Charcuterie_ The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing - Michael Ruhlman [85]
We’ve given approximate times in the recipes, but these can vary considerably depending on your conditions. It’s best to rely on sight and touch. Use your common sense. This may seem obvious, but Brian and I can’t overstate it. A finished dry-cured sausage should be completely firm and uniform in color, and it should not look at all raw. Does it look good? Does it look like the dried sausages or sliced salami you’ve had before? If the casing is hard and the interior still has a mushy raw texture, it’s not dried. Does it have a dark ring around the outside of a slice, another indication that the outside hardened before the interior dried? Does the interior smell bad? Any signs of deterioration or rot or rancidity mean that something went wrong: Throw it out. This is one of the few instances in cooking in which mistakes are not necessarily edible. If “mistakes” are cooked to 155 degrees F./68 degrees C. or above, they will be safe to eat, but the flavor may be off. If you’ve got a bad sausage, throw it out.
Obviously Brian and I can’t be in your kitchen making sure your grinder is immaculately clean, that you’re adding the right amount of salt and nitrates, and so forth, and so cannot be responsible for you if you get sick. If that concerns you, if you don’t feel comfortable evaluating dry-cured meats, don’t use dry-cure techniques. (See Sources, page 303, for excellent dry-cured sausages.)
On the other hand, if you follow the directions precisely, act to prevent the potential dangers noted above, and use your common sense, you shouldn’t have any safety problems. These techniques have been used at home for centuries.
STORING
The easy part. Keep dry-cured sausages in your refrigerator, preferably wrapped in parchment paper or butcher’s paper. They will keep for a month or more if you store them with care.
QUANTITIES IN THESE RECIPES
Most of these recipes call for 5 pounds/2.25 kilograms of meat and fat. As with the other sausage recipes in this book, they can be halved. Remember, though, that the drying process will reduce their weight by about 30 percent—so that 5 pounds/2.25 kilograms of sausage ultimately yields 31⁄2 pounds/1.60 kilograms—and also that they keep for a long time.
THE FIRST TIME
As mentioned earlier, some sausages have specific shapes and sizes, from skinny to fat. As a rule, though, any ground sausage can be stuffed into any kind of casing. Because it is easier to succeed with a thinner sausage and a shorter drying time (meaning less time for case hardening and for bad molds to develop), you might consider beginning with sheep casings or hog casings rather than casings with larger diameters. Any of the sausage recipes will work just as well, and maybe better, in a skinny casing rather than the traditional casings suggested in the recipes. Or you might start with the Landjager on page 194, a German cold-smoked dried sausage, which beginners seem to have a lot of success with. For all long-cured items, don’t forget to note on a calendar or in a notebook, the day you begin to cure a sausage and the expected time of completion.
TUSCAN SALAMI
Here is a classical salami with the additional flavors of red wine and fennel; use a good big red wine and fresh fennel seeds. This, as do all the sausages in this chapter, relies on the fermenting process. A beneficial bacteria, sold in the United States as Bactoferm F-RM-52, is introduced to the raw ingredients. It feeds on the sugar and produces lactic acid as a result. This acid gives the salami a pleasing tartness and, more important, the acid makes it difficult for harmful bacteria to grow.
The method for this sausage can be used for any of the ground dried sausages. Most types of casings can be used as well, though different diameters will result in differing drying times. Sausages in sheep casings will take about a week to dry (and are thus the