers, colorants and preservatives, I assure you I have made a creative diversity of delicious dry sausages without them. I’d gently urge you to do the same, and keep it pure.
MAKING A CHARCUTERIE CABINET
Crafting the recipe is half the battle; the other half is providing the environment for food preservation. Charcuterie cabinets are controlled environments allowing us to control temperature and humidity to an optimum range for our desired purposes. Very generally speaking, a dark environment at about 50–60°F and around 65–75% relative humidity will get the job done. If you have a root cellar, it will likely work, and I myself have discovered pockets in my house and corners in my basement that work as well. If you’d like to make an official cabinet, all you need is an insulated box with an external thermostat and humidistat. I use a refrigerator, and have wired an external digital thermostat into it that will override the refrigerator’s normal temperature controls. The external digital thermostat is set between 50 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit. I have two fans inside the cabinet to promote air circulation. I also have a cool mist humidifier wired into an external humidistat, set to regulate the relative humidity between 65–75%.
Meats hanging in converted refrigerator charcuterie cabinet
The simplest way to do this is to get your hands on an old fridge (don’t use a side-by-side, it’s a waste of space). Go online and buy an external thermostat with a three-prong outlet on it. This will cost you about $100. Buy an external humidistat with an outlet on it. Plug the fridge into the thermostat, and plug a cool mist humidifier (about $40) into the humidistat. For about $250, you’ve got yourself a decent curing chamber. You will probably want a desk fan inside the cabinet to promote airflow, if humidity gets too high.
This coppa has just been stuffed and is ready to hang.
If you want instructions for hard wiring your fridge into an external thermostat, and hard wiring your humidifier into an external humidistat, check out my first book, The Ethical Meat Handbook.
Once you’ve got this little microclimate established, you’re ready to start concocting salamis, lomo, coppa, guanciale, and a host of other preserved meat products. You’ll hang these items up once they have salt cured and been stuffed or wrapped, and tied. Then let the microorganisms go to work. You’ll know the product is ready when it has lost 40–50% of its weight.
The same coppa is smaller a month later, after it has undergone some fermentation and curing.
It is still not finished curing here.
During the fermentation and drying process, you will notice considerable weight loss and shrinkage as the meat loses water activity. This is why you want to make sure your knots are extra tight!
STARTER CULTURES AND BENEFICIAL MOLDS
Starter cultures are isolated strains or combined isolated strains of beneficial microorganisms, produced by the food industry for inoculating cured meats. If you’re not familiar with the process of inoculation, it simply refers to the addition of beneficial microorganisms to a substrate, to ensure proper biological processes over time. Pea seeds, which fix nitrogen in the soil, have a specific bacterial symbiont, and gardeners and farmers can purchase dried bacterial cultures to use in inoculating their seed. Similarly, bacteria that will ferment and cure meat products are isolated into several standard starter cultures that can be added to ground meat mixtures to ensure proper preservation.
Personally, I do not love using isolated starter cultures, as they are a product of an industry I am not fond of supporting, and I’m in favor of promoting processing which encourages the proper bacterial strains to present themselves in the meat products naturally. Because fermenter bacteria are ubiquitous, it is reasonable to believe that without any added starter culture, home practitioners can expect proper fermentation and curing. That said, many producers use them, and for beginners it is an extra assurance that you’ve got the good guys working for you. If you choose not to use them, at least understand their purpose as you begin your charcuterie craft. If you do use them, I encourage you to experiment without them as you gain confidence in your gauge of food safety and the proper scientific processes at hand in your charcuterie cabinet. Indeed, many salumists are some of the most accomplished experimenters I know. What will happen if I put macaroni in salami? Only one way to find out ....
Close-up of Penicillium nalgiovense coverage on a salami
For all of the uncooked or long-fermented recipes in this book, I have included T-SPX starter culture as an ingredient. This is by far my go-to of all the starters, as it is the choice for slower, more traditional-styled curing projects. Similar cultures to T-SPX are T-RM-F3 and T-SP. Other commonly used starter cultures are F-RM-52, which is used for faster fermenta
tion and higher temperatures, and F-LC, which works at different time and temperature settings but also includes a kind of antibiotic that prevents listeria from exceeding safe levels. The list of all available cultures is long, and their uses vary based on process and intent. I assure you that if you are committed to Pure Charcuterie, that is charcuterie with pure ingredients and traditional processes, you need not possess a deep and complex understanding of all the commercially available strains and their unique properties. T-SPX and its brethren will get you off to a fine start with plenty of beneficial lactobacillus species and no need to tweak other ingredients or climate controls too much.
A beneficial mold that you will become familiar with in producing fermented sausages is Penicillium nalgiovense, which is the white mold you have no doubt seen on the surface of many salami products. P. nalgiovense is a fungus, just like all molds, and comes in a few forms, each of which is more effective at specific temperature ranges and relative humidity levels. M-EK-72, M-EK-4, and M-EK-6 will all give you the white mold, but M-EK-4 works at lower temperatures and lower relative humidity, producing a less fuzzy mold. The other two work at higher temperatures and humidity levels, and will produce a thicker, fluffier coverage. As you start out, any of the three P. nalgiovense strains will work for your purposes, which are mostly to ensure there is a beneficial mold on the surface of your salamis that is aggressive enough to outcompete any other surface molds that might produce off-flavors in the final product. In general, surface molds that can populate the outside of a casing are not hazardous to your health — they just don’t lend the right flavor, so you want to avoid them by keeping humidity in the proper ranges (see Making a Charcuterie Cabinet, above), and by using penicillium to work in your favor.
I like to generate my own penicillium. Do this by letting an organic orange sit out and grow white mold that turns to an olive green, then scraping it off and diluting it in a spray bottle. Or I pull the casing off of salami that I have inoculated with penicillium and soak it in a bottle of lukewarm water before spraying the water on finished salamis that are ready to go into the cabinet. I also usually keep a package of M-EK-72 in the freezer just in case. Cultures will keep for some time in the freezer, so if you want to get some just to have on hand it isn’t a bad idea.
The other mold with exciting applications in the charcuterie world is Aspergillus oryzae, otherwise known as koji. The amazing thing about this mold, which has been used for centuries to make miso, sake and soy sauce, is that it ferments and cures kind of in tandem, and its applications for curing meat are very exciting indeed.
KOJI CHARCUTERIE
Koji charcuterie is a method of preserving meat that relies on Aspergillus oryzae, or koji mold, grown directly on the surface of the meat. This mold is a filamental fungus (as is P. nalgiovense), which might seem weird, since most people think of fungus as a typical Mario Brothers mushroom. The truth is that fungi come in many shapes, sizes and colors, and the “mushroom” you picture is just the fruiting body of the dynamic fungus — its way of getting its “seed” out to the world. If you think about it, this isn’t too crazy. The familiar apple, for example, is really just an ovary, holding the seed of the apple tree. Likewise, there is more to fungus than its fruiting body. What more? Well, the mycelium, which you can think of as the fungus’s “roots.” Mycelia are highly networked, forming mats and webs, and are responsible for incredibly dynamic metabolic activity in the life of any fungus. Understanding this may help you recognize surface molds such as penicillium and koji as fungi indeed. In warm, moist environments rich in oxygen, koji can grow on the surface of nearly anything, and what you’ll see is a literal mat of filamental white, yellow or pale-green mycelia, growing all over the substrate. I’ve heard of koji mold being used to break down plastic (seriously), and using the same metabolism, it can work its magic on meat as well.
The science of how koji works is a bit more complex than we have room to explore, but the main thing to understand is that its mycelial mat produces many enzymes, which work to break big molecules into smaller ones. The bigger molecules we’re talking about here are starches, carbohydrates, proteins and fats, and they are being reduced to simpler sugars, amino acids, fatty acid chains, etc. With what you know about fermentation and curing so far, you might be able to guess that these smaller molecules are prime nutrition for some other microorganisms (like our friend Lactobacillus), and in this way, koji lays a spectacular groundwork for natural fermentation processes to unfold. But, in tandem with other microbes, koji’s enzymes have their own added effects. For example, it has been found that typically tough cuts of meat can be cultured with koji spores; once the koji populates their surface and releases its enzymes into the meat, it radically tenderizes the cuts. Additionally, meat that is cured using koji has been shown to cure in at least a third of the time that meat cures using traditional charcuterie practice, due to the ongoing activity of koji’s enzymes during the curing process. It’s truly amazing.
I’m not an expert on koji charcuterie, and have only recently been introduced to the power of koji across all of its applications, from miso to soy sauce to sake and vinegars. I’m extremely excited about the applications, however, and am now happily growing koji like a fiend, right next to my desk. I grow it on everything from rice to barley to pork loins, after the advice of Chef Jeremy Umansky, the leader in koji charcuterie, using methods he developed at his restaurant in Ohio. Chef Umansky has contributed his own recipe to this chapter, so you can get a sense of how the experts are working with koji and meat. I’ve also included my own koji experiment, a recipe I am developing for a local restaurant here in Asheville, NC. Umansky is working on his own books and is totally open-sourcing his projects online. Do yourself a favor and check out his restaurant, Larder, and the social media associated with the exciting work he is doing.
GROWING KOJI
Like any mold, koji prefers warmth and moisture. Temperatures of roughly 80–95 degrees Fahrenheit and high humidity levels are ideal for koji to thrive. Since this is decidedly not the ideal environment for your home, you’ll have to rig up a small incubator for your koji projects. My incubator is made from a 12-x-24-inch plastic tub about 6 inches deep, with a lid. I fill it about a third of the way with water, and in that water I place a roughly $40 aquarium heater, capable of heating water up to 90 degrees. You can find these anywhere they sell tropical fish. The aquarium thermometer is plugged into the wall beside my desk, and then run into the water and suctioned to the bottom of the plastic bin. I crank it all the way up to 88 degrees, then invert a couple of small loaf pans in the water, allowing me to place a 9-×-13-inch glass casserole pan on top of them so that the casserole pan is submerged in the water but not loosely floating. Then whatever I am koji culturing can hang out in the casserole pan, covered in a towel, and happily form sweetly fragrant koji mold on its surface. I typically cover whatever I am culturing in a tea towel, which I change out daily. This prevents any condensation from dripping consistently on the food. While koji likes high humidity, I find that it helps to keep whatever you are culturing from getting downright soaked.
Koji culture on barley after 16 hours
So, how do you get the koji on there to begin with? The answer is, you’ll need to buy a starter culture. I know I kind of scoffed at this earlier, but it is important to understand that koji is relatively difficult to conjure from the wild. Research into ancient Asian methods for doing this show they involve making strange cake-like concoctions from as many as twenty different native wild plants, and allowing these to ferment wrapped in leaves until the mycelial mat forms on their surface. Assuming you don’t have the flora of a Chinese mountainside at your disposal, it is best to start by buying koji spores from reputable independent sources. My favorite provider is GEM Cultures. There are several types of koji, and they are grown on different grains. My favorite is barley koji, but you can choose what you want. Once you’ve picked it out, it will be mailed to you in a little bag with instructions for use. It
looks like olive green powder.
Close-up of Aspergillus oryzae, or koji mold
I like to do about 4 cups of organic pearled barley at a time. That’s about 2 pounds. The package instructions may suggest to soak or rinse the barley, but Jeremy says not to do either, as koji is a saccharifying mold, meaning it seeks out starch and breaks it down. So the more starch, the better. Steam the barley. I use a bamboo steamer for about 45 minutes, until it is cooked and sticky. After cooking, I’ll turn it out onto a towel and break up the clumps, allowing it to cool slightly. Jeremy suggests temping it during the cooling process, aiming for 90°F. While it is cooling, I toast about ¼ cup of flour in a cast iron skillet, to sanitize it, then mix it with about 2 tsp of koji spores. If I am using koji from a previous batch, I’ll use double this amount, simply because part of the barley from the last batch is in there as dry matter, and it isn’t straight koji spores that I’m adding to the mix.
Once you’ve mixed the toasted flour with the koji spores, you’re ready to add them to the cooked barley. I usually sprinkle about half of the flour and koji mix onto the barley, then mix it around with my hands. It should smell good, like a meadow wildflower. Once I’ve moved it around to coat the grains as much as possible, I’ll sprinkle the rest of the flour/koji mix on and combine again, using my hands. After all the mixing, I bundle the koji up into the towel, leaving a slight opening at the top. Then I’ll put the bundle into my casserole dish and place the dish into the incubator, close the lid and leave it alone for a bit.
Pure Charcuterie: The Craft & Poetry of Curing Meat at Home Page 8
